Singing Piano

Playing a club date one evening recently, Jazz Pianist Bill Evans slid unaccompanied into a fragilely twining song of his own composition titled Peace Piece. Afterwards, a teen-age fan rushed ecstatically up to the piano. "He told me," recalls Evans with a faintly puzzled frown, "that when he heard it he felt like he was standing all alone in New York."

In varying degrees Evans, 32, inspires the same feeling of apartness in all his fans. At the piano he seems transported, and some of the trancelike visual effect rubs off on the customers. When he hunches his tall, spare frame over the keyboard, as he did last week in Manhattan's Birdland, fixing his eyes on his belt buckle and stroking the keys with disembodied-looking fingers, he seems to be responding to promptings from far beyond the bandstand on which a bass and a drum plunk and sizzle quietly. The music itself often has a trancelike quality. A listener can find himself hypnotized by an Evans treatment of a familiar tune--My Man's Gone Now or My Foolish Heart--because it contains no qualifications or showy embellishments. It is, as nearly as Evans can make it a simple and unadulterated musical idea.

The Evans audience is not large, but it is a distinguished one, including a large share of Evans' fellow jazzmen. What Evans has returned most notably to the jazz piano besides simplicity is the long melodic line, which, says Evans, is "the basic thing I want in my playing because music is singing." The influences pointing the way were Pianists Nat Cole and Bud Powell and Trumpeter Miles Davis. A New Jersey boy, Evans studied classical piano as a youngster, at twelve filled in one evening with a local dance band and was hooked on jazz. He played his way through Southeastern Louisiana College, there first heard the records of Saxophonist Lee Konitz and the Lennie Tristano school: "I felt for the first time as if I were hearing jazz played that hadn't been learned by osmosis; they were making an effort to build something."

After college, Evans gigged around, suffered through three unhappy years in the army, only began to win polls and influence people in 1958, when he spent almost a year with the Miles Davis Quintet.

A shy and uncertain man, Evans was persuaded with great difficulty to record his first album for Riverside in 1956. The album was a hit, but he let more than two years pass before he would try another. "You can't turn inspiration on and off,'' he says. "You can only hit the supreme moments occasionally." But the supreme moments, admits Evans, relaxing into a rare smile, have carried him a long way: "Music is the only thing that has dragged me through life."

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