It is hard to believe, but Keith Shadwick's Everything Happens To Me -- A Musical Biography is only the second whole-book biography of Bill Evans, who is to jazz piano what the Beatles were to rock 'n 'roll bands. Evans' emergence in the late 1950's marked the arrival of modern jazz piano as we think of it today. Without Bill Evans, there would likely have still been Herbie Hancock, Keith Jarrett, McCoy Tyner, Chick Corea, and many others. But fuck me if we can guess what they'd sound like if they didn't have Bill Evans as a catalyzing stylist.

The drawback to being such an actualized agent of a style is that you become the figurehead of stereotype and even parody. Remember the "bug music" episode of The Flintstones, where a few caterwauled "Yeah Yeah Yeah"s get across the idea that this is Beatle music? The Beatles became widely imitated and at the same time were reduced to a cliche, irregardless of the value of their work.

Words like "poetic," "impressionistic" and "introspective" were the Bug Music albatrosses hung around Bill Evans' neck. The Ravellian chord voicings, the slow-simmer quality of his best trio improvisations -- that shit is all there and well-represented in his catalogue. And it's amazing, emotionally charged music. But Evans burst onto the scene in full force back in 1957 as part of a sort of "new innovative jazz composition" record date, where he played a solo on George Russell's "All About Rosie" that was so incendiary, mercurial, and overtly swinging that his arrival was not a cause for debate when the record came out. Rather, "Rosie" was heralded as the arrival of a major new voice in jazz piano. Before long, Evans was invited to join the Miles Davis Sextet, which resulted in arguably Miles' best-loved album, Kind of Blue, which Miles admitted was shaped around the more contemplative aspects of Evans' playing. And Kind of Blue was such a watershed that it colored much of the jazz public's perception of Bill Evans. During this time of triumph, Evans met that strange combination of critical acclaim, hassles for being the only white guy in the band, and exhaustive travel. The combination led Evans to the other albatross that stayed with him throughout his life, save for a few years in the seventies -- heroin.

In 1959, Evans formed his first standing trio, with two brilliant players up to the challenge -- drummer Paul Motian and bassist Scott LaFaro. LaFaro was a revelation. No bassist had ever erupted on the scene with such blinding virtuosity. Perfect. Evans' concept of a trio was not the usual "bass and drums back the piano," but rather a three-sided conversation where the interactive elements of jazz were pushed to the fore of the music. Despite the effects of heroin on pretty much every other aspect of his life, his music flowered. The group did two studio LP's, a bootleg of the trio playing Birdland, two "official live" LP's from a run at the Village Vanguard, and a third of outtakes from that same engagement. The Vanguard LPs were a shot heard 'round the world for jazz pianists and bassists. Unfortunately, LaFaro wasn't around to hear it. He died in a car accident within weeks of the engagement. The work of that trio became the yardstick by which everything Evans would ever do was measured.

Keith Shadwick, himself a musician, has written a bio that centers on the music. He reports on other stuff, but only because it affects the music. Neither this book nor the other Evans bio, How My Heart Sings, by Peter Pettinger, is huge on the personal aspects of Evans' life. So far the best reportage on that is to be found in Gene Lees' brilliant Meet Me At Jim & Andy's: Jazz Musicians And Their World. Pettinger's book missed the mark. If you were enough of a fan to go to the library, you'd read almost all his source material. Shadwick, however, goes above and beyond.

There are two usual tendencies in biographies of genius dead guys. The first is to make them out to be heroes even when you're reporting on fucked up shit they did to other people. The other -- the Albert Goldman school -- is to vilify, vilify, vilify. Shadwick is detached but very humane. He does not make excuses for Evans' drug consumption, nor does he try to excuse some of Evans' weaker efforts as being somehow valuable as cathartic journals of the horrors of drug addiction (the way that horrible Charlie Parker take of "Lover Man," where he's so messed up he can barely get through the tune, has been adoringly mythologized by the sort of politically correct critic who loves painting geniuses as victims).

Very rarely has a subject as impressive as Evans been dealt such an even-handed analysis. For instance, LaFaro's replacement, Chuck Israels, has generally gotten his ass kicked for not being Scott LaFaro. The conventional wisdom is that Evans' trio was great with LaFaro, and wasn't great again until 1966, when Eddie Gomez replaced Israels. The recorded evidence suggests otherwise, and, for the first in-depth time I've ever seen, so does a critic.

But Shadwick makes his points so well and with such empathy that it makes it all the more objectionable when he says things that I would never say. His unkind words about Larry Bunker's drumming in Evans' mid-sixties trio are cause for a fistfight. Of the albums Evans cut with LaFaro and Motian, Explorations is the one that changed my way of looking at music. Shadwick finds it substandard by the standards of that group.

On the other hand, Shadwick strips away a few layers of long-standing mythology and dares mention Evans' fall from universal critical favor during the sixties, going so far as to quote New York Times jazz crit John S. Wilson, a man with no talent except that he could trash more great musicians in print than just about anyone else in the profession. His reviews of Dave Brubeck are classics of misanthropy, right alongside Mein Kampf. We also get to read Cecil Taylor saying unkind things about Evans. Granted, Evans was no longer the force of change he had once had been, but respect is respect.

In the seventies, Evans was regaining momentum in a way that he had managed to avoid through the previous decade, not that the sixties were an infertile time for him. But that he managed to get off heroin and onto methadone certainly helped matters. He would barely make it into the eighties, dying on September 15, 1980, largely from what cocaine had managed to do to him in the last couple years of his life, just as he found his way to a creative spell and a new trio -- with bassist Marc Johnson and drummer Joe LaBarbera -- that found him on the high creative precipice that characterized his first trio.

Shadwick stays away from obvious pathos. He avoids painting Bill Evans as anything other than a musician. He makes no excuses. He analyzes the music without being cold or mathletic. Granted, this is not the in-depth personal bio of Bill Evans that some of us have been waiting for. But it's such a comprehensive look into the music and the factors around it that it will do handsomely. Shadwick has told the story with impartiality and dignity, in an engaging writing style that's crisp and smart without being clever or self-congratulatory. This belongs on the bookshelf of anyone with more than a passing interest in jazz.

(C) 2002 - Skip Heller

Painting at bottom of article by Franz Barutti, 1994.