Bill Evans is tied with Nina Simone as being not only one of my favorite jazz pianists, but one of my favorite jazz artists in general. His style has been characterized as "impressionistic," influenced just as much by Claude Debussy and Maurice Ravel as he was by Earl Hines. Listening to his take on standards of the American songbook such as "My Foolish Heart" on Waltz for Debby or the soft beauty and dissonance of his composition "Peace Piece," one can see how he fits into these traditions of compositional innovators and technical masters.
One of Evans's final recording dates produced the posthumously released album You Must Believe In Spring which came out in 1981, a year after his death in 1980. The music on here is wistful, airy, and tinged with the inner sadness of a musician trying to work out in performance the tragedies that befell him late in life. The two original compositions Evans brought to the sessions are both eulogies to relationships torn apart. The opening track "B Minor Waltz (For Elaine)" is a eulogy for Evans's former common-law wife Elaine Schultz, who committed suicide when Evans left her for another woman. The track is a lamentation, with Evans's lush chords augmented by drummer Eliot Zigmund's soft brushstrokes and bassist Eddie Gomez'z deep, full basslines. I am not exonerating Evans's life or behavior by meditating on this album; instead, I want to approach it as an exercise in examining how music allows tragedy to seep through the body of the listener or the performer, and the possibilities of transformation that can come from that.
The second original Evans composition was written for his brother Harry Evans, who committed suicide in 1977. "We Will Meet Again"'s title evokes the famous Vera Lynn ballad "We'll Meet Again," a song now synonymous with World War II, and the families and lovers torn apart by the conflict. Both tracks exude a sense of hope for the future amidst a present that is plagued by darkness. But whereas Lynn's stirring ballad is soaked in nostalgia, this track is beset with a melancholy that hangs over it, a reminder of the traumas that can color otherwise glowing memories.
The album's title track comes from a 1967 Jacques Demy musical entitled The Young Girls of Rochefort (Les demoiselles de Rochefort), one of my favorite films of all time. It struck me on learning this that Evans chose to place a Michel Legrand composition from one of the most colorful and vibrant films of all time into the middle of these introspective sessions. To be sure, Evans has a long history of plundering show tunes or the Great American Songbook, but the way in which he turns this song from an uptempo number meant to reflect the technicolor explosion that is Demy's film was jarring at first. Evans's rendition of Legrand's original is melancholy to be sure, and gestures toward a broader thruline of the album: that nothing lasts forever, that even the happiest moments of life are never fixed, are still in a process of becoming. Evans reminds the listener that it all can be taken away from you at any second.
How can we explain this? That our relationships with people can be in danger of collapsing or irrevocably changing at any moment? That the comfort we derive from all of the people, places, and objects in our lives being ordered, colored, and tucked away in our minds in a certain way is unstable and ever shifting? My own experiences of precarious employment, the growth and development of my friendships where someone gets married or moves away, or the instability and isolation of living with an invisible virus that makes me questions every step I make (heightening the anxiety of a mind already unnaturally heightened by ADHD and an anxiety disorder) have thrown this instability into high relief.
December marked a month that, for myself, was filled with uncertainty. I lost the first job I had right out of graduate school, I felt an enormous pressure to write as much as I could as quickly as I could in order to lose no time, an immense sense of burnout over this pressure, and the always lurking seasonal depression that accompanies the holidays. It was in this frame of mind that I found myself turning to Bill Evans, rekindling a love for his music and jazz music more broadly that laid dormant for the better part of 3 years. Time rekindled a love for Evans's music that I thought wouldn't ever combust as it had when I first discovered his music and that of Miles Davis, John Coltrane, and Charlie Parker.
But what of this elusive hope, that "spring" we are implored to believe in by Legrand and Evans? How can music, the experience of art or vicarious tragedy allow us to see through our own lives to something else perhaps beyond it? The album's backstory is moving and painful, but at the end of the day it comes down to whether the music itself crosses the threshold separating performance and experience. Does it make you shiver, does it make you see beyond yourself in some capacity -- whether into the life of someone else or your own life but viewed slant? Great art shouldn't necessarily be tasked with providing answers to the great questions or difficulties that we face in life -- that's the domain of self help gurus who promise that with this *one* adage, you will achieve complete ascension.
Rather, sometimes art is a question of reframing, of allowing the observer or listener to experience the question anew, or from a different vantage point. This is, I think, one of the great achievements of Evans's career. Across albums like Everybody Digs Bill Evans, Undercurrent, and How My Heart Sings!, Evans blends musical traditions together so as to present a form of jazz music that is distinctly his own, distinctly that of an introverted man whose struggles were refracted through the music he made. To paraphrase what a music critic once said, it wasn't his struggles that made him a great artist, but the fact that he was a great artist allowed him to transmute his struggles into his music so well. Evans's music allows the listener to (re)enter themselves, to reflect on how they are constructed as individuals or perceived in the world, all whilst reminding one of the fragility of those constructions.
As for Evans himself, one need look no further than the title of his 1960 album Portrait in Jazz to observe how he saw himself, and how we continue to see him to this day. We must believe in spring, in the possibility that turbulence is not necessarily good (metaphysical statements on the "goodness" or "badness" of something are a separate issue), but present, and that to deny the spring as it sits in the eye of a hurricane is to deny life itself.
