Bill Evans doubted his own talent before helping make Kind of Blue
Bill Evans first learned piano by copying what he overheard during his older brother's lessons. Years later, after Army critics shook his confidence, he spent a year alone practising because he felt he lacked other players' natural ease. His first album sold 800 copies; within three years he was on the best-selling jazz record ever made.
Evans was born in Plainfield, New Jersey, on August 16, 1929. His father drank, gambled and was abusive, so his mother often took the boys to relatives nearby, where his brother Harry started lessons. Bill, judged too young, simply imitated what he heard and began formal study at six. Violin, flute and piccolo followed and were dropped, though they may have shaped his keyboard touch. By 13 he was filling in for a sick pianist in a rehearsal band, and soon earned a dollar an hour playing polkas and boogie-woogie at New Jersey weddings.
He took a flute scholarship to Southeastern Louisiana College, called his last three years there the happiest of his life, and wrote his first tunes. Drafted in 1951, he played in an Army band for three years, but the posting was traumatic; criticism of his playing left him with nightmares and, for the first time, self-doubt. Around 1953 he wrote Waltz for Debby for his little niece. After discharge he moved back with his parents, bought a grand piano and drilled his technique for a year.
Back in New York from 1955 he studied composition, played weddings and dances, and met the theorist George Russell, whose ideas about the Lydian mode fed into modal jazz. A producer who heard a demo over the phone signed him, and his 1956 debut earned good reviews but minimal sales. In 1958 Miles Davis hired him, and in 1959 the sextet recorded Kind of Blue.
Leaving Davis late that year, Evans started his own trio, with Paul Motian on drums and Scott LaFaro on bass, a group now seen as a landmark group, and recorded its celebrated Village Vanguard sets in 1961. LaFaro was killed in a car crash ten days later, and Evans stayed off stage for months. He returned to win a Grammy for Conversations with Myself, a solo album built by overdubbing, and ultimately earned seven Grammys from 31 nominations before his death in 1980.
Source: Bill Evans
