`Bill Evans’ influence on jazz
When people discuss the music of Bill Evans, there are several clichés that tend to come up about him and his playing. He is described as a player with a soft introverted sound, precise phrasing, well known for his classical impressionist influences, and harmonic sensibilities, which contributed to modal jazz. These attributes are clearly present in his playing, but were not absent from jazz music before his arrival, so I will try and examine why they have become so synonymous with him. Starting with the question of impressionism: the influence of western impressionist composers was already present in jazz, like in the music of Duke Ellington, who cited Debussy as a major compositional influence. However, this was part of Evans background as a classical musician, and so he drew inspiration more specifically from Debussy’s solo piano compositions, bringing the music away from big band and towards smaller ensembles. To this point, Evans introduced Miles Davis to composers such as Rachmaninoff, Ravel and Khachaturian. This led in part to the harmonic innovations made on Kind of Blue, which became the best-selling jazz album of all time.[1]
From a technical standpoint, pianists (myself included) revere Evans’ sound and phrasing. His touch is described as delicate and light, able to create very vivid colors out of the piano while playing chords, especially in ballads. This touch is certainly influenced by his classical training, but also reflects a wider musical decision to play with a lot of sentimentality and vulnerability. Even in faster tempos, his touch remains light, far removed from the more boisterous tones of Powell and Monk, though he does cite them as his influences, alongside Nat King Cole, Stan Getz and Lennie Tristano. This list of influences is present to me in his solo on “Love for Sale” on Kind of Blue. His phrasing and harmonic concepts come closer to the cooler sound of Tristano, notably his use of offbeat accents in his lines - his left hand comping comes closer to the bebop of Powell. This combined sophisticated sound is a clear influence on earlier performances of Hancock and Corea. Harmonically speaking, from a perspective that can ignore the boundaries of genre and think purely compositionally, Bill Evans offered several new harmonic concepts to the piano that influenced not only pianists but a wide array of musicians down the line - Evans is widely attributed to several chordal concepts such as quartal voicings and many variations of “rootless voicings” that let the bassist complete the chord, therein making the absolute most of the trio as an artistic framework.
I believe that for Bill Evans, just like Miles Davis and Art Blakey, the groups he was able to form are the most important part of his legacy and his influence. In the history of jazz playing with Bill Evans seems almost a rite of passage and some of the greatest trios ever assembled in this music may well be in his name. He granted all of his rhythm sections immortality through his music: Chuck Israels and Paul Motian, Scott LaFaro and Paul Motian, Eddie Gomez and Jack DeJohnette, etc… I found in an interview with Chuck Israels that he arranged much of the music in his trios carefully and treated the trio as seriously as one does an orchestra [2] - this reminds me very much of the approach of his contemporary Ahmad Jamal. Bill Evans’ vast contributions to piano, the jazz trio and to the pantheon of the greatest bands and jazz recordings ever will most certainly endure as long as this music continues to evolve.