But things started going wrong even before Mitchell arrived at Reeves Sound Studios on East Forty-Fourth Street. First, his luggage went astray en route from Florida. Then there was a surprise waiting for him in the control room: Miles Davis, one of his musical heroes, who had taken the extraordinary step of composing a new melody as a gift to Cannonball. Mitchell was supposed to play Miles’s part.
That wasn’t going to be easy, because the tune, called “Nardis,” was anything but a standard workout on blues-based changes. The melody had a haunting, angular, exotic quality, like the “Gypsy jazz” that guitarist Django Reinhardt played with the Hot Club de France in the 1930s. And it didn’t exactly swing, but unfurled at its own pace, like liturgical music for some arcane ritual. For three takes, the band diligently tried to make it work, but Mitchell couldn’t wrap his head around it, particularly under Miles’s intimidating gaze. The producer of the session, legendary Riverside Records founder Orrin Keepnews, ended up scrapping the night’s performances entirely.
The next night was more productive. After capturing tight renditions of “Blue Funk” and “Minority,” the quintet took two more passes through “Nardis,” yielding a master take for release, plus a credible alternate. But the arrangement still sounded stiff, and the horns had a pinched, sour tone.
Only one man on the session, Miles would say later, played the tune “the way it was meant to be played.” It was the shy, unassuming piano player, who was just shy of twenty-eight years old. His name was Bill Evans.
And that might have been the end of “Nardis.” Miles never recorded the tune himself—the fate suffered by another of his originals, “Mimosa,” recorded once by Herbie Hancock and never heard from again. In this case, however, the lack of a definitive performance by the composer created a kind of musical vacuum that other players have hastened to fill. Despite its inauspicious debut, the tune has become one of the most frequently recorded modern jazz standards, played in an impressive variety of settings ranging from piano trios, to Latin jazz combos, to ska-jazz ensembles, to a full orchestra featuring players from the US Air Force. For some musicians, “Nardis” becomes an object of fascination—an earworm that can be expelled only by playing it.
Though superb versions of “Nardis” have been recorded by everyone from tenor sax titan Joe Henderson to bluegrass guitar virtuoso Tony Rice, no one embodied its melodic potential more than Bill Evans. For him, Miles’s serpentine melody was a terrain he never tired of exploring. For more than twenty years, Evans played it nearly every night with his trios, often as the show-stopping climax of the second set. Indeed, he became so closely associated with the tune that some of his fans dispute that Miles actually wrote it, insisting that Evans deserves the credit. It’s certainly true that “Nardis” radically evolved over the course of Evans’s career, morphing into new forms, reinventing itself, and achieving new levels of poignancy as it became inextricably entwined with the arc of Evans’s turbulent life.
For this listener, “Nardis” has become a full-on musical obsession. I have more than ninety official and bootleg recordings of the tune stored in the cloud, ranked in a fluid and continually updated order of preference, so they follow me wherever I go. In my travels as a writer, I use “Nardis” as a litmus test of musical competence: if I see a jazz band in a bar or a busker taking requests, I inevitably suggest it. (If they’ve never heard of it, I understand that they must be new at this game.) By now I’ve heard so many different interpretations, in such a far-flung variety of settings, that a Platonic ideal of the melody resides in my mind untethered to any actual performance. It’s as if “Nardis” were always going on somewhere, with players dropping in and out of a musical conversation beyond space and time.
Evans once told a friend that a musician should be able to maintain focus on a single tone in his mind for at least five minutes—and in playing like this, he achieved a nearly mystical immersion in the music: a state of pure, undistracted concentration. Even before writers like Jack Kerouac and Gary Snyder made Buddhism a subject of popular fascination in America, Evans saw parallels between meditative practice and the keen, alert state that jazz improvisation demands, when years of work on perfecting tone and technique suddenly drop away and a direct channel opens up between the musician’s brain and his or her fingers. He listened to other pianists closely, but rather than imitate a player like Bud Powell, he would try to extract the essence of Powell’s approach and apply it to different types of material. “It’s more the mind ‘that thinks jazz’ than the instrument ‘that plays jazz’ which interests me,” Evans told an interviewer.
By maintaining a singularly intense focus on “Nardis” over the course of his career, Evans managed to turn the melody that had frustrated “Blue” Mitchell that night in 1958 into a vehicle for dependably accessing “the mind that thinks jazz,” like a homegrown form of meditation that could be performed on a piano bench before rapt audiences in clubs night after night. By bringing the story of Evans’s quest for a kind of jazz samadhi to light, I hope to understand the enduring hold that “Nardis” has on the ever-widening circle of musicians who play it, while reckoning with my own personal fixation.
Pale, bespectacled, and soft-spoken, Bill Evans looked more like a graduate student of theology than a hard-swinging jazzman. He was already working for Miles full-time on the night he recorded “Nardis” for Cannonball. He had been recommended for the job by George Russell, an avant-garde composer whose book of music theory, The Lydian Chromatic Concept of Tonal Organization, was a decisive influence on Miles’s modal conceptions of jazz in the late 1950s.
When Russell first mentioned Evans’s name, Miles asked, “Is he white?”
“Yeah,” Russell replied.
“Does he wear glasses?”
“Yeah.”
“I know that motherfucker,” Miles said. “I heard him at Birdland—he can play his ass off.” Indeed, the first time Evans played a beginner’s intermission set at the Village Vanguard—Max Gordon’s basement club, the Parnassus of jazz—the pianist was astonished to look up and see the legendary trumpeter standing there, listening intently.
After being invited to sit in with Miles’s sextet at a bar called the Colony Club in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn, Evans got the gig, though he was in for several more rounds of hazing before being allowed to play alongside Cannonball Adderley, John Coltrane, Paul Chambers, Philly Joe Jones, and Miles himself, all at the peak of their powers. At one point, Miles, in his inimitably raspy voice, told the wan young pianist that to prove his devotion to the music, he would have to “fuck” his bandmates, “because we all brothers and shit.” Evans wandered off for fifteen minutes to entertain the possibility, before telling Miles that while he wanted to make everyone happy, he just couldn’t do it. The sly trumpeter grinned and said, “My man!”
Still, the ribbing continued. Miles would counter Evans’s musical suggestions by saying, “Man, cool it. We don’t want no white opinions.” At the same time, the trumpeter became the young pianist’s staunchest advocate, saying that he “played the piano the way it should be played,” and comparing his supremely expressive touch on the keys to “sparkling water cascading down from some clear waterfall.” He would sometimes call Evans and ask him to just set the handset down and leave the line open while Evans played piano at home.
But Miles’s hard-core fans continued to shun Evans. They saw a white nerd evicting the beloved Red Garland from the prestigious keyboard chair at a time when black pride and appreciation of jazz as a distinctively black cultural form were ascendant. For months, while his bandmates got thunderous ovations after solos, Evans got the silent treatment, which reinforced his self-doubt. In his eagerness to be regarded as an equal, he accepted a first fix of heroin from Philly Joe, whom Evans respected more than any drummer on earth. He also began dating a chic young black woman, Peri Cousins, for whom he wrote one of his sprightly early originals, “Peri’s Scope.” Cousins observed how quickly the drug filled a crucial role in Evans’s existence, providing a buffer between his acute sensitivity and the realities of life on the road. “When he came down, when he kicked it, which he did on numerous occasions, the world was—I don’t know how to say it—too beautiful,” she said. “It was too sharp for him. It’s almost as if he had to blur the world for himself by being strung out.”
On Kind of Blue, widely regarded as the greatest jazz recording ever made, Evans became a conduit of that unbearable beauty, mapping a middle path between Russell’s Lydian concepts, Miles’s unerring sense of swing, and the luminous romanticism of Ravel and Debussy. His leads on “So What” and “Flamenco Sketches” seem geological, like majestic cliff faces carved outside of time.
By the time he recorded the tracks on Kind of Blue, however, Evans had already decided to leave Miles’s band. After his baptism of fire on the road, he was physically, mentally, and spiritually exhausted, but he also felt more confident about pursuing his own vision. He had a specific goal in mind: achieving a level of communication in a piano trio that would enable all three players to make creative statements and respond to one another conversationally, without any of them being obliged to explicitly state the beat. This approach came to be known as “broken time,” because no player was locked into a traditional time-keeping role; instead the one was left to float, in an implied pulse shared by all the players. Evans compared broken time to the kind of typography in which the raised letters are visible only in the shadows they cast.
That kind of collective sympathy, akin to three-way telepathy, demanded major commitment from the trio, and required high levels of personal chemistry. Evans met the perfect fellow travelers in two young musicians named Scott LaFaro and Paul Motian.
Ironically, the two men came into Evans’s band on the wings of the worst gig the pianist had ever played, a three-week stand at Basin Street East, on East Forty-Ninth Street, working opposite Benny Goodman. The “King of Swing” was enjoying a revival of interest, and his band was getting the red-carpet treatment, with VIPs arriving in limousines and lavish champagne dinners on the house, while the members of Evans’s trio bought their own Cokes at the bar. Occasionally they’d play a set only to discover that their mikes had been turned off. Evans ran through a series of illustrious accompanists that month as each man decided he could no longer take the abuse. (Philly Joe split when the club owner told Evans to stop letting him take solos.) But when LaFaro and Motian sat in, Evans felt things start to click, and he would look back on the three-week ordeal as a karmic process of eliminating the wrong players from the trio.
Boyishly handsome, six years younger than the pianist, and confident to the point of arrogance, LaFaro was the brazen yang to Evans’s ascetic yin. He spent hours every day commandeering attic rooms and hotel basements to practice, and restrung his instrument with nylon-wrapped strings years before they became standard, which enabled him to get a guitar-like tone and articulation in the upper register. “He was freer than free jazz,” Ornette Coleman said. “Scotty was just a natural, played so naturally, had a love of creation. I’m not only talking about music, but being human. I would say he was closer to a mystic.” Like Evans, who pored over volumes by Plato, Thomas Merton, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Jiddu Krishnamurti at home, LaFaro was intuitively attracted to Zen. The two men spent hours discussing philosophy on the road.
Motian came of age providing a solid four-four foundation for classic horn men like Coleman Hawkins and Roy Eldridge, but had also proved his versatility and ability to handle advanced musical concepts by supporting avant-garde players like George Russell, Thelonious Monk, and Lennie Tristano. He could swing harder with a pair of brushes than most guys could with a whole kit, and he instantly gravitated toward the concept of broken time, which gave an unprecedented amount of expressive freedom to him and his bandmates. This style proved so influential that it has become nearly ubiquitous in jazz even outside of the piano-trio context, though it requires an intense level of dedication.
The enduring effect of Miles’s endorsement ensured Evans a steady stream of gigs, and the three men made a pact: no matter what opportunities came up, their primary commitment for the next phase of their lives would be to the trio.
A warbly-sounding bootleg reel recorded at Birdland in 1960 shows the Bill Evans Trio distilling “Nardis” down to its essence and making it swing. After Evans authoritatively states the theme, he plays rollicking variations on it with LaFaro and Motian close behind. Then LaFaro takes an astonishing lead, climbing the neck of his instrument to make those nylon strings ring. As each member of the trio explores the implications of the melody, the other players lay out or step in as appropriate, so that the whole trio becomes a unified organism, “thinking” jazz as naturally as breathing.
When Evans first met LaFaro, he said, “There was so much music in him, he had a problem controlling it… Ideas were rolling out on top of each other; he could barely handle it. It was like a bucking horse.” On the road with the trio, LaFaro would learn to handle that bucking horse without taming it, expanding the range of possibility for every bass player who followed. He attained such a level of rapport with Evans that tears would come to Motian’s eyes on the bandstand.
As word spread that something special was happening in Evans’s trio, their days of having to buy their own Cokes ended. They began appearing on bills with top-ranked groups, including Miles’s bands, and other musicians flocked to see them on off nights. Keepnews wrote of “a definite feeling in the air… the almost mystical aura that marks the arrival of an artist.”
The constant touring, however, was tough on the pianist, who developed chronic hepatitis in tandem with his raging addiction. The cover photographs on Evans’s LPs became a time lapse of his physical degeneration. On the back of Undercurrent, Evans is depicted urbanely perusing a score with guitarist Jim Hall, a Band-Aid on his right wrist marking the spot where his needle went awry.
Evans was a polite junkie. For decades, he kept tabs on how much money he owed various friends, and he always endeavored to pay them back, even if his benefactor had long forgotten the debt. But among the people disturbed by his accelerating decline was the fearlessly outspoken LaFaro, who had no problem confronting the pianist in the bluntest terms. “You’re fucking up the music,” he would say. “Look in the mirror!”
It was in this combative atmosphere that Evans made his second attempt to commit “Nardis” to vinyl, at Bell Sound Studios, on February 2, 1961, under Keepnews’s watchful eye. Though Keepnews gamely tried to keep everyone’s spirits up, the whole session seemed jinxed, with Evans and LaFaro openly arguing about the pianist’s drug use and Evans suffering a splitting headache. By the time the ordeal was over, both the players and the producer assumed that the tapes would be quietly filed away and never released. “We had a very, very bad feeling,” Evans recalled. “We felt there was nothing happening.”
Listening back, however, everyone was shocked to discover how well the trio had played. Upon the album’s release, Explorations was hailed by critics for its bold, unsentimental reinvention of well-worn standards like “Sweet and Lovely” and “How Deep Is the Ocean,” the dynamism of the group’s interactions, and the sublime sensitivity of Evans’s phrasing and voicings. Humbled by the inadequacy of his own ability to judge how well the session had gone, Evans began to think of “the mind that thinks jazz” as something larger than the consciousness of any individual musician, as if the music organized itself at a higher order of awareness that wasn’t always discernible to the players. The rendition of “Nardis” that appears on the album, a refinement of the arrangement that the trio had been playing on the road, became the default canonical version in the absence of a Miles original—the basis for twenty years of Evans’s performances, and for hundreds of interpretations by others.
Ben Sidran once suggested, somewhat implausibly, that Miles told him that the name of the tune had something to do with nuclear energy. Others have suggested that it’s just a sound, like Charlie Parker’s “Klactoveedsedstene.” Perhaps the most amusing explanation (though it’s almost certainly apocryphal) was offered by bassist Bill Crow in Ted Gioia’s compendium The Jazz Standards. One night when Evans was playing with Miles, Crow reported, a fan requested a tune that the pianist felt was beneath him. “I don’t play that crap,” Evans replied. “I’m an artist”—with Evans’s nasal New Jersey drawl doing the work of eliding the phrase into the song’s cryptic title. (...)
Unlike most of the acts in Keepnews’s stable at Riverside, the young Evans often resisted his producer’s promptings to make a new record, feeling that he had nothing new to say. (That would change later in his career when loan sharks threatened to break his fingers.) But perhaps sensing that the trio had attained an extraordinary level of empathy, the pianist agreed to allow an engineer to record the output of the whole last day of a two-week run, five sets in total, running the gamut from Evans’s unbearably poignant exploration of classic ballads like “I Loves You, Porgy” and “My Man’s Gone Now” to cooking modal workouts on angular modern tunes like “Solar” and “Milestones.” LaFaro’s vibrant declarations danced around Evans’s richly harmonized lines as Motian kept the whole thing swinging with subtle shadings and accents. (...)
For Evans, wrote jazz critic Whitney Balliett, improvisation was “a contest between his intense wish to practice a wholly private, inner-ear music and an equally intense wish to express his jubilation at having found such a music within himself.” In the trio with LaFaro and Motian, Evans finally found the support he needed to take that music as deep as he felt it to be, and by doing so deepened the subjective possibilities of jazz itself.
Ten nights later, after a few beers, LaFaro and a friend decided it was worth driving eighty miles to Geneva, New York, where another friend had a good stereo. For the next several hours they drank coffee and listened to records, including Bartók’s “The Miraculous Mandarin” and the trio’s Explorations, which LaFaro was proud to show off.
After hearing Chet Baker sing his mournful “Grey December,” LaFaro remarked that Baker had it all—talent, movie-star looks, recording contracts—but because of his addiction, he had ended up another jazz casualty, his teeth knocked out while attempting to buy drugs in Sausalito, ruining his embouchure. LaFaro called Baker “an American tragedy.” The young bass player and his friend were invited to spend the night, but they turned down the invitation, having chores at home.
Driving east on Route 5-20, LaFaro fell asleep at the wheel. The car careened onto the shoulder, struck a tree, and burst into flames. The twenty-five-year-old bassist and his friend died instantly.
by Steve Silberman, The Believer | Read more:
Unlike most of the acts in Keepnews’s stable at Riverside, the young Evans often resisted his producer’s promptings to make a new record, feeling that he had nothing new to say. (That would change later in his career when loan sharks threatened to break his fingers.) But perhaps sensing that the trio had attained an extraordinary level of empathy, the pianist agreed to allow an engineer to record the output of the whole last day of a two-week run, five sets in total, running the gamut from Evans’s unbearably poignant exploration of classic ballads like “I Loves You, Porgy” and “My Man’s Gone Now” to cooking modal workouts on angular modern tunes like “Solar” and “Milestones.” LaFaro’s vibrant declarations danced around Evans’s richly harmonized lines as Motian kept the whole thing swinging with subtle shadings and accents. (...)
For Evans, wrote jazz critic Whitney Balliett, improvisation was “a contest between his intense wish to practice a wholly private, inner-ear music and an equally intense wish to express his jubilation at having found such a music within himself.” In the trio with LaFaro and Motian, Evans finally found the support he needed to take that music as deep as he felt it to be, and by doing so deepened the subjective possibilities of jazz itself.
Ten nights later, after a few beers, LaFaro and a friend decided it was worth driving eighty miles to Geneva, New York, where another friend had a good stereo. For the next several hours they drank coffee and listened to records, including Bartók’s “The Miraculous Mandarin” and the trio’s Explorations, which LaFaro was proud to show off.
After hearing Chet Baker sing his mournful “Grey December,” LaFaro remarked that Baker had it all—talent, movie-star looks, recording contracts—but because of his addiction, he had ended up another jazz casualty, his teeth knocked out while attempting to buy drugs in Sausalito, ruining his embouchure. LaFaro called Baker “an American tragedy.” The young bass player and his friend were invited to spend the night, but they turned down the invitation, having chores at home.
Driving east on Route 5-20, LaFaro fell asleep at the wheel. The car careened onto the shoulder, struck a tree, and burst into flames. The twenty-five-year-old bassist and his friend died instantly.
by Steve Silberman, The Believer | Read more:
Video: YouTube
[ed. Nice to see this retrospective, but sad also. I was deeply into jazz for a long time and Bill Evans was (and still is) my favorite (especially, The Village Vanguard Sessions). Also, Pat Metheny, Joe Pass (who I got to chat with after setting up his stage), McCoy Tyner and of course, the Duke (Ellington). See also: Peri's Scope]
