Keeping Time with Bill Evans

By: Joseph Vella at http://www.huffingtonpost.com/joseph-vella 

Posted: 10/5/11 01:25 PM ET

I feel fortunate to be old enough to have grown up in a time where listening to the radio and buying albums was one of the activities you looked forward to. Each week my friends and I ventured into San Francisco and hit the Tower Records store on Columbia and Bay Street with hopes of buying a hot new record... or cassette or 8 track... whichever we could afford. We combed through the new release shelves, which were front and center, then checked out our favorite artists' albums and finally, went through the discounted cut-out bins (remember those?). One such Saturday, I stumbled upon a cut-out priced Bill Evans Trio cassette tape entitled You Must Believe in Spring. Although I didn't make a habit of buying cassettes, I did purchase this tape because it was a new release that I had heard a lot on the radio. It was also the first Bill Evans Trio album released after the pianist's death and featured bassist Eddie Gomez and drummer Eliot Zigmund... and it was only $3.99.
You Must Believe in Spring turned out to be a keeper and one of my all-time favorite Bill Evans Trio albums and one that I still return to for enjoyment and inspiration. It always works. I recently played the album after not having heard it for some time, and it again just floored me. What an amazing work and what a brilliant trio. I thought it would be cool to explore this album in a greater context and interview one of the remaining trio members and see if this session was as special to him as it was to me and hopefully you. So I reached out to the great drummer Eliot Zigmund who graciously agreed to discuss this work as well as his distinct approach to jazz drumming. Enjoy this behind the scenes look at one of the greatest trios and recordings in jazz history.
Tell us about your approach to drumming?
Eliot Zigmund (EZ): My approach to the drum set from day one was to play with whatever was going on around me and find ways to play. I always had a real good light touch from the beginning. I learned to play brushes very early and intensely when I first started playing because I only had a snare drum and then a snare drum and a hi-hat. For long periods at a time I only worked with a snare drum and hi-hat and then a bass drum and then finally a ride cymbal and eventually a couple of toms. My parents bought me my drum set one piece at a time. My technique was secondary and I never thought of myself as a virtuoso drummer. I always saw myself as part of the team. As a supportive player, I tried to be as expressive as possible. I've felt my role as a drummer was as a team player to enhance, any way possible, what was going on around me. The difference in a trio and a bigger group is the communication between the players because they don't have to function as just a rhythm section. The relationship becomes a little more intimate. There's things that can be assumed or omitted and there's greater potential for abstraction.
How did you approach drumming with Bill's trio?
EZ: I was very influenced by the music that was going on around me particularly Tony Williams and Jack DeJohnette. There was basically a revolution in drumming going on at that point. I really liked the way Jack had played with Bill. He was very abstract, used colors a lot. So I was thinking that way musically at that time and tried to bring a lot of color and expressiveness. I was just trying to give Bill and Eddie what I worked in that context.

Tell us about the session for You Must Believe in Spring (1977)?
EZ: It was a very positive session and that is a great record. We had a lot of great performances with that band. When the band was happening and the acoustics and conditions were right, that band played well a lot of the time. We were just very lucky to capture one of those performances on record because a lot of times that magic may or may not happen to that degree on a record. You're kind of lucky when it does. There's actually a bootleg from that period in Europe of a live concert (Bill Evans - In His Own Way) where the band plays great and in a little bit of a looser fashion but with the same types of nuances but with a little more swing because it was a live performance . I think we had a very high level when it was happening and it was also compared a lot to Bill's first trio.
Is there a specific track that holds a special meaning to you?
EZ: The whole record is special but I didn't like that Warner Bros. added those three extra tracks when they reissued the album ("Without A Song," "Freddie Freeloader," "All of You"). That was a complete mistake and Bill definitely didn't want them on the record. One of the great things about the record was Tommy LiPuma was a great producer and he really had an ear to what was happening. We never played most of that music before so it was really fresh but yet we knew how to play together really well and we were excited to record. The album is unique and there are moments in all of it. It's just one of those records that almost sounds composed in a way. The whole thing is kind of a suite and that really gets me. We also got lucky because the trio played great and you don't always capture that in the studio. If it's not the right vibe, the right piano, the right producer... there are so many elements that go into it. Everything was just right for this recording and everybody was feeling pretty good.
Tell us about the chemistry between you and Eddie Gomez?
EZ: We really dug playing together. We did have something special and we were a good match at that point. He had a certain unique way of playing and I was trying to accommodate him too. Eddie and Bill were big stars in my eyes and people I had been listening to for years and I certainly felt like the low man on the totem pole in that band.
Can you share your reflections of Bill?
I see Bill as a 20th century equivalent to Mozart. He had that kind of genius and that kind of ear, that kind of ability to sit at the piano for 40 minutes and make an incredible arrangement of a standard tune that would stick in your mind for the next 40 years! He had that kind of talent and it was incredible. And the older I get the more aware I am of it. My fondest hope would be to go back now and play with Bill Evans and really give him what I think he was looking for and I am frustrated that I can't. I feel now that I understand much more of what he was looking for in a drummer and what he was trying to achieve and I think I could do these things now that would help him more than I did back then.

Tribute Recordings On Bill Evans - Part Seven

Manuel Rocheman
The Touch Of Your Lips: Tribute To Bill Evans

By System Records

Manuel Rocheman is one of France’s finest jazz pianists and his latest CD honours the hugely influential Bill Evans who passed away in 1980. However it’s clear from the outset of this recording that Rocheman is never seeking to imitate and instead aims to evoke all the music that Evans has inspired within him.
Bill Evans’ favoured context was, of course, the piano trio where interaction with the rhythm section was paramount. It’s fitting, therefore, that Rocheman is joined by two very creative musicians on this recording - bassist Mathias Allamane and drummer Matthieu Chazarenc. Like Evans, Rocheman places a great deal of value on the interpretation of standards and performs a highly personal take on the title track, a tune immortalized by his predecessor. Also included are two originals by Evans, Johnny Mandel’s “Theme from M.A.S.H.” (from Evans’ “You Must Believe in Spring” album) and four new compositions from Rocheman himself.


By C. Michael Bailey

The French Naive record label, long known for its fine releases of classical music—particularly its ongoing Vivaldi Opera project—has initiated a jazz stream, highlighting French jazz talent, including pianist Manuel Rocheman's The Touch of Your Lips: Tribute to Bill Evans. It is somehow fitting that a tribute to America's last great pioneer in jazz piano (apologies to Cecil Taylor) comes from the land of the Impressionists. Bill Evans, more than any other pianist—notJohn Lewis, not Jacques Loussier, not even the great Art Tatum—elevated jazz piano to a chamber art. His music, particularly that performed close to his 1980 death, was characterized by a fragile intensity, a phenomenon so friable, that the pianist's performance threatened to dissolve at any moment, like a smoke ring in the wind.
Rocheman, in his tribute, adds a quickening support to Evans' art like scaffolding buttressing an ancient sculpture that better allows for the ethereal to gain substance, to be seen and heard. Few pianists could pull off the high-wire act that was Bill Evans, and Rocheman does not even attempt to. Instead, he provides definition, darkening the lines of Evans' thought, making a clearer picture. The Johnny Mandel melody of "Suicide is Painless," from the 1970 movie M*A*S*H, demonstrates Evans' visions in its Red Garlandblock chords and modern bass-drums support. Here, Rocheman solos confidently, with tart punctuation and comment on the higher harmony of the composition.
The Evans' composition "We Will Meet Again" from the pianist's last studio recording of the same title (Warner Brothers, 1979), offers the scent of Evans' 1961 Village Vanguard trio inMathias Allamane's bass solo. Allamane surfaces from the impressionistic somnolence with a musing, flat in tone that takes off on the perpendicular to Rochemann's direction. This is the most potent presence of the spirit of Scott LaFaro on the disc, one that is gratefully not overplayed. "Daniel's Waltz" lilts with a swinging ferocity that does not draw attention abruptly; rather, revealing itself like an intellectual connection being made, when things become clearer.
Bill Evans is justly a hard musical target. His influence is like an apparition barely seen but registered nevertheless. Rocheman and his trio turn up the musical sensitivity on Evans so that he may been seen with greater clarity without losing any of the mystery that was that pianist's certain specialty.
Track Listing: 

M.A.S.H; Send in the Clowns; We Will Meet Again; Daniel's Waltz; For Sandra; Only Child; Rhythm Changes; The Touch of Your Lips; La Valse Des Chipirons; Liebeslied.
Personnel: 

Manuel rocheman: piano; Mathias Allamane: bass; Matthieu Chasarenc: drums.