Biography

Bill Evans was born on August 16, 1929 in Plainfield, New Jersey. His father was of Welsh descent, his mother was of Russian Orthodox background. His mother was an amateur pianist and gave Evans his first piano lessons at home as well as at her church. At the age of 6 he started classical piano training and later added flute and violin. At 12 he was able to fill in for his elder brother in Buddy Valentino's Jazz band. During the end of WWII and after the war, Evans played piano gigs in New York clubs. He graduated from Southeastern Louisiana University as a pianist in 1950, and later went to the Mannes College of Music, where he studied composition.

Bill Evans was hired by Miles Davis in 1958, as the only white musician in the all-star Miles Davis Sextet. It was a mutually beneficial collaboration and their album "Kind of Blue" is now one of the most referred to in Jazz. Their creative work is documented in The Miles Davis Story (2001). In 1959 Evans started his own trio with bassist Scott LaFaro and drummer Paul Motian which became one of the most acclaimed trios. Four albums recorded by that trio in 1959-61 are Jazz classics. Evans' innovative "Conversations with myself" won him his first Grammy award in 1963. He recorded several albums with trios, of which a nice trio gig at the 1968 Montreux Jazz Festival with Eddie Gomez and Jack DeJohnette won a Grammy. His lyrical piano solo album "Alone" won him another Grammy in 1968.

Bill Evans' legacy includes over a hundred recorded albums and concert performances. In his improvisations Evans shines as a brilliant inventor, as well as remarkable timekeeper and polyrhythmic player. On records he plays with authoritative presence, marked with refined nuances and accentuations. His mastery of impressionistic voicings comes with supreme clarity and with definitive phrasing in many of his deliciously intertwined counterpoint lines. Evans makes the right balance in various settings; solo, in a duo, in a trio, in a small ensemble, and with a big band. His original style stands on the solid foundation of classical heritage from Sergei Rachmaninoff, Maurice Ravel and Claude Debussy, to Erik Satie, Sergei Prokofiev and Igor Stravinsky, as he ingeniously included tiny bits of themes from these and other composers in his own improvisations.

Bill Evans' influence on modern music is growing as more musicians absorb his original ideas and study his music scores. The leading classical musicians, like Jean-Yves Thibaudet include compositions and arrangements by Bill Evans in their repertoire. Evans's inventive harmonization of all-so-familiar songs makes them sound fresh and tasty. His two recordings with Tony Bennett in 1975-77 are among the finest achievements of artistic interplay between singer and pianist, where two partners are improvising and stimulating each other's creativity and imagination. Musicians who played and recorded with Bill Evans often recognized him as the one who made the difference. His last trio recordings with the young Joe LaBarbera and Marc Johnson revealed even more of his unending creative and improvisational freedom.

He suffered from a drug addiction since his stint with the Miles Davis sextet in 1950s. He also suffered from hepatitis and had a perforated ulcer of the stomach. He died on September 15, 1980 in New York. Bill Evans is now considered one of the most influential pianists in the history of Jazz.