The Truth and Beauty of Bill Evans: ‘Jazz Is Not a What, It Is a How’

Bill Evans in Copenhagen 1964. Photo © Jan Persson

‘Ultimately I came to the conclusion that all I must do is take care of the music – even if I do it in a closet. And if I really do that, somebody’s gonna come and open the door of the closet and say: ‘Hey, we’re looking for you.’’
Bill Evans

I recently watched a fine documentary about the life and work of jazz pianist and composer Bill Evans. (‘Time Remembered’, 2015, produced by Bruce Spiegel)

'Develop a comprehensive technique, and then forget that and just be expressive.’

With his unhurried, gentle, impressionistic playing, Evans created elegant, mournful works that meander with intent. Albums like ‘Everybody Digs’, ‘Portrait in Jazz’,’ Explorations’ and ‘Moon Beams’; legendary live recordings at the Village Vanguard, convey a sublime sadness. He teaches us to dig deeper and think harder in the quest for truth and beauty.

‘The jazz player, ultimately, if he’s going to be a serious jazz player, teaches himself.’

Born in 1929 in Plainfield, New Jersey, Evans began playing the piano at 4 or 5 and was classically trained. At 13 he fell in love with jazz, particularly admiring Nat King Cole and Bud Powell.

‘Jazz is the most central and important thing in my life.’

In 1955 Evans moved to New York, installing his piano in a small, cramped apartment on 83rd Street. He focused single-mindedly on making it as a musician.

‘At that time I made a pact with myself… I gave myself ‘til I was 30.’

Evans supplemented his natural talent with an incredible work ethic. He practised every available hour, took jobs performing in clubs in the evenings and carried a music notebook wherever he went.

'I like people who have worked long and hard, developing through introspection and dedication. I think that what they arrive at is, usually, deeper and more beautiful than the person who seems to have that ability and fluidity from the beginning.'

After producer Orrin Keepnews was played one of his demo tapes over the phone, Evans was signed to the Riverside label, the home of Thelonious Monk. His first album, released in 1956, sold only 800 copies. But he managed to catch the attention of Miles Davis, who took him on the road and enlisted him for the recording of the 1959 classic ‘Kind of Blue.’

‘I want to build my music from the bottom up, piece by piece. And I just have a reason, that I arrived at myself, for every note I play.’

Subsequently Evans formed a series of trios, the first of which, with bassist Scott LaFaro and drummer Paul Motian, was seminal. He embarked on a stunning period of music making. 

'Jazz music has always been a place where anything is possible.'            

Bill Evans. Seen here as he appears on the cover of the 2016 legacy release of the album ‘Some Other Time’

Tall and thin, sharp-suited; hair slicked back and wearing glasses, Evans played with his head hung over the piano, fingers lightly caressing the keyboard. There was a look of intense concentration on his face. With his own unique harmonic language; with melodies that floated, and rhythms that de-emphasised the beat, he created what Davis described as ‘crystal notes or sparkling water cascading down from some clear waterfall.’

Evans thought deeply about his craft. Though jazz was often regarded as somewhat cerebral, he sustained that it should always express emotions.

'It bugs me when people try to analyze jazz as an intellectual theorem. It's not, it's feeling.’

Ultimately Evans held that his music should have a spiritual dimension.

'Art should teach spirituality by showing a person a portion of himself that he would not discover otherwise.’

I was particularly taken with this statement:

'Jazz is not a what, it is a how. If it were a what, it would be static, never growing. The how is that the music comes from the moment, it is spontaneous, it exists at the time it is created.'

In the creative professions we tend to treat ideas as precious commodities, stable and fixed. We worry a great deal about people stealing our strategies, copying our concepts. What if another Agency gets hold of our pitch deck? What if a competitor mimics our campaign?

'To imitate someone is to insult them.'

I’ve always felt that creative ideas are fragile, mercurial properties, worth little in the hands of rivals. Viewed through other people’s eyes our proposals generally come across as cold, hollow, flat and lifeless. Great concepts need to be articulated by the people who originated them; animated by advocates that believe in them. And then set free.

Like Evans, the best communicators invest their ideas with spontaneity and emotion; with personality and performance. 

Persuasion is not a what, it is a how.

'Keep searching for that sound you hear in your head until it becomes a reality.’

Evans was quiet and introverted. He lacked confidence, was hurt by criticism and for much of his life he was haunted by tragedy. In 1961 Lafaro was killed in a car crash. He was just 25. In 1973 Evans’ long-term girlfriend Ellaine Schultz jumped in front of a subway train after he ended their relationship. Six years later his beloved brother Harry, who had been diagnosed with schizophrenia, shot himself. 

Evans consistently turned to narcotics to dull the pain. He died in 1980 from haemorrhaging and bronchial pneumonia, the result of decades of substance abuse. He was 51.

Not long before he passed, Evans called his collaborator and friend Tony Bennett and relayed some advice:

‘Just go with truth and beauty, and forget the rest.’

'The scene is set for dreaming,
Love's knocking at the door.
But oh my heart, I'm reluctant to start,
For we've been fooled before.

The night is like a lovely tune.
Beware, my foolish heart.
How white the ever constant moon.
Take care, my foolish heart.’

Bill Evans and Tony Bennett, ‘My Foolish Heart' (N Washington / V Young)

No. 432


Glyn Philpot: It’s Never Too Late to ‘Go Picasso’

‘Acrobats Waiting to Rehearse’ Glyn Philpot

Royal Pavilion & Museums, Brighton

I recently visited a fine exhibition of the work of artist Glyn Philpot. (‘Glyn Philpot: Flesh and Spirit' is at Pallant House Gallery, Chichester until 23 October.)

Philpot was a successful society portraitist who, at the age of 46, shook off convention to embrace modernism. He was a model of mid-life reinvention.

Born in Clapham in 1884, the son of a surveyor, Philpot grew up in Herne in Kent. Having studied at the Lambeth School of Art and the Académie Julian in Paris, he first exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1904. 

Philpot painted the elite of his day: aristocrats, ambassadors and actors. He had a talent for making his subjects look rather elegant and refined, beautifully dressed and coolly composed. His style was influenced by the Spanish and Italian Old Masters, whom he greatly admired. 

‘I am not one of those who think we should begin by striking out methods of our own. I feel that is a gift which only comes afterwards – if it comes at all.’

In 1923 Philpot was elected the youngest Royal Academician of his generation. And by the end of the ‘20s his endeavours had earned him a grand London studio on fashionable Tite Street, a chauffeur-driven car and a country house in Sussex. 

Philpot could afford to travel to France, Italy, America and North Africa, and to explore other artistic avenues beyond professional portraiture. He painted classical and biblical images; scenes from the street, the theatre and the circus. And, exceptionally for an artist at that time, he painted sensitive studies of Black subjects, never characterising his sitters as either stereotypical or subservient. 

Perhaps, as he approached his mid-40s, Philpot felt he needed a change.

In 1930 he served on a panel judging an art competition in Pittsburgh that awarded the Gold Medal to Pablo Picasso for his ‘Portrait of Olga.’

On his return from America Philpot hired a studio in Montparnasse, Paris and furnished it with chrome Bauhaus furniture. He set aside the rich colours and traditional glazes that had characterised his work to-date. Employing a cool, dry colour palette, his brushwork became loose and light, sparse and spare. He was a convert to modernism.

‘I am evolving a new way of painting to meet the new things I want to do.’

Philpot gave up the lucrative society portraiture that had made his name. Instead he embraced a broader range of subjects and themes. 

In a mood of mystical calm, two muses stand at the tomb of a poet. A doorman, dressed smartly in red coat and white top hat, ushers his customers into the nightclub with a sideways glance. A Jamaican man sits in profile, like a Florentine prince, against a batik backcloth. A group of women in Marrakech, wrapped in their big burnous cloaks, blend into the blue and pink background - almost abstract shapes. Two male acrobats waiting to rehearse, one with his arms folded, regard us in silence.

The critics of the time, confused by Philpot’s change of direction, thought it a serious mistake. The Guardian observed that: ‘a studio in Paris among the wild men of art is disturbing to an Old-masterish painter.’  A 1932 review of a Philpot exhibition in The Scotsman was headlined:

‘Glyn Philpot ‘goes Picasso’.’

Group of Women, Marrakech. Glyn Philpot (1884–1937). Jerwood Collection

Sadly Philpot’s modernist phase did not last long. He died from a stroke in 1937. He was just 53. 

As tastes evolved and his celebrated sitters receded into history, Philpot lapsed into obscurity. Only decades later did the art establishment reappraise his work and recognise him as a key figure in British modernism.

Philpot teaches us that, whatever age we are, wherever we are in our career - if we are open to stimulus and alert to inspiration - we can still adjust our style and transform our output. We can ‘go Picasso.’ 

It’s never too late to change.

 

'It's never too late
For rainbows to shine,
For whispering violins
And bubbles in the wine.
Let your heart stay young and strong.
Just one note can start a song.
So don't worry about how long
You've had to wait.
It's never too late.
It's never too late.’
Tony Bennett, ‘Never Too Late’ (R Evans / J Livingston / D Rose)

No. 385

NOTES FROM THE HINTERLAND 2

Thinking Inside the Box

This week I visited the excellent Joseph Cornell exhibition at The Royal Academy. Cornell spent most of his life in New York State and never left America. But through his art he voyaged across continents and through time. In a week in which Pixar launches a film exploring the brain of an 11 year old child, the Cornell exhibition is a jouney into the mechanics of a creative mind.

Although Cornell didn’t travel, he read extensively and compiled dossiers on subjects that interested him, whether that be astronomy, ornithology, circuses, childhood games or nineteenth century France. Drawing on the contents of these dossiers and combining them in imaginative ways, Cornell painstakingly constructed collages, mechanicals and glass fronted ‘shadow boxes.’ His boxes contained fantasy hotels, tropical birds, celestial maps. He created fictional lives, shooting galleries, slot machines and an interactive Museum of Sound (including ‘the sound of silence’ which I guess belongs in a museum nowadays…).

It’s often been said that travel narrows the mind. Cornell demonstrated that a creative imagination can take us to exotic places without setting foot outside one’s home town.

What can we in the creative professions learn from Cornell?

Could we do more to capture and collate experiences and thoughts that would otherwise pass unexpressed and unremembered?

Are we misleading ourselves when we imagine that our exotic holidays are fuelling our imagination? Would we be better off just reading more?

In the age of consumer insight and user experience, do we give proper weight to the pure transformative power of dreams?

Cornell loved poetry and he dedicated his piece Toward the Blue Peninsula to the similarly private Emily Dickinson. The work refers to a Dickinson poem that considers the choice of an imagined, over an experienced, life.

‘It might be easier
To fail - with Land in Sight-
Than gain – my Blue Peninsula -
To perish - of Delight -’

Emily Dickinson/ It Might Be Lonelier
 

Carving, Not Casting; Making Not Managing

I also attended the splendid retrospective of the sculptor Barbara Hepworth at Tate Britain. Beautiful contemplations in form and space, surface and light. Hollowed out solids, wires casting shadows. Polished and painted, curved and scooped. Lovely.

In her early career Hepworth participated in the ‘direct carving’ movement: artists carving directly into wood and stone, respecting the truth of the materials; rather than casting sculpture into a mould or employing skilled craftsmen to execute a model. Initially the direct carvers’ works were a little cruder, a little more rudimentary, than those produced by the incumbent methods, as the artists learned the craft skills themselves. But there was a compelling simplicity and honesty about the results.

I wonder what would a rededication to direct carving look like in the communication arts?
What if all our creatives shot their own film, designed their own posters, wrote their own code, built their own applications?
What if we rejected our fragmented, demarcated world and rededicated our selves to ‘making not managing’?
 

Wasted Talent

On Friday afternoon I sat on my own in a cinema weeping to the Amy Winehouse documentary. It was like watching a car crash in slow motion. From the start you could see the ending, but there was nothing you could do to stop it.

There seem to have been many contributors to poor Amy’s demise; not least her determination to ‘sabotage her own life’. And I couldn’t escape a sense of complicity. I’d read those papers, consumed those news stories; I was watching the film.

But the abiding impression I took from Amy was of waste: wasted talent, wasted love, wasted life. In our disposable culture we imagine that talent, like everything else, is readily replaceable. But it isn’t.  And we’ll not see the like of Amy again in our lifetimes.

I wonder, are creative businesses wasting the very talent that sustains them?
Shouldn’t we be protecting talent as our most precious commodity?
Should our new-found commitment to sustainability extend to people, not just resources?

And, by the way, the film wasn’t entirely depressing. Tony Bennett emerged as a wise, gentle, luminous star. If only there were more like him…

Advice to My 17 Year Old Self

Work hard, but not at the expense of your cultural life.
Study hard, but not at the expense of your social life.
Play hard, but not at the expense of your health.

N0. 39