Listening to Bill Evans’ jazz is like playing the terciopelo at night, with its sense of sweet abandon. Keep an intimacy so spiritual that it feels like you’re always there in front of a newly discovered song, as if it never wears out and flows with light, gently reticent notes.
The air of hypnotic beauty clashes with the profile of this colossal pianist who experienced a tragic end of life and who, moreover, has never been sufficiently valued by the collective memory. His name speaks to the most music-loving minds, but it is diluted in a sad ostracism among common mortal listeners, those who may have a taste for music, but who do not delve deeper into alternative connections or references. Dead only 51 years old in New York from liver failure and internal bleeding due to his addiction to heroin and cocaine, Evans dragged himself through life because of his brother’s suicide, which further worsened his drug addiction.
Few artists have the skill, ability and talent to change part of the rhythm of the music and, above all, to do it twice. Lohizo, first of all, is part of an unbeatable team. In 1959, Miles Davis, John Coltrane and illuminated the masterpiece A kind of blue (1959) and, only a year later, they returned to deliver another astonishing ride, each separately. Davis with Sketch of Spain, Coltrane with Giant steps and Evans ass Portrait in jazz.
Portrait in Jazz It’s a gem of the best jazz of all time. An album that seems suspended in the air, in a dimension distinct from everything else. An exquisite and nocturnal album. Exquisite for this original and supreme aesthetic expression which establishes a new horizon for the advancement of jazz, a universe where everything shines with its light and intensity. An elegant, refined, beautiful intensity, in which its sound reformulation is made from the European classical piano, without the roots of the blues, without the black tradition, like other contemporary African-American pianists as precious as Thelonious Monk, Oscar Peterson, Herbie Hancock or Art Tatum. And nocturnal because, if you ever need to listen to a record for duermevela dusk or dawn liqueur, Portrait in Jazz he is one of the best.
The caress of the night inhabits this album, as in all of Bill Evans’ work. The melancholic night calls upon a living organism as is the conjunction of the pianist with the bassist Scott LaFaro and the drummer Paul Motian. A complete trio of harmony and understanding, which offers a clear and gently vibrating sound in the broad form of the instrumental phrase, where all three play in three-dimensional form. That’s it, until then the trio was doing it in a two-dimensional way: the piano dominated everything and led the rhythm section of the drums and bass. But with them, Portrait in Jazz and in their concerts the three-dimensional form gave them the role of leader, with a rhythm section phrasing melodic and rhythmic and not just supporting or marking the compass. As Evans said, there was more space and therefore more dialogue.
This is the identity of Bill Evans, the pianist with paste glasses, haunted by heroin, cocaine and the suicide of his brother. A colossus that ended without pain or glory. And, if the general public cannot separate his name from the transcendence of his music, his jazz shines in the darkness, like the rock of the terciopel in the night, a touch that abandons itself as if life were replenished paralyzed, very paralyzed, from daily stress.
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