'A Barroom Piano Player'

This is how Bill Evans was appraised when free jazz exploded. Later, the critics realized that circumspectly and without being the leader of any particular current, he had led as profound a revolution as John Coltrane or Ornette Coleman. Without ever systematizing the contributions of modal jazz (which he helped found), he drew deep inspiration from it. His work as a composer surely borrowed from his charms of the old standards, of which he was very fond; but he lightened their often limited harmonic frames and broadened the field of melodic possibilities.

  

Bill Evans

More significantly, due to the quality of his touch, he inaugurated a new approach to the jazz piano, which, until that point, had primarily been used as a percussion instrument. Bill Evans was not a barroom piano player; he was a concert pianist. His trio (piano, double bass, drums), which he used as a chamber orchestra, broke new ground.

  

Scott LaFaro, Bill Evans, Paul Motian

From 1960 to 1961, Scott LaFaro (bass) and Paul Motian (drums) freed themselves from their role as mere accompanists and became soloist on an equal footing with the piano; the three participated in a triangular conversation. Collective and interactive, improvisation became more than ever a question of mutual listening and finding one's own place while treating the others' with respect. The revolution led by John Coltrane with sound and fury was conducted by Bill Evans' trios with a delicacy that evoked the intimacy of Claude Debussy.

(L-R) Steve Swallow, Walter Perkins, Art Farmer, Jim Hall

  

Thus, along with such contemporaries as Jim Hall, who shared his concerns, Bill Evans left his mark on generations of musicians: on pianist, of course (Keith Jarret, Paul Bley and Chick Corea), but also on drummers (Jack DeJohnette), bass players (Gary Peacock), and saxophone players, trumpet players and bandleaders.

Gary Peacock, Keith Jarret, Jack DeJohnette (2012)

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Peace Piece

The white face of Bill Evans stands out among the players of hard bop. It was under the fingers of this young pianist that some of the hottest preoccupations of the moment were crystallized.
When, on 15 December 1958, he recorded 'Peace Piece' as an accompanied piano solo, he pushed his taste for spareness to the extreme. In it, he improvised on two endlessly repeated chords for almost seven minutes. Concentrating on such minimalism, he explored the scale corresponding to these chords, but not without taking the liberty to wander off into neighboring scales.

Bill Evans

  In doing so,he drew on the teaching of composer George Russell, whose theories, found in his 'Lydian Chromatic Concept of Tonal Organization', offered a new approach to jazz musicians: rather than contend with the increasingly elaborate chord changes required by fifties jazz, a modal approach (based on the notes in one scale) offered new simplicity. Modal jazz, often inspired by non-European musical forms, became widespread in the sixties. On the one hand, with modal jazz and the blossoming of a new lyricism harmonic language would be reborn; on the other, it would find its own negation in the upcoming explosion of free jazz.

John Coltrane (L) and George Russell (R)

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Toward Hard Bop And Modal Jazz

While cool was gaining popularity on the West Coast, the black musicians on the East Coast were active, too. They made bop accessible to the large ensemble, enriched its forms, mastered its vocabulary and became apprentices to new rhythms. By the mid-fifties, they had developed a hardened tone, drawing from blues and gospel in order to preserve the specific characteristics of African- American music.

Dizzy Gillespie

The trumpet player Dizzy Gillespie started his career in big bands and did not hesitate to let the first sounds of bebop be heard there, sometimes under the glare of his bandleaders. In 1946 he formed his own big band, in which some of the best-known names played, and he created  a sensation by incorporating Afro-Cuban elements into his music. Indeed, contacts between American jazz musicians and those hailing from Cuba and Puerto Rico - many of whom had been in New york since the thirties - multiplied in this decade. In this way, jazz musicians broadened their rhythmic habits and explored new ways of exploring the beat.

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