I don't particularly like to sit up in a roam or in somebody's house and just play for the enjoyment of the three of us. And I've played long enough where I prefer now to play for people. We hope the music is liked, and accepted, and understood -that’s one of the reasons for it. We're playing, first of all, for each other. And to me there is a certain quality of relating to an audience, that I find hard to do in a large auditorium sometimes. You do a concert performance of 45- 50 minute an hour at the most - and you're done with it. And most of it in the Village Vanguard in New York, It's simply that we must play so much time every night, so many nights a week.īUNKER: And you get that in a club, where you don't on a concert. ISRAELS: We've done all our developing in clubs, I must say. To my mind, both are essential - at least, where we're at now. That way we feel we'll have enough of each, and develop. And we'd like to divide that up into, say, a two- month European tour of concerts and some club work, and perhaps two months of concerts and two months of club work in the States - something like that. However, I feel, and we all agree, that we don't want to perform perhaps more than six months a year, because we all have other musical projects and interests. Most places we go to now do have good instruments, and we find the right kind of working conditions. There's a club in Tulsa that the fellow built like an auditorium, and went into all kinds of acoustical research to build the bandstand. But we do have the discipline to adjust to whatever situation we're in, and try to get the most out of it.Ĭertain clubs are much better than others. And, however marvellous an audience is, these other factors have to be considered.

Sometimes we find ourselves in difficult situations - the piano may be below standard, we may be crowded on the stand, or the acoustics may not be the greatest. The closer a club can get to concert conditions, the closer it is to being ideal. However, ideal performance conditions are concert conditions. There's a volume of playing involved there, which is important to our development as a group, since we don't rehearse and everything comes from the music. It seems to me we have to perform in clubs a certain amount of the time. In the second interview in 1966, Bill Evans, Chuck Israels and Larry Bunker talk about working in clubs and about the music they create in the trio.ĭo you think that a jazz club is the ideal environment for stimulation in playing?ĮVANS: Well, there's different answers come into my head. After leaving Davis, he led his own trios, using a succession of top bassists (including Scott LaFaro, Chuck Israels and Eddie Gomez) and toured widely in the US, Europe and beyond.Įvans wrote memorable compositions, such as ‘Waltz for Debby’ and ‘Very Early’, but was perhaps at his best in his lustrous re-interpretations of standard tunes which he could lift to new levels of subtlety and lyricism. The pressure of working in Davis’ sextet, perhaps the leading jazz unit of its time, aggravated Evans’ narcotic habit which very seriously affected his later career. Evans’ contribution was crucial, helping to define the album’s unique mood. He influenced Davis’ interest in modal jazz and returned to play on the trumpeter’s 1959 Kind of Blue album, one of the most important recordings in jazz history. His breakthrough to real prominence came as a member of Miles Davis’ sextet from April to November 1958. Born in Plainfield, New Jersey as William John Evans, he introduced an original, attractive style of piano playing to jazz, with distinctive harmonies, great sophistication in chord voicings, and a new conception of the piano trio in which bass and drums assumed almost equal responsibility with the pianist for developing a performance.Įvans, classically trained from the age of six, worked with various jazz groups before attracting notice on recordings by Charles Mingus and George Russell. It is hard to over-estimate Bill Evans’ influence on subsequent jazz pianists.

Bill evans conception transcription