Fifty-five albums across twenty-four years: from the Riverside debut that almost nobody heard through the Village Vanguard recordings that changed jazz piano forever, the Verve experiments, the long Fantasy and Warner Bros. years with Eddie Gomez, and the devastating final recordings at the Keystone Korner eleven days before his death.
Each era page covers a distinct period in Evans's career, with full reviews, personnel details, Apple Music audio previews, and album art for every record.
The near-invisible debut, the breakthrough of Everybody Digs Bill Evans, the revolutionary trio with Scott LaFaro and Paul Motian, the Village Vanguard sessions recorded ten days before LaFaro's death, and the duo masterpieces with Bob Brookmeyer and Jim Hall.
Creed Taylor's Verve productions: the multi-tracked Conversations with Myself, the Claus Ogerman orchestral sessions, the duo with Jim Hall, the trio with Chuck Israels and Larry Bunker, the Montreux triumph, and the arrival of Eddie Gomez.
The Fender Rhodes experiments, the Grammy-winning Bill Evans Album, the George Russell orchestra session, the Tokyo concert, the Symbiosis concerto with Ogerman, the all-star Quintessence quintet, and the duos with Tony Bennett and Eddie Gomez.
The Warner Bros. sessions with the Konitz/Marsh frontline, You Must Believe in Spring, the Affinity album with Toots Thielemans, the last studio date, the Paris concert with the final trio, and the Keystone Korner recordings on Milestone and Timeless from days before Evans's death.
William John Evans was born in Plainfield, New Jersey in 1929 and grew up in a musical household: his father ran a golf course, his mother was of Welsh and Ukrainian descent, and both parents encouraged his early piano studies. He studied at Southeastern Louisiana University, where he was one of the few white students playing jazz on campus, and later earned a graduate degree in composition from the Mannes School of Music in New York. He served in the Army from 1951 to 1954, stationed at Fort Sheridan near Chicago, where he played in the Fifth Army Band and began sitting in at local clubs.
After his discharge Evans worked steadily in New York, recording his debut New Jazz Conceptions for Riverside in 1956. The album sold fewer than eight hundred copies in its first year but caught the attention of Miles Davis, who invited Evans to join his sextet in 1958. The eight months Evans spent with Davis shaped the sound of Kind of Blue, recorded in 1959, and transformed Evans's own conception of the trio format. The Riverside recordings with Scott LaFaro and Paul Motian from 1959 to 1961, particularly Portrait in Jazz, Explorations, Sunday at the Village Vanguard, and Waltz for Debby, are the foundation documents of modern jazz piano trio playing.
LaFaro's death in an automobile accident on July 6, 1961, ten days after the Village Vanguard sessions, left Evans devastated. He did not record for nearly a year. When he returned, it was with a series of trios featuring Chuck Israels and later Eddie Gomez on bass, and a body of work on Verve, Fantasy, and Warner Bros. that sustained his reputation across two more decades. The Verve years produced the overdubbed solo experiments, the orchestral sessions with Claus Ogerman, and the Grammy-winning Montreux performance. The Fantasy years added the George Russell collaboration, the Symbiosis concerto, and the all-star Quintessence session. The Warner Bros. period introduced the final trio with Marc Johnson and Joe LaBarbera, whose music is documented in the Paris concert recordings and the exhaustive Keystone Korner box sets.
Evans struggled with drug addiction for most of his adult life, and by 1980 his health had deteriorated severely. He played a final nine-night residency at the Keystone Korner in San Francisco beginning August 31, 1980, then returned to New York, where he died on September 15 at the age of fifty-one. He won seven Grammy Awards during his lifetime and two more posthumously. The Complete Village Vanguard Recordings box set, released in 2005, confirmed what working musicians had known for decades: that the trio with LaFaro and Motian had changed the vocabulary of jazz as decisively as any small group in the music's history.