Bill Evans, an elegant, cold, selfish and gentle man in the jazz world!

Vague and unreal, sometimes absent, like fog, rain and wind, you can't catch it if you want to. This hazy and mysterious impressionist art always leaves people with endless imagination space!

In the history of jazz piano, Bill Evans is the most impressionist.

Under his piano, everything seems to be sucked into a black hole. Some people say that he is the warmest person, others say that he is the most elegant gentleman in new york, and so on. In my opinion, to some extent, he is also very cold and selfish at heart.

But no one can define him, because a thousand people have a thousand Bill Evans in their hearts.

Haruki Murakami has a vivid evaluation of Bill Evans's trio in The Biography of Jazz. "The human self, through the natural filtering device, has become a rare treasure."

When Bill Evans plays, he is very absorbed and independent of the music world. His head is deeply buried in the piano, and his eyes seem to stick to the keys. Even the band rarely takes a look, let alone the audience.

Many times I don't even report the names of songs, and I rarely stand up and talk to the audience. Just one song after another, except for my hand moving, the other parts seemed to be motionless until the end of the performance. This is Bill Evans, and so is the interview. His expression is Mu Na's, his tone is not urgent or slow, with a little smile and a little anger.

So it is inevitable that some people think he is selfish and cold. On the one hand, he seems to only care about talking to himself in the piano world. People commented that he always dissected himself extremely cruelly and refused to let himself go. On the other hand, in the trio, the piano is too strong and the color is too strong, while the bass and drums are relatively weak, which is basically the status of harmony accompaniment.

I think this can be clearly felt in his music, but what's the harm? His piano is enough to express everything related to the soul, and people just need to feel it.

Bill Evans's attention to jazz figures is also rare. He has basically only explored in a trio in his life, and he is also the most acclaimed piano trio in the whole jazz history, including bassist Scott Lafalo and drummer Pouard Mohsin.

Bill Evans is a typical middle-class musician, born in 1929, and received a good classical music education since childhood. Unlike many jazz and black musicians, he has a very deep background in classical piano, and he is serious but not frivolous.

In the later interpretation, Bill Evans is the most special combination of classical and jazz. His music is not so much cool jazz as his own genre.

In Autobiography of Miles Davis, Myers worships Bill Evans very much. He recalled an interesting thing. When Bill was invited to record Miles' famous jazz album "Planting Blue" in 1958, Miles joked with Bill that everyone who joined his team needed oral sex. Myers didn't expect that Bill Evans took such a casual joke seriously. A few days later, Bill found Miles and said seriously, "I'm sorry, I've thought about it, I can't do it, I can't do it." He laughed at Miles on the spot.

But it also reflects the most direct problem, that is, the gap between blacks and whites. At the beginning, the members of the Myers Orchestra were dissatisfied with why Myers wanted to find a white pianist. There were so many excellent black pianists. Of course, Miles always said, "I don't care about black and white. Whoever hits a stick can be a green man."

Although Miles supported Bill Evans, other members' attitudes, getting along, living habits and other factors forced them to leave Miles Orchestra after 1959 recorded the album.

It is also because of the album "Planting Blue" that Bill Evans became famous in one fell swoop, and later joined bassist Scott Lafaro and drummer Pual Motion, and was rated as the most perfect trio by the outside world until 196 1, the bassist died in a car accident and his perfection was broken, and then he was found in a helpless year. 1962.

In Myers' era, drugs were very popular in jazz circles, and almost no one was free from drugs, so was Bill Evans, but he always gave people a very attractive calm and elegant atmosphere. For him, it is impossible to get excited in the middle of a performance like Charlie Parker, and then take a person to pee in public.

Bill Evans also has some genius paranoia, for example, a lifelong habit, a meticulous and glossy hairstyle with an oil comb on his head. Under the trend of electronic synthesizers, he didn't need electronic synthesizers to record and play until his death.

Including after leaving Miles Orchestra, most of the works we can hear today are piano trio, which deeply influenced later jazz pianists and even classical pianists. Almost anyone who studies jazz piano can't avoid Bill Evans, just like Beethoven, who is indispensable to classical students. Therefore, too many people still have the shadow of Bill Evans, which some critics call "a historical burden in some way" of jazz soul and freedom.

And Bill Evans, from 1959 to his death 1980, for 2 1 year, they were obsessed with exploring their own personal style, that is, they kept going, in other words, they couldn't get in or out.

Of all the albums we can listen to, what you can feel seems to be that Bill Evans is always immersed in the dialogue with himself in the piano world, constantly exploring and giving his feelings, and constantly expressing his new self with a hazy and mysterious color.

That's why people always think that Bill Evans has been analyzing himself cruelly all his life.

Bill Evans is a person who pursues perfect minimalism, but he is also a "selfish" person. He can keep himself as little as possible and as much as possible. The rest is just for himself. Although minimalism gives people a comfortable and clear feeling, it is squeezed out by complexity.

Therefore, for music lovers, Bill Evans may be the best channel to enter the jazz world, but it may also be the worst.

The best thing is, because his music has a classical fusion, that is, the melody is obvious, and it is soothing, gentle and smooth, and the listening habit will be closer.

Worst of all, it's hard to get in but hard to get out. In many of his works, only two harmonic instruments, the bass cello and the piano, are playing, and the jazz drum is always the lowest, or even not, which is equivalent to taking away the rhythm. It's like people lose gravity on the earth and always feel that they can't step on the ground. Only the imagination floating in the sky will inevitably feel monotonous after a long time.

Jazz attaches great importance to harmony theory, which is particularly prominent in Bill's music. When we are practicing his chord inversion phrases, we often feel overwhelmed involuntarily. (Alas ... we are all bugs! )

In Bill Evans's videos, it always feels that the photographer is the same person, and he can always take close-ups of all aspects at very close range. So I also found that Bill hardly looked at the keys and always closed his eyes deeply, which was a bit like blind typing.

Every time I listen to his music, sometimes I feel like a light rain that never falls, sometimes I feel like unpredictable powder, but sometimes I feel like a bullet penetrating my heart.

This is probably the charm of minimalism. Some people will feel monotonous, but it is undeniable that they are not tired of listening until they understand the process behind them.

But who knows?

After all, there are a thousand Bill Evans in the hearts of a thousand people!

Sailboats are swaying in the sea of jazz, the wind goes that way, and the ship goes that way, without purpose and without landing, drifting forever. This may be the fate of sailing boats!