The History of Jazz (61 page)

Follow-up Evans-Davis projects,
Quiet Nights
and a live recording from a Carnegie Hall concert, were released in the early 1960s, but were lesser efforts, although not without their moments. Davis’s finest music after 1960 was invariably made with smaller bands, and even during the period of studio work with Evans, Davis had maintained his preeminence as a combo leader. For a time, Sonny Rollins had returned as tenor soloist in the band, but Coltrane rejoined the trumpeter at the close of 1957. Coltrane had undergone a dramatic personal rebirth during his time away, and had now foresworn tobacco, alcohol, and narcotics. Moreover, he was now widely acknowledged as a rising star in the jazz world on the strength of his work with Monk and Davis, as well as his first recordings under his own name. In September, Coltrane had recorded his sole leader date for the Blue Note label,
Blue
Train
, a topflight effort distinguished by the tenorist’s strong work on the title blues, and on “Moment’s Notice,” an intriguing exploration of shifting ii–V chords played at a fast clip. This piece—half composition, half harmonic exercise—anticipated the even more complex “Giant Steps” of 1959. During this same period, Coltrane recorded extensively for the Prestige label, as both leader and sideman. This body of work tends to be obscured by the more adventurous material recorded by Coltrane for Atlantic and Impulse in the 1960s. Yet the Prestige recordings, despite the more conventional repertoire and “blowing date” ambiance, successfully showcased Coltrane’s skills as a mainstream jazz soloist in a variety of spirited settings, including memorable frontline battles with other name saxophonists. All in all, the previous eighteen months had marked a major transformation for Coltrane. The man who rejoined the Davis band was a more mature soloist—and person—than the one who had left in the summer of 1957.

The addition of John Coltrane, however, was only one of the steps Davis was taking to rebuild his band into what would prove to be the most celebrated working unit of his illustrious career. When the new Davis combo opened at the Sutherland Lounge in Chicago in December 1957, Coltrane and Davis were supported in the front line by alto saxophonist Julian “Cannonball” Adderley. Adderley’s impassioned playing had caused a sensation in the jazz world almost immediately on his arrival in New York in 1955. For a time he had worked with Oscar Pettiford and later with his brother Nat Adderley, but in performing on a regular basis with Coltrane and Davis the altoist was challenged as never before. “The first night in Chicago,” Davis would later relate, “we started off playing the blues, and Cannonball was just standing there with his mouth open, listening to ‘Trane. … He asked me what we were playing and I told him ‘the blues.’ He says, ‘Well I ain’t never heard no blues played like that!’ ”
⁹
But Adderley, himself a master of the twelve-bar form, came to flourish in this competitive setting, countering Coltrane’s baroque explorations with vigorous, hard-swinging solos. The chemistry between the three frontline players was amply demonstrated on the
Milestones
album, recorded for Columbia the following February and March, which consisted entirely of medium-tempo and fast numbers played with almost unrelenting energy. This edition of the Davis band seemed destined to be remembered as one of the most assertive jazz combos of its day, almost the antithesis of the cool sound that Davis had honed in other settings.

This would soon change. The addition of pianist Bill Evans shortly after the
Milestones
date brought, in Davis’s words, a “quiet fire” to the group. Soft-spoken and introspective, Evans acted little and looked even less like a jazz musician: hunched over the instrument, with his horn-rimmed glasses and slicked-down hair only inches from his probing fingers, he seemed lost in some private communion with the ivory keys. In time, this unassuming figure would demand respect as the most influential jazz pianist of his generation, forging an innovative style that would permanently alter improvised keyboard music. But in 1958, few jazz fans had heard of this mild-mannered white pianist, whose major sideman credits were low-profile stints with Tony Scott and George Russell. True, Evans’s lucid work on Russell’s “Concerto for Billy the Kid” and “All About Rosie” had caught the attention of more discerning listeners. Yet his 1956 debut recording as a leader for the Riverside label sold only eight hundred copies in the twelve months following its release. Two years would elapse before Evans, now validated by his role in the Miles Davis band, would record again as a leader.

Born in Plainfield, New Jersey, on August 16, 1929, Evans began learning piano at age six and started his performing career at age twelve. He later studied music at Southeastern Louisiana University, focusing on piano, flute, and music theory. He brought to his jazz playing a deep knowledge of the classics, especially late nineteenth-and early twentieth-century composers such as Ravel, Debussy, Scriabin, Bartók, Prokofiev, and Rachmaninoff, supplemented by a keen appreciation of the jazz work of Powell, Tristano, Konitz, and others. In time, these disparate influences would coalesce into a unique, integrated style of Evans’s own creation. Although previous jazz pianists had experimented with chords built on higher intervals, Evans refined a comprehensive and systematic understanding of voicings, derived primarily from the French impressionist composers, which made extensive use of ninth, eleventh, and thirteenth chords. At times, Evans would craft richly layered block-chord solos, as on the Davis recording of “On Green Dolphin Street”—a technique largely abandoned by the pianist in later years but which persuasively set forth the varied and subtle palette of sounds at his disposal, akin to a Maurice Ravel playing cool jazz. These same higher intervals figured prominently in Evans’s melody lines, which employed altered ninths and sharp elevenths the way earlier jazz pianists had used blues notes: to add color, tension, and release to the improvised phrases. Evans’s touch at the piano was equally noteworthy, tending toward a smooth legato, softening the staccato attack preferred by his bop predecessors. In time, Evans would learn how to construct phrases that broke away almost completely from the gravitational pull of the ground beat—a technique he would master with his later trios and teach by example to the next generation of jazz players—but even on these early recordings with Davis, Evans’s attenuated approach to melodic development was evident, furthered by the frequent use of triplets and three-against-two rhythms, as well as the sometimes aeriform, free-floating quality of his solos.

Is it going too far to see this Davis unit as the most impressive working combo in the history of modern jazz? Certainly it not only included some of the greatest individual talents of the era, playing at a peak level, but the band also possessed a rare chemistry. The cooler aesthetic of Davis and Evans tempered and counterbalanced the fire-and-brimstone exhortations of Coltrane and Adderley. Yet only a handful of recordings exist, making a complete evaluation impossible: the ensemble’s total oeuvre can be heard in a couple of hours. A late May session for Columbia produced several landmark performances: “Fran Dance,” “Love for Sale,” “Stella by Starlight,” and the aforementioned “On Green Dolphin Street.” Other tantalizing extracts of this band in action have also been released—often issued scattershot by Columbia, which, for example, waited eighteen years before making “Love for Sale” available. But, for the most part, the Olympian reputation of this sextet rests on a single recording project,
Kind of Blue
.

Yet what a remarkable recording it is! On the title track of his previous
Milestones
release, Davis had experimented with modal-based improvisation, and he was intent on delving more deeply into this technique on
Kind of Blue
. The essence of modal jazz lay in the use of scales as a springboard for solos, in place of the busy chord progressions that had characterized jazz since the bop era. For example, Davis’s composition “So What” may have appeared, at first hearing, to be a traditional thirty-two-bar piece in AABA song form. But there was one critical difference: a seven-note D Dorian scale (equivalent to the white notes on a piano keyboard) served as the basis for improvisations in the first section of the piece, while an E-flat Dorian scale was the foundation for the middle section. The soloists were expected to rely solely on these scales during their improvisations. “Flamenco Sketches” took the modal concept even further. Traditional song form was abandoned in favor of interludes of indeterminate length; each soloist worked through a series of five scales, proceeding at his own pace, lingering on each mode for as long or as short a time as he wished. This approach gave the players unprecedented freedom but also demanded a degree of austerity unknown in bebop. Musicians raised on Parker’s precept that a soloist could—indeed, should—“play any note against any chord,” felt understandably constrained when limited to predetermined modes. Sometimes they responded by ignoring the “rules” Miles had set for the songs. When Sonny Stitt played “So What” with the Davis band, he treated the modal sections as long vamps on minor chords, spicing them with Parkeresque chromaticism. In time, modal jazz playing would evolve in this very direction—especially in the later works of Coltrane where static harmonies were used as foundations for the most complex melodic superstructures. But Davis’s original conception, although more restrictive, bespoke an almost childlike fascination with the basic building blocks of music. In his hands, modal jazz served as a healthy corrective, a minimalist response to the maximalist tendencies of postwar jazz. Bill Evans’s impressionist harmonies added to the emotive power of
Kind of Blue
and served to reinforce Davis’s Zenlike insistence on simplicity of means. Coltrane and Adderley, who by temperament were much hotter players, responded with some of the crispest solos of their careers.

Evans had already left the band by the time these pieces were recorded, after only eight months with Davis. “I felt exhausted in every way—physically, mentally and spiritually,” he later recalled.
¹⁰
In September 1959, Cannonball Adderley departed as well, despite Davis’s guaranteeing a minimum annual salary of $20,000, which was more than the altoist could hope to earn leading his own band. After reluctantly joining Davis for a European tour in early 1960, John Coltrane also left the fold. These were devastating losses. Davis would eventually regroup with a superb mid-1960s band, but in the interim he struggled to recruit suitable replacements for these unique talents. On saxophone, for example, the early 1960s found Davis using, for greater or shorter periods, Jimmy Heath, Sonny Stitt, Hank Mobley, Frank Strozier, George Coleman, Sam Rivers, and others. Many of his sidemen during this period were outstanding players, and even the lesser lights were solid journeyman soloists; for example, Davis’s keyboard accompanists, Wynton Kelly and Victor Feldman, were both toptier talents and their sound well matched with Davis’s needs—yet the resulting ensembles rarely approached the chemistry of the late 1950s and mid-1960s bands.

During his brief stint with the Davis sextet, Bill Evans’s playing reached a new peak, and it continued to evolve in his ensuing trio work. Together with bassist Scott LaFaro and drummer Paul Motian, Evans achieved a degree of interaction and heightened sensitivity rarely heard in the jazz world, and created a body of work that would prove to be vastly influential during the coming decades. Only twenty-three years old at the time he joined Evans, LaFaro had already performed on both coasts with musicians as diverse as Sonny Rollins, Chet Baker, Thelonious Monk, and Benny Goodman. But with the Evans trio, LaFaro took far greater chances, departing markedly from traditional walking lines, instead offering countermelodies and guitar-like phrases. His sense of time was freer, less tied to the ground beat, than any jazz bassist had previously attempted. In this regard, he was ably assisted by drummer Motian, whose subtle percussion work—especially his brush and cymbal playing— added color and texture to the music as much as it did rhythmic drive. For this band, the underlying pulse was implied rather than stated. Evans referred to this approach as the “internalized beat.” It is not going too far to see this short-lived trio as redefining the nature of the jazz rhythm section. Almost all the great piano-bass-drums units of later years—perhaps most notably the exceptional Herbie Hancock–Ron Carter–Tony Williams combination that powered Miles’s mid-1960s band—would, in some measure, draw on the innovations of this seminal trio.

Studio recordings from December 1959 and February 1961 showcased the band’s progress in breaking free from bop-era clichés in an attempt to create a more purified style of trio music. The trio’s follow-up recording—which would also prove to be its last—finds these hints of greatness coalescing into a full-fledged mastery. On June 25, 1961, Evans’s record company taped the trio’s performance at New York’s Village Vanguard. The two dozen selections recorded that day achieve a telepathic level of group interplay, one in which the line between soloist and accompanist— isolated and distinct in the swing and bop idioms—often blurs and at times totally disappears. The piano work, the bass line, the percussion part weave together in a marvelous, continuous conversation. Such a description might make it seem that the music is busy, filled with content. Nothing could be further from the truth. The marvel was how this music could say so much while leaving so much unsaid. One would struggle to find a jazz recording from the day with a slower tempo than “My Foolish Heart,” yet the performance never lags; indeed, it could serve as a textbook case in how to use space and silence to accentuate the forward momentum of jazz music. Other tracks are equally exemplary: the intimate dialogue between the bass and piano on “Some Other Time”; the shimmering percussion work on “My Man’s Gone Now,” supporting Evans’s poignant solo; the probing across-the-bar-lines phrasing on “Gloria’s Step” and “All of You”; the pristine beauty of “Waltz for Debby” and “Alice in Wonderland”; the avant-garde deconstruction of “Milestones.” A band might rightly be willing to rest its reputation on the basis of a single day’s worth of work when it was a day such as the one the Evans trio enjoyed at the Village Vanguard; alas, as it turned out, that would perforce be the case. Eleven days later, LaFaro died in a car accident. He was only twenty-five years old.