Performance Studies I

MUM100

Dr.Tim Ewers

Kaewalin Prasertchang

MA in Music Education

K0733740

Deadline Date: 29 February 2008

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Bill Evans and his influence on Jazz Music

The Jazz Pianist: Bill Evans

Jazz is one of the most popular music genres in the world. This kind of music is very

improvisational and so gives the musicians many freedoms in performance based on clear structure,

chord patterns and learned motif form other players (DeVeaux, 1991). Jazz music can be

transformed at anytime and in any place, therefore, because it is the kind of music where decisions

are made in the moment of performance by the musicians who played, despite structures being

clearly set, the detail is unpredictable (Witkin, 1998). Additionally, the very special issue that

makes jazz different is that jazz music can be mixed with other musical genres, for example, Rock

and Roll, Samba, Latin and Western Classical. Moreover, when look back to the history of jazz,

one can see that jazz has changed significantly in the past few decades and still develops and has the

improvement. Amount the many musicians that considered as an important person in jazz history,

Bill Evan is one of the most important pianist who created many things for jazz music.

Bill Evans and Jazz Music

According to Gridley (1978), while many suggest that most of the powerful innovators and

musicians in jazz history and jazz musicians were black, Bill Evans was one of the few white

musicians to be accepted in jazz history. For instance, in 1958 he worked with Miles Davis on the

album ‘Kind Of Blue’, which was very influential in terms of the development of a new kind of

jazz, modal jazz. Evans was the jazz pianist who had a considerable influence on jazz history. His

musical style has influenced many of jazz pianists as his rhythmic and harmonic conceptions are

combined with great expression. In this he played an important role in developing the style of

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improvisation and indeed some say that he was the first pianist to play modal jazz style (Huesman,

1991:282).

His style of improvisation and harmonization has been inspiration to jazz pianists as well as

the other jazz instrumentalists, such as the vibraphonist, Gary Burton. Indeed, it has been suggested

that “Evans is the father of them all” (Petrucciani as cited by Huesmann, 1991:284) and Chick

Corea, Keith Jarrett, Paul Bley, Steve Kuhn were all influenced by Evans. Therefore, many of his

characteristics appear in their works, for example moving inner voices, block chord melodies,

rhythmically reduced melodic lines, scalar passages-especially diminished scales-in thirds, and

poignant harmonies (Simpson, 2004). Many time that the later pianists re-harmonization’s Evan’s

composition and used their own harmonic structures that similar to the way that Evans used.

Bill Evans had a personality similar to a scientist who always thinking and creating.

Therefore, every time Evans played, he always thought and analyzed the musical line in his head.

As a result, things that reflect his personality can be seen through his performance. He always

played smooth chords when he improvised and he showed that it is not always important that the

solo has to be in a fast tempo (Prior, 2002). Normally, Evans was a pianist who played in slow

speed. He always presented his improvisation as the melodic line as well as presented a good

dynamic control, such as soft and loud. When he played a part of the accompaniment, he usually

played the comping chord style, called lock-handed, to support the soloist. The idea of lock-handed

harmonies is to choose the perfect tone of a complex note that would be appropriate to the

performance in order to get the sound that suspend and hold by the leading voice. (Pettinger, 1992)

Bill Evans and the Classical music background

Bill Evans started music lessons when he was six years old with his mother as his teacher.

Afterward, he got a music scholarship to study at Southeastern Louisiana College (now called

Southeastern Louisiana University) in Hammond, Louisiana and graduated in 1950 (Stevens, 2005).

Therefore, he had a classical music education, the techniques of which he used to form the melodic

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lines in his improvisations. Indeed, this background allowed him to investigate the depth in

tradition jazz music (Simpler, 2004). During a period when jazz was commonly becoming more

abstract like the modern jazz period, Evans also presents a structural balance connecting classical

music and jazz, from which he produced his own musical style. Gioia (1997) notes that Evans is

the musician who had an understanding of the music of late nineteenth century and early twentieth

century.

Besides, Evans was known as the impressionist jazz pianist because his chord voicing was

similar to the voicing in the impressionist classical pieces, and his style was influenced by many

impressionist composers, for instance Ravel, Debussy (Leilly, 1993). Evans always developed the

new chord and the strange intonation. “Evans was the main person responsible for reforming jazz

voicings on piano” (Simpson, 2004). As mentioned before that he had studied Western classical

music, it provides him with inspiration in his music. This classical training is evident in the album

‘Kind of Blue’ (1959), in which he worked with the world-reknown jazz musician, Miles Davis.

Evans played a role as the pianist in this band and demonstrated his pioneering melody line and

lyrical chord voicing.

Hence, this style perfectly complemented Miles Davis' goal of avoiding thickly, crowded

chorded passages by only focusing on melody. Evans also introduced the fundamental concepts of

classical technique and the harmonic background to Miles Davis (Niemack, 2004). These brought

the new concept of using the new scales in jazz music and expanding Miles Davis’s gratitude for

classical music. Finally, they both worked together and then established the modal form of jazz.

“I've sure learned a lot from Bill Evans. He plays the piano the way it should be played.” (Miles

Davis, in Pollard 2004, on ‘Everybody Digs Bill Evans’). He also learned much from the

partnership. Miles Davis wrote that:

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“Bill had this quiet fire that I loved on piano. The way he approached it, the sound he got

was like crystal notes or sparkling water cascading down from some clear waterfall.”

(Davis, 1989:226)

Modal Jazz

Fundamentally, Evans’s compositions were not in modal style, but he had come to represent

that style of playing because he provided the methods to Miles Davis (Niemack, 2004).

Nevertheless, there is some of his composition that used the concept of modal. The modal jazz is

one of the periods in jazz music history. Characteristically, a modal chord progression used in

modal jazz is created on an individual sound, in preference to how it relates to the prevailing

tonality. There are many musicians, such as Miles Davis and John Coltrane, play ideas from

outside of the rules of harmonic structure which create the perfectly interesting and stunning

dissonant chord sounds (Barret and Peplowski, 1998, as cited by Zack, 2002). Moreover, with this

kind of method, the result is the fewer chord changes that used with each chord held for a long

period of time. This also, allows time and the freedom for players to make melodic improvisations.

At this stage, Modal Jazz is to be considered as the progress of jazz musical style and the influence

on later period.

An example of modal jazz style is found in the significant composition ‘So What’, again

from the album ‘Kind of Blue’ (1959). The structure of this song is ‘AABA song form’ in which

section A is in D Dorian mode and then the music modulates a semitone up to E-flat Dorian for the

B section. This composition constitutes thirty two bars in total, sixteen bars of D Dorian (Section A

twice), followed by eight bars of E-flat Dorian (Section B) and ending with another eight bars of D

Dorian (Section A).

While D Dorian is similar to D minor seven chord (Dm7), it does not mean that it has the

function of the ii7 in the key of C Major, rather it is the I7 of the D Dorian Scale (Table1) (Pease

and Pullig, 2001). Similarly, the E-Flat Dorian is the I7 of the E-Flat Dorian Scale.

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Modal Scales 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8

D Dorian D E F G A B C D

E-Flat Dorian Eb F Gb Ab Bb C Db Eb

Table1: The Modal Scales

The piece ‘So What’ starts with a ‘call and response’ section between the piano and the

band, and this is followed by the melody played by the double bass. Throughout the piece, Bill

Evans used a two chord pattern repeated in each bar. Every bar it begins with the bass playing the

root of the chord. In section A, the voicing of the piano part consists of a pattern two chords in D

Dorian scale (Example 1) repeated 7 times with a bass melody played in between. The first chord

contains uses the 9th (E), 5th (A), 1st (D), 11th (G) and 13th (B) degrees of the scale (Table 2), which

resolves to the second which uses the 1st (D), 11th (G), 7th (C), 3rd (F) and 5th (A) degrees of the

scale.

Example 1: Davis, Miles ‘So What’ bb.21-24 in ‘Kind of blue: Score transcribed from the

recording’ Trans. by Roy DuBoff at el. (Milwaukee: Hal Leonard, No date) pp.5

Degree Scales 1 3 5 7 9 11 13

D Dorian D F A C E G B

Table 2: The chord change in D Dorian scale

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Similarly, in section B based on E-Flat Dorian scale (Example 2), the chord progression is

repeated in transpositions. The first chord contains uses the 9 th (F), 5th (Bb), 1st (Eb), 11th (Ab) and

13th (C) degrees of the scale (Table 3), which resolves to the second which uses the 1 st (Eb), 11th

(Ab), 7th (Db), 3rd (Gb) and 5th (Bb) degrees of the scale.

Example 2: Davis, Miles ‘So What’ bb.29-32 in ‘Kind of blue: Score transcribed from the

recording’ Trans. by Roy DuBoff at el. (Milwaukee: Hal Leonard, No date) pp.6

Degree Scales 1 3 5 7 9 11 13

E-Flat Dorian Eb Gb Bb Db F Ab C

Table 3: The chord change in E-Flat Dorian scale

While Gioia (1997) notes that past jazz pianists had only experimented chords built on

higher intervals. It means that to express the chord by spelling the chord, for instance the root, the

third, the fifth and the seventh. Evans experimented with new concept of comprehensive and

systematic chord voicing. He was the first person to develop the new style of 'rootless voicing' as

demonstrated in the example 1 and 2. This idea was influenced by the style of French impressionist

composer. In the rootless voicing technique, Evans played the chords by using the series of notes

that avoid the root of the chord, and then left it to the bass player, or to the left hand that played on

another beat of the measure (Simpson, 2004). The idea was to build the chord by used the ninth, the

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eleventh, and the thirteenth, which produced the more various sound and the tone colour. This

unstable emphasis of notes in the chord voicing with restrained use of the sustaining pedal

demonstrated a wider type of tone-colour than is usual in jazz piano. This concept of chord voicing

soon becomes widely used by the later jazz pianists.

Moreover in his solo (Example 3) Evans used dissonant chords and the lock-handed

technique rather than playing single melody notea. This ‘clusting’ is evidence of the uses of modal

jazz technique, ‘Clusters are voicings in which the prevailing interval between adjacent notes is a

second. (Pease and Pullig, 2001:93). Indeed it can be seen that he used clusters in most of his

sixteen bars solo.

Example 3: Davis, Miles ‘So What’ bb.245-252, 257-260 in ‘Kind of blue: Score transcribed from

the recording’ Trans. by Roy DuBoff at el. (Milwaukee: Hal Leonard, No date) pp.16-18

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In conclusion, Bill Evans was the person who led the way in the development of a

realistically jazz style. The most important issue was his completely characteristic approach to

harmony, in particular to the voicing or the way that notes in the chord are arranged. Presently, jazz

is dividing into many musical genres and still developed by the new generation of jazz musicians.

Even the traditional jazz style like bebop and blues is conserved by the musicians who interest and

love in this kind of music. Despite many changes in world music, jazz seems to remain as a stable

entity, and while it changes to a limited extent, some of the musical style was not up-to-date, but it

is still alive and present in every decade. As it were, Jazz music itself would not have been possible

developed without the involvement of him.

Word count: 2,107

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Bibliography by MHRA

- Berendt, Joachim E. The jazz book: from ragtime to fusion and beyond / Joachim E. Berendt

/ rev . - 6th ed. (Brooklyn, NY: Lawrence Hill Books, 1992)

- Davis, Miles with Quincy Troupe. Miles: the Autobiography (New York: Simon and

Schuster, 1989)

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Mark Vinci, Mark Davis and Josh Davis (Milwaukee: Hal Leonard, No date)

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Literature Forum, 25:3, Literature of Jazz Issue (1991), 525-560

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- Gridley, Mark C., Jazz styles (London: Prentice-Hall, 1978)

- Israels, Chuck, ‘Bill Evans (1929-1980): A Musical Memoir’ Musical Quarterly, 71:2

(1985), 109-115

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2004)

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Ensemble, Ed. by Michael Gold (Boston: Berklee Press, 2001)

- Pettinger, Peter, ‘Platform: Bill Evans, Poet. Peter Pettinger Declares His Enthusiasm for a

Great Jazz Pianist’, The Musical Times, 133:1790 (1992), 180

- Pollard, Scott, ‘Remembering Bill Evans’ (2004)

<http://www.allaboutjazz.com/php/article.php?id=14330> [Accessed Date 15 January 2008]

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http://www.billevanswebpages.com/prior.html> [Accessed Date 3 February 2008]

- Reilly, Jack, The Harmony of Bill Evans (New York: Unichrom, 1993)

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- Simpler, Kyle, ‘Bill Evans, The Pianist as an Artist’ (2004)

< http://www.allaboutjazz.com/php/article.php?id=1362> [Accessed Date 15 January 2008]

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< http://www.allaboutjazz.com/php/article.php?id=14599> [Accessed Date 15 January

2008]

- ‘So What’ – Published sheet music. In the Real Book I 5th edition. Miles Davis’s ‘Kind of

Blue’ (1959)

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< http://www.billevanswebpages.com/billbio.html> [Accessed Date 10 January 2008]

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