[Dixielandjazz] Bill Evans: "Autumn Leaves"

[Bill Haesler]

Norman Vickers <nvickers1 at cox.net> asked [in part]:
> ...Evans was a music student at Southeastern Louisiana State University in Hammond, and his teacher was John Venetozzi.  It’s not clear to me how Evans, a New Jersey native, came to study music in Louisiana.  Help me, jazz experts!

Dear Norman,
The answer is contained in the 1998 book 'Bill Evans. How My Heart Sings’ by Peter Petting (Yale University).
The following extracts are from Chapter 1.

  " Evans was still in high school when the new music of bebop began to erupt in New York in the early 1940s. He was perhaps just too young, and not yet enamored enough of jazz, to adopt the new language. Then, precisely when he might have been ripe for conversion, he left the area to continue his studies in Louisiana. The end of the decade was spent a thousand miles away from the flourishing art of bebop, a simple geographical fact that led him to pursue other forms on his own.

    So it was, in September 1946, that Evans, along with several other students from New Jersey, continued his musical studies on a scholarship to Southeastern Louisiana College at Hammond, some fifty miles from New Orleans. Just seventeen, he savored being on his own for the first time, and in such a place. "It's an age when everything makes a big impression," he said. "And Louisiana impressed me big. Maybe it's the way people live. The tempo and pace is slow. I always felt very relaxed and peaceful. Nobody ever pushed you to do this or say that. Perhaps it's due to a little looser feeling about life down there. Things just lope along, and there's a certain inexplicable indifference about the way people face their existence."

    The double life that he had established in high school--student and night owl--continued to flourish in Hammond. From a base on Magnolia Street, New Orleans, he went jamming almost nightly around the Crescent City and the surrounding countryside with his regular group, the Casuals. Later he described the sort of pocket-moneymaking gig the band undertook. One, for example, was an outdoor affair for seventy-odd folk: "It was a church in the middle of a field--a boxlike structure about forty by twenty with nondescript paint on the outside and none on the inside. It was more like a rough clubhouse than a church. I think they built it themselves. You wondered where the hell they came from because you couldn't see any houses around. It was a dance job. We played three or four tunes for them, and then blew one for ourselves. They didn't seem to mind. Everyone had a ball. The women cooked the food--it was jambalaya--and served it from big boards. Everything was free and relaxed. Experiences like these have got to affect your music."

    Back home, during summer vacation after his first year, he played in a group that included Russ Le Gandido on clarinet and saxophone, Connie Atkinson on bass, and the singer Eleanor Aimes. …

    He assimilated "a thousand influences," from musicians at the clubs where he played to nationally prominent figures--not just pianists like Dave Brubeck, George Shearing, Oscar Peterson, Al Haig, and Lou Levy, but hornmen as well, like Miles Davis, Dizzy Gillespie, Charlie Parker, and Stan Getz. He took something from each. "Bud Powell has it all," he said, "but even from him I wouldn't take everything... 

    The biggest influence on Evans at this time, though, was the pianism of Nat "King" Cole--in Bill's estimation "one of the tastiest and just swingin'est and beautifully melodic improvisers and jazz pianists that jazz has ever known, and he was one of the very first that really grabbed me hard.”... 

    Back at college, he was playing first flute in the concert band. If playing the violin had fostered a depth to his midregister piano tone, the flute promoted a pearly treble. His piano technique evolved, meanwhile, and he soon became known as the "king of the fast-lock tens," a reference to his left-hand "walking" tenths... 

    Evans's studies in the classical repertoire, two weekly lessons of an hour and a half each, took in sonatas by Mozart and Beethoven and works by Schumann, Rachmaninoff, Debussy, Ravel, Gershwin (the Piano Concerto in F), Villa-Lobos, Khachaturian, Milhaud, and others. Performances of some of these pieces were broadcast, and prizes came his way under the guidance of his piano teachers, Louis M. Kohnop, John Venettozzi, and Ronald Stetzel.

    For his senior recital on April 24, 1950, Evans began with Bach's Prelude and Fugue in B[b flat] minor (from Book 1 of the "48"), Brahms's Capriccio, Opus 116, No. 7, and Chopin's B[b flat], minor Scherzo... Not surprisingly, a Russian composer was represented, Evans choosing a group of Kabalevsky's recently published Preludes. The program finished with the opening movement of Beethoven's Third Piano Concerto; Evans's teacher, Ronald Stetzel, played the orchestral part. Later, as honor graduate on Senior Class Day, he played the whole concerto with the college orchestra.

    The constructional knowledge of music that Evans later brought to jazz was firmly rooted in this European tradition, as was his thoroughly trained and exquisitely refined touch at the keyboard… 

    But even as he mastered the classics, jazz was conquering his heart. He worked for hours on end at the grammar of jazz, refining his knowledge of what he was doing when playing it. As colleagues from his student days who had seemed more gifted--the ones with the "easier" talent--dropped out of the profession, Evans kept working, and playing.

    He studied theory and composition with Gretchen Magee and became deeply appreciative of her guidance. With a piece called "Very Little Suite" he appeared on the college platform as composer-performer.

    In about his third year he produced a small masterpiece in waltz time that he called "Very Early." It is a highly disciplined piece of writing, its melody comprising a two-bar falling, and then rising, germ; it can withstand the most rigorous structural analysis... the globe for three decades.

    He developed a love for the works of Thomas Hardy, becoming something of an expert on them. He also identified strongly with the visionary eighteenth-century poet and painter William Blake. Later, in discussing Blake's art, he propounded an artistic ideal:

    Evans graduated from Southeastern in May 1950 with two degrees: bachelor of music with a piano major and bachelor of music education. In letters to his teachers years later, he expressed his deep appreciation of their patience, perseverance, and personal attention. Thirty years after he graduated, when he returned to play with his last trio, he told the audience that his last two years at the college had been the happiest of his life…”

The whole Chaper can be accessed at  http://www.nytimes.com/books/first/p/pettinger-evans.html

Kind regards,
Bill.