On this night, I talked while Bill Evans listened
Richard Burgin is a professor at Saint Louis University. This essay is excerpted from "The Show I'll Never Forget: 50 Writers Relive Their Most Memorable Concertgoing Experience," edited by Sean Manning. Copyright 2007. Published and reprinted by arrangement with DaCapo Press, a member of the Perseus Books Group. All rights reserved.
In my early teens, I had an unusual hobby. Whenever the urge grew strong enough to overcome my basic diffidence, and whenever I didn't think it would show up too badly on my parent's phone bill, I used to make long - distance calls to different jazz musicians I admired. From the safety of my home in Brookline, I'd tell them how much I liked their music and then ask such typically journalistic questions as, "Who influenced you?" and "Who is your favorite jazz pianist?" It would be much more difficult to do this in today's world, but back in 1960-61 unlisted numbers were almost unheard of. I knew from regularly reading Downbeat that most jazz musicians of stature lived in New York. It was simply a matter of asking the operator for their phone numbers and voilà, I would be speaking with [Cecil] Taylor or [Lennie] Tristano.
I was fired up -- dying to communicate with people who had communicated so much to me. I think it was this enthusiasm and curiosity that gave me the ability to sustain these conversations that sometimes lasted as long as a half hour. I remember that Tristano was especially loquacious, referring to [Thelonious] Monk as "the dissonance kid " . . . and also expressing admiration for Bill Evans.
Evans was my new god of jazz in general, and of jazz piano in particular. His influence on me was incalculable and I assumed he had -- or should have -- influenced the rest of the world the same way. After all, Evans had introduced a new language for the piano featuring a kind of lyrical introspection never heard before in jazz, with a harmonic language and rhythmic conception never heard before in any music. Moreover, his excruciating sensitivity and fiercely concentrated demeanor completely bereft of any pandering to the audience made him seem unapproachable -- someone I could never dream of speaking to.
As I grew older, it was inevitable that I began to hear Evans live, first at the Village Vanguard in New York, later at the Jazz Workshop in Boston. Just as so many of my contemporaries would be reminded of important times in their lives by different Beatles' songs and albums, Evans performed that same function for me. On the night when I lost my virginity, for example, I made sure my girlfriend first listened to " Undercurrent, " the brooding but lyrical album of piano and guitar duets Evans made with Jim Hall. Two years later, at a turning point in my relations with the new love of my life, Phoebe, we went to Evans's 1966 Town Hall concert in New York (from which an album was eventually made).
By the winter of 1971, when I was at one of my peaks of loving Evans (and just beginning to more seriously compose some of my own music), I was also at one of the seemingly bottomless valleys in my love life. I was 23, teaching English at Tufts University and in the midst of the agonizing dissolution of my relationship with Jane that was so horrible I couldn't talk about it with anyone. Everything that had once been so beautiful had become appallingly painful -- that kind of relationship.
On this January night, however, I afforded myself some relief by going to hear Evans's new trio with the always excellent Eddie Gomez on bass and Marty Morell on drums. They were playing at the Jazz Workshop, a wonderfully intimate club (that no longer exists) in downtown Boston between Copley Square and Arlington Street where I'd previously heard [John] Coltrane, Tristano, and Horace Silver. For me, the most successful venues for music, or for anything you love, are those where you aren't aware of time or space. The Jazz Workshop had no clocks, but even if it did, it would be too dark to see them. You entered from the street, but the music was performed below street level, which removed you from the outside world by another welcome degree. It was not a large space, but because it was dark enough with the lighting focused on the simple but functional stage, space melted away like the ending of an Evans song. As a result, it attracted first-rate musicians and was a place where people listened quietly and seriously to the music as if in a concert hall instead of a nightclub.
By intermission before the third and last set, when it was already after midnight, I was pretty loose. Incredibly, I noticed Evans sitting alone at a table near mine. I must have been high, because the next thing I knew, I'd walked over to the table and started talking with him. I'm sure I began by telling him how much I loved his music -- that was all I thought I really wanted to say. But for some reason Evans invited me to sit down and started asking me about myself.
Almost immediately, I began telling him about my breakup. It was odd; there were still over 50 people in the dark room, but there was no sign of anyone else waiting to speak to him. It was as if a magical space and time were created where I could speak alone to the man whose music I had listened to almost every day for seven years.
Mercifully, for Evans's sake, I skipped most of my history with Jane and concentrated on our final catastrophic date on New Year's Eve, which culminated with her reaching for a bottle of Quaaludes, which unfortunately were legal at the time and had been prescribed to me for my insomnia.
Evans watched me closely behind his glasses. He had one of the most earnest and sympathetic faces I'd ever seen, like the way one wished one's psychotherapist would look.
"Did she OD?" he asked.
"No," I said, feeling a moment's shame -- but only a moment's -- before I forged ahead for at least another 15 minutes. I told him how she was taken to the hospital, but was all right now. I told him about meeting her parents in a restaurant and how her father said he wanted to kill me. I revealed still more horrible details, about drugs and jealousy and obsession, including how much I wanted her back.
To all of this, Evans listened as intently as if he were listening to music he had to occasionally accompany with an appropriate chord or fill. Frankly, no one had ever listened to me that way before or ever has since.
I knew that Evans himself had drug addiction problems throughout his professional life (which explained why one hand had swollen to almost twice its natural size). That's why I knew he could understand and not be shocked by my story. (I didn't know then how many loved ones he'd lost or would lose to suicide, including his ex-wife, Elaine, nor that Evans himself would die only nine years later of drug-related causes . )
Finally, I concluded my self-indulgent horror story and transitioned to music again. I asked him how he liked playing with Gomez and whether he would ever record again with his previous bassist, Gary Peacock. Evans, of course, said that he admired both musicians and hoped his trio with Gomez would last. I told him that my favorite albums of his were " Sunday at the Village Vanguard " and " Conversations With Myself, " and that my favorite compositions of his were "Time Remembered" and especially "Re: Person I Knew," neither of which he'd performed that night. He thanked me. He was unfailingly polite, gentle , and sincere.
The next day, when I thought about it, I was sorry that I remembered so few of his exact words. Were I to have another chance to talk to him, I'd ask all the questions and listen much more carefully. Of course, I'd already done that in a way, I thought, consoling myself. I had listened and would continue to listen to his musical "conversation" for the rest of my life, and surely that was what Evans cared most about. It was just that, on the night that I met him, I needed his listening even more than his music, and for no discernible reason other than his own humanity, he had given it to me.
The first song he played in the next and final set was "Re: Person I Knew." I was touched. He had remembered. I prefer to end this little story here, with the Jazz Workshop still in existence, with my young and tormented heart touched and momentarily fulfilled, and with Bill Evans -- his head bent over so close to the piano while he played, as if he were a doctor examining its heart.
