At 6 years old, Bill Evans (August 16, 1929 – September 15, 1980, full name William John Evans) started learning the piano. In 1979 he and his band (Marc Johnson on bass and Joe LaBarbera on drums) played at l’Espace Cardin in Paris on November 26th. The concert was recorded by Radio France / Yves Abiteboul, and the record mastered by Vlado Meller.
The Paris concert was released in two parts, both on vinyl with mastering done at Mastering at CBS DIS Computer System Columbia Studios, New York City. ‘ORTF Paris’ is erroneously stated as the place of recording on some editions.
The Paris Concert Two – A portal-like experience
The Paris Concert Edition Two has been one of two portal-like album opening the door to the world of jazz – the other being ‘Harmony of Difference’ by Kamasi Washington – for me. The record contains six tracks, four compositions by Bill Evans himself, one by Miles Davis (Nardis) and one by Gary MacFarland (Letter to Evan).
For some years, I’ve been looking for a (semi-rare) Japanese edition of album. It arrived a week ago express from Tokyo. It’s spinning now – and it’s everything I’d hoped for. I’d like to complete the collection with the US, Germany & Europe editions at some point in the future.
It’s one of the best live albums I’ve listened to.
Bill Evans Interview by Jim Aikin, Contemporary Keyboard 1980
Excerpts from an interview with Jim Aikin in ‘Contemporary Keyboard’, June 1980, printed on the back of the album cover of ‘The Paris Concert Two’.
Jim Aikin:
Why don’t you tell us a little bit about your new trio?
Bill Evans:
Yeah, that’s a happy subject. There was a lot of trauma when Eddie Gomez and Eliot Zigmund left almost simultaneously.
Eliot had been with the trio for three years, and he left first and Eddie a month or two later, and for the first time in eleven years I was faced with the prospect of reforming the entire trio.
In that time Eddie and I had gotten so many million things together that it was a very difficult thing to contemplate.
So for about a Philly Joe Jones played drums year with the trio, and there were five or six different bass players, all of whom did a very fine job on a professional level but who for one reason or another.
I felt that, as good as all of them were, I still didn’t get that feeling of real potential for growth. Then an old friend from college called me out of the blue and said,
“I hear you’re looking for a bass player. There’s a young man who is on the road with Woody (Herman), who I think has something very special that you would like”.
Jim Aikin:
And that was Marc Johnson?
Bill Evans:
Right. So Marc was calling me from the road, where as you know they’re in a different place every day, hoping that we could get together, but when he was nearby, or able to get free, I was away or something.
This went on for three or four months. Finally he was off in West Virginia for one night, and we were working at the Village Vanguard, and he called me and said he would come up and sit in, and I said, “Well, do you want to go through all that to sit in? That’s won- derful.” So he flew up, and before we even finished the first number, I got the feeling immediately that this was the guy.
Jim Aikin:
What was it that gave you that feeling?
Bill Evans:
I don’t know how to explain what those decisions are based on. It’s a lot of experience, and realizing how a guy approaches things and how he sounds, and all that, I’ll tell you the truth—there were guys that worked with the trio that were better professional bass players than Marc was when he first came with the trio, but none of them indicated to me that they had the potential that he had for this music.
And this has proven to be true to an even greater degree than I thought. He came in playing more than competently, just beautifully as far as was concerned, but he has been progressing at a fantastic rate. In fact, it scares me sometimes, the rate that he’s progressing.
Jim Aikin:
What about finding a drummer
Bill Evans:
Marc [Johnson] came into the trio about six months before Philly Joe left, and we had some magnificent times with that trio.
When Philly Joe left, after a Japanese tour we did, I was again looking for a drummer. I rely a lot on peer opinion. With Marc I relied on my tcollege friend because he made a speacial effort to communicate with me, and in the same way I’m friendly with (guitarist) Joe Puma, we both like to go to the harness races once in a while, and I value his opinion about musicians.
Joe said, “I hope you don’t take this guy away from me, but as far as I’m concerned, Joe LaBarbera is the drummer who always does the right thing at the right time.”
So I had Joe come down and sit in at the Vanguard, and he attracted me very much the same way. I was afraid he might not want to make the gig, because he was getting a lot of studio work, and I didn’t know whether he wanted to travel.
But since then I’ve found that he’s very dedicated to playing quality music, and he’s willing to make the concessions of travel and the concessions of dues toward that end. And he also turned out to be not only as much as I expected, but much more.
He’s really a top soloist, and as Joe Puma said, he does the right thing at the right time. When you expect him to switch to sticks, or go to another thing, or the dynamic thing, or whatever, he’s doing it.
Jim Aikin:
How would you compare your current trio to the first trio with Scott LaFaro and Paul Motan?
Bill Evans:
This trio (with Marc Johnson & Joe LaBarbera) is very much connected to the first trio … You can put three musicians together that you predict will make it work, and it will fall right on its face.
It’s very difficult to find the right chemistry. It’s almost karmic. And I feel that the trio I have now is karmic, in that the whole thing had to evolve the way it did through a year of very hard searching and trauma, going through bass players and so forth. Which is difficult with the kind of music I play.
I believe in a steady group. In Believe in a group where the people are right for the group, where they believe in the music and they’re responsible, and you stay together. That way, the music grows in ways that you don’t even realize. This is a firm and deep belief of mine, and consequently the people that have been with me for fairly long periods.”
From Château de Sceau to Frederiksberg, Denmark
On the front-page of the album there’s a photo taken by Eric Hartman featuring a mirror dam in the park surrounding Château De Sceaux. It’s unclear to me if the person seen in the low left-hand corner is Bill Evans. There’s light and darkness – and a narrowing path of reflective water.
This photo was an inspiration for my photo from the ‘Gardens of the Royal Danish Horticultural Society‘.
What were Evans’ last live concerts?
‘The Paris Concert’ releases of the concert in Paris in 1979 seems to be the antepenultimate live recording that were to be published later. The penultimate a 1980 recording from Molde Jazz Festival in Norway – and the last recordings are from the Keystone Corner in San Francisco recorded between August 31st and September 7th, some of which are found on the ‘The Bill Evans Trio – Consecration II – Last’ album.
From Burt Korall’s introduction to ‘The Paris Concert Two’
Bill Evans was – and remains – very special to me. The reasons for this promptly come to mind. He hated chaos; structure and coherence were foremost Evans’ concern. He had to know exactly what he was doing and why. At the same time, he loved freedom – with certain restraints -and welcomed new musical experiences. He relished economy. He gave 100% of himself tom music, regardless of what was going on in his life.
[…]
Evans, the pianist and composer, sought to create beauty and explore and reveal what was best about us, without being overly sentimental, or becoming too flashy or “hard”, technically. He was a romanticist who swung and moved in a manner that suited him. Over the years he progressed from a shy, introverted man and musician to a person who knew his true place in the world and at the piano.
[..]
At the time of his death in 1980, Evans was in the midst of a highly creative period, with colleagues – Marc Johnson, bass and Joe LaBarbera drums- he felt were the most formidable he had had since the ground-braking trio, featuring Scott LaFaro and rummer Paul Motion, in the early 1960s.
[..]
The music the trio made was simultaneously strong and lyrical – a matter of three musicians freely giving and taking. For two years – from 1978 until Evans’ death in 1980 – the trio constantly improved. They sensed the great possibility of a continuing relationship.
[..]
“They were three of the most excited people you ever saw,” Helen Keane, Evans’ longtime manager, remembers. “Particularly when we were recording, Bill, Marc and Joe couldn’t wait to hear what had been done. The sensitivity they had, one for the other, kept the music fresh. It was a marvelous time, musically for Bill.”.
[..]
The music you’re about to hear came as something of a surprise to me. I hadn’t heard Evans for a while before he dies. And I tended to think in terms of the Bill Evans I knew years ago. So the open quality of the performances, the unusual energy and percussiveness in particular, seemed uncharacteristic.
[..]
But as I listened it became apparent that Bill had changed without tampering with the core of his playing personality. His basic sound, the harmonic adventure and manner of dealing with rhythms, the melodic focus of his work, were not affected. Only the energy level was heightened. And he seemed more immediately accessible – though extended listening revealed he was more experimental than ever.
Intellectual ownership
The Paris Concert Edition II was released as part of Elektra’s the Jazz Masters Edition series with a 1984 copyright for Elektra/Asylum Records in the United States and WEA International Inc for the world outside of the US. The Paris Concert Edition One was released the year before.
Tracks on the Japanese release
Side one:
Re: Person I knew (Bill Evans) – 5:01.
Gary’s Theme (Garry MarFland) – 5:12
Letter to Evan (Bill Evans) – 3:34
34 Skidoo (Bill Evans) – 6:30
Side two:
Laurie (Bill Evans) – 7:50
Nardis (Miles Daves) – 16:58
The inlay with Japanese writing has the date ‘1984.4.27’ in the lower right-hand corner. The top right-hand corner reads ‘P-11460’.
Streaming options
Both Paris I & Paris 2 er available on Qobuz and Tidal. On Tidal it’s erroneously stated that the concert took place at ORFT. The content that make up both albums is all from l’Espace Cardin and recorded on the 26th of 1979.
“The Big Love, Life & Death with Bill Evans”
To add context to the album, I’ve compiled quotes from Laurie Verchomin’s book ‘The Big Love, Life & Death with Bill Evans’, which is a series of diary entries inspired by Anaïs Nin’s diaries, published in August 2010.
—
New York City, September 15, 1980 – The Big Love
“Nobody showed me the body. For ywares afterward, I [Laurie] would dream that Bill [Evans] wasn’t acutally dead, but had planned some kind
of escape. That’s why it’s so easy for us to continue our relationship because he isnørt really dead to me.
Not really.
Not at all.
I never left and he is internal.”
—
New York City, July 1978
“I [Laurie] book my room for two weeks; the bill comes to $310 American. We despoti our bags in our respective rooms and head out into the night. The asphalt junle, all-night diners at last, disco clbus, gay people, 24-hour corner stores, street lights. The pavement seems to heave and buckle under my feet. It’s the ripple effect of this highly charged atmosphere. I am being ripped out of my arid prairie mind and sucked into the cultural vortex known as New York City.”
—
New York City, May 1979
”This is Donny Hathaway and Roberta Flak,” he says. “There’s one track on here that I’ve been listening a lot of lately. It’s called For All We Know.”
We listen in silence together, Bill seated at the piano, me still reclining on the sofa.
At the end of the song, Bill lifts the needle off the record and begins to tell the story os his brother Harry’s battle with schizophrenia, about the hours spent listening to his paranoid ranting about the nature of the universe. How re really wanted to believe that Harry was just ahead of his time, onto something the rest of the world didn’t understand yet.
—
Village Vanguard, New York, December 1979
“Bill emerges from the men’s room at the back of the [Village] Vanguard, follows the red line taped to the floor of the hallway, past the staff lockers and the entrances to the kitchen. He slides past the crowd in the darkened room up onto the stage and seats himself at the piano. Marc & Joe are waiting for him to begin the intro. The crowd reflects this serious demeanor by lowering their own heads — wiating for the transmission to begin.”
—
I have one dark dress, which I want to wear at Bill’s funeral. An antique navy blue chiffon piece from the 1940’s, which requires a slip, which I don’t have. I’m staying at Linda Goldstein’s and I beg her for a slip. Reluctantly she gives it over to me. Her only one.
Q: When did Bill Evans & Laurie Verchomin meet?
A: Bill Evans & Laurie Verchomin met in April, 1979 in Laurie’s hometown Edmonton.
Also see:
Copenhagen Photographer, Kasper Bergholt