The History of Jazz (62 page)

Evans retreated from public performance for a time, but eventually regrouped. He recorded prolifically during the 1960s and 1970s, most often in a trio format, but also occasionally in the company of well-known horn players (such as Stan Getz, Freddie Hubbard, Zoot Sims, Lee Konitz, and Warne Marsh). In an era when many jazz players were outspoken in their embrace of new movements, from free jazz to fusion, Evans continued to rely on the traditional American popular song repertoire and tonal, linear improvisation. Yet a considerable amount of innovation lay hidden behind this apparent conservatism. Evans’s chord voicings, with their expressive use of color tones, would became widely imitated, almost serving as a default standard among later pianists. Less obvious to many listeners, but equally important, were the subtleties of Evans’s rhythmic phrasing. Even when playing in strict time, he could create the feeling of an effortless rubato. Above all, his music was virtually free of base sentimentality, even when he played the most saccharine pop songs, and never relied on the hackneyed or empty display of technique for its own sake.

Like Davis and Coltrane, Evans struggled with drug addiction. During the 1960s, his heroin habit punished him physically and financially. Yet Evans’s music seemed to reflect a different reality, often suggesting a contemplative otherworldliness above the fray of day-to-day concerns. Indeed, these years produced some of the finest work of Evans’s career: the glorious solo album
Alone
with its incomparable exposition of “Never Let Me Go”; the memorable live recording at Town Hall; a classic pairing with guitarist Jim Hall; experiments with overdubbing; and various trio and combo dates. During the 1970s, Evans was free for a time from drugs, and his music making took on a smoother sheen, less introspective and more assertive, especially in the pianist’s work alongside the accomplished bassist Eddie Gomez. Even more aggressive—at times almost angry—was the music made by his final trio, which featured bassist Marc Johnson and drummer Joe La Barbera. By this time, Evans had turned again to drugs, now primarily cocaine, and those nearest him feared that he was slowly, almost deliberately, killing himself. On his last tour with the trio, he frequently surprised audiences with his strident interpretation of the theme from the TV series
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, a song also known as “Suicide Is Painless.” The irony of the title was disturbing. A bleeding ulcer was the final, official cause of a cumulative process of self-destruction. At the time of his death, on September 15, 1980, Evans was fifty-one years old.

How influential was Bill Evans? A survey of forty-seven jazz pianists conducted by Gene Lees in 1984 found that Evans ranked second to only Art Tatum as the most influential pianist in the history of jazz keyboard music; it is worth adding that Evans ranked first when these same players were asked to choose their personal favorite among jazz pianists.
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Yet describing the scope of this influence is made difficult by its very pervasiveness—much like trying to determine Johnny Appleseed’s impact on a grove of Red Delicious, it seems to blossom wherever one looks. A host of later Davis sidemen also showed Evans’s influence, especially Herbie Hancock and Chick Corea. Less well known are Denny Zeitlin’s stunning 1960s trio recordings for Columbia, produced by John Hammond, that served as especially powerful examples of how Evans’s probing style and concept of trio interaction could serve as the basis for the next generation of jazz pianists. Zeitlin’s music displayed a rare skill in mixing quasi-avant-garde techniques with sublime lyricism, as demonstrated on such projects as
Cathexis
,
Live at the Trident
, and
Zeitgeist
. Evans returned the favor by adding Zeitlin’s “Quiet Now” to his repertoire, recording it on several occasions. Zeitlin’s work from this period, as well as Steve Kuhn’s and Paul Bley’s, can be rightly described as the “missing links”—rarely noted and insufficiently appreciated— between Evans’s pioneering efforts and the classically tinged ECM sound (discussed in
chapter 8
) that came to the fore during the 1970s. In later years, the Evans influence continued to figure in the work of many of the finest young pianists emerging on the scene, including Michel Petrucciani, Fred Hersch, Andy LaVerne, Jim McNeely, Richie Beirach, Eliane Elias, Alan Broadbent, and Enrico Pieranunzi. Yet the magnetic pull of this singular artist also was felt by nonpianists: its impact is evident, for example, in the vibraphone work of Bobby Hutcherson and Gary Burton, or even more conspicuously in the magisterial guitar stylings of Lenny Breau.

Coltrane’s postMiles career took him in a far different direction from the one Evans pursued. Only a few days after the final
Kind of Blue
session, Coltrane entered the studio as leader for the Atlantic label. The resulting
Giant Steps
release would rank as the tenorist’s most commanding recording to date. This music stood at the opposite end of the spectrum from the Davis modal work. In many ways, the title track represented the epitome of chord-based jazz material, with its difficult progressions played at a rapid pace. On this number, pianist Tommy Flanagan falters noticeably—and who can blame him? Unlike Coltrane, he had not had the benefit of practicing in advance for this daedal musical obstacle course. But the tenorist shows no hesitancy, handling the changes with ease. On closer examination, much of Coltrane’s work on the solo is based on a simple pattern—employing the first four notes of the pentatonic scale over each chord—and the seemingly novel harmonies are borrowed in large part from the bridge of the old Rodgers and Hart standard “Have You Met Miss Jones?” But Coltrane’s adroit execution and relentless energy are impressive. No other saxophonist of his generation could have put his personal stamp so completely on this music. On “Countdown,” from the same project, Coltrane runs the gauntlet on an almost equally difficult chord pattern, while the ballad “Naima,” played over a shifting pedal point, ranks as one of the tenorist’s loveliest compositions.

For another musician, such a record might have been the crowning achievement of a career, but for Coltrane
Giant Steps
served merely as a way station on an unceasing journey. By the following year, Coltrane’s fascination with complex chord progressions was tempered by a renewed interest in pieces with a modal flavor. On his June 1960 recording with Don Cherry, backed by Ornette Coleman’s rhythm section, Coltrane makes frequent use of modal techniques. “My Favorite Things,” recorded a few months later, finds him alternating between conventional chord progressions and simple vamps suitable for modal improvisation. Yet Coltrane’s use of modes was moving far beyond Davis’s spartan conception. Even when Coltrane’s rhythm section was playing a quasi-modal harmonic pattern, based on one or two chords, Coltrane’s saxophone lines ranged widely, superimposing a variety of scales, with different degrees of consonance and dissonance. In time, Coltrane would push this technique to its limits. On pieces such as “Spiritual” and “A Love Supreme,” he builds Byzantine structures over simple bass lines, paltry foundations that—were one not confronted with the final, unimpeachable results—might otherwise seem incapable of supporting such colossal ambitions.

In this regard, Coltrane was well served by a world-class rhythm section. These static harmonies might have sounded merely banal when played by lesser artists. But in pianist McCoy Tyner and drummer Elvin Jones, Coltrane had found two of the finest musicians of the younger generation, both largely unheralded at the time, but each—like Coltrane himself—boasting a solid technique combined with a desire to develop and expand his musical vocabulary. These three players would mature in tandem over the next several years, feeding off each other’s energy, pushing each other deeper and deeper into the music. A member of a prominent jazz family, Elvin Jones was less well known than his siblings Hank and Thad at the time he moved to New York in 1956. But, by the close of his tenure with Coltrane, Elvin Jones had established himself as one of most influential drummers in the history of jazz. His mastery of polyrhythms was unsurpassed, yet even more striking was the unabashed intensity he brought to every performance. More than any other percussionist of his generation, Jones showed that delving into the interstices between the beats was not incompatible with pushing the band forward with unrelenting force. Time and time again, Coltrane’s own assertive musical personality seemed to draw its strength from Jones’s drum work—so much so that bass and piano would sometimes drop out of the proceedings for extended interludes, allowing these two dynamos to go at it. In these superheated moments, the line between leader and accompanist was replaced by a transcendent and combined will to power. Coltrane himself realized how important Jones was to his musical development. At one point, the drummer borrowed Trane’s car and totaled it in an accident. “I walked away with just bruises and scratches,” Jones later recalled. “When I told Trane about it, he said, ‘I can always get another car, but there’s only one Elvin.’”
¹²

Pianist McCoy Tyner similarly primed himself for greatness during his time with the Coltrane quartet. Born and raised in Philadelphia, Tyner had studied piano and music theory at the West Philadelphia Music School and Granoff Music School, and at age fifteen began leading his own rhythm and blues band. His early jazz role models included Thelonious Monk and Bud Powell, as well as Richie Powell, Bud’s lesser known brother. Like them, he favored a heavier touch at the keyboard and a penchant for percussive effects. At age seventeen, Tyner met John Coltrane and played two gigs with the saxophonist, then between stints with the Davis band. Some four years would elapse before Tyner joined Coltrane’s quartet. In the interim, he struggled to make a living at music, and as late as 1959 was working as a shipping clerk during the day while taking occasional evening gigs. That year Tyner’s career received a boost when he was asked to join the Benny Golson/Art Farmer Jazztet. Less than a year later, Tyner left to become a member of the Coltrane quartet, where he would stay until 1965. Blessed with a crisp, clean piano attack and a knack for constructing elaborate improvised lines, Tyner could have been a premier hard-bop pianist. But alongside Coltrane, Tyner gradually grew to be much more. Where other pianists would have backed Coltrane’s horn phrases with conventional comping chords, Tyner challenged the soloist with vamps and clusters and various percussive effects that, in aggregate, constituted a veritable pianistic tsunami of sound. The band’s excessive reliance on songs with simple harmonic structures may have played a role in this evolution, forcing Tyner to exert the utmost creativity in weaving a whole tapestry of harmonic color out of these most meager of threads. Tyner delighted in ambiguous voicings, liberally spiced with suspended fourths that rarely resolved, often played with a thunderous two-handed attack that seemed destined to leave permanent finger marks in the keys. Tyner’s solos were, if anything, even more energetic. Single-note lines, leavened with wide, often unpredictable interval leaps, jostled with sweeping arpeggios, cascading runs, reverberating tremolos. His touch at the piano, which originally possessed brittle sharpness, took on volume and depth, eventually emerging as one of the fullest and most easily identifiable keyboard sounds in jazz. Tyner’s career continued to flourish long after he left Coltrane, and his work in subsequent decades, especially his 1970s albums for the Milestone label—including vital projects such as
Echoes of a Friend
,
Atlantis
,
Trident
,
Supertrios
, and
Fly with the Wind
—would exert a noticeable influence on the jazz pianists of that era. But though others mimicked Tyner’s mannerisms, voicings, and modal runs, these acolytes seldom approached the intensity of the original.

In 1961, Coltrane was among the first musicians to sign with the new Impulse record label. A sizable advance made Coltrane the second highest paid musician in jazz, an honor in which he trailed only his former employer Miles Davis. Given this investment, Impulse was understandably anxious to broaden Coltrane’s following and frequently featured him in settings far afield from the increasingly outré approach Trane was pursuing in nightclubs and concert halls. Yet the more mainstream projects were invariably well conceived and almost uniformly successful: the pairing with vocalist Johnny Hartman ranks among the finest collaborations ever between saxophonist and singer and resulted in definitive performances of “Lush Life,” “My One and Only Love,” and “You Are Too Beautiful”; the
Ballads
release pursued a similar aesthetic, with comparable results; the session with Duke Ellington was a daring move—both parties may have seemed accommodating on the surface, yet each was driven by a tough-as-nails commitment to his personal musical principles—but this odd couple proved that, on occasion, demigods do consent to give-and-take. On “In a Sentimental Mood” Coltrane even elicited a breathtakingly fresh reconfiguration of the standard from Ellington (of a piece Duke had been playing regularly for almost thirty years). Some time later, Johnny Hodges, who had put an indelible stamp on this composition as a member of the Ellington band, told the record’s producer, Bob Thiele, that Coltrane’s version was “the most beautiful interpretation I’ve ever heard.”
¹³

These respectful reworkings of the traditional jazz repertoire coexisted with Coltrane’s more emphatic explorations, also recorded extensively by Impulse during these years. One finds a vast range of styles broached in these releases: tour de force blues such as “Chasin’ the Trane” and “Bessie’s Blues”; elaborate soprano sax excursions in 3/4 time—perhaps consciously aiming to recreate the success of “My Favorite Things”—in which Coltrane deconstructs singsong melodies such as “Chim Chim Cheree,” “Afro Blue,” and “Greensleeves”; “Alabama,” “Crescent,” and other epic pieces that find the quartet majestically flowing in and out of tempo; virtuosic modal performances such as “Impressions”; a stunning variety of hypermodern ballad styles, including moody rubato pieces (“Soul Eyes”), volcanic eruptions over standard changes (“I Want to Talk About You,” “Nature Boy”), and lilting superimpositions of a waltz feel over a slow 4/4 (the late live recordings of “Naima”); hypnotic mixtures of music and chanting (“Om” and the opening section from
A Love Supreme
) or quasivocals (“Kulu Se Mama”); and more tightly structured efforts with a larger ensemble (
Africa/Brass
).