On June 25,
1961, the Bill Evans Trio recorded the concerts that would become the albums Sunday Night at the Village Vanguard and Waltz for Debby, two of the defining albums in jazz piano
history, both held in the same high regard as Jarrett’s The Köln Concert.
On the two albums the trio is a fully wedded, integrated unit, not a leader plus sidemen. All three musicians play in and around each other, fully entwined in each other’s performance. Eleven days later bassist Scott LaFaro was killed in a car crash.
The recordings and
the death of LaFaro, happening so closely together are the launchpad for Owen
Martell’s novel about Evans’ lost weekend, the period during which he dropped
out of sight and grieved for his friend. Evans is described as ‘shocked and numbed’
at the death and is reported to have ‘wandered round New York City wearing some
of Scott’s clothes’.
The novel is told
through the eyes of Evans’ brother, Harry, and his mother, Mary, and father,
Harry Sr, and, at the end, Evans himself. For most of the novel Evans is a
passive, melancholy presence at the centre whilst others are the characters taking
care of him. It is only in the last few pages, when we hear his own voice, that
he starts to rise up from his despair.
We first see Evans
as, on hearing the news of the crash, Harry seeks him out. Harry describes him
at this point as gaunt, “like something cadaverous, eaten” in clothes two sizes
too big for him. "He was an odd looking brother", Harry thought. Eventually the
wanderings bring them to the Village Vanguard; Max Roach is playing, "Poor
souls," Harry thought, "these jazzmen called to improvise on tunes they could play but
couldn’t hum".
Harry takes him home
but Bill is there in body "but elsewhere in spirit". Even Debby, (Yes, that
Debby), Harry’s young daughter senses that something isn’t right with Uncle
Bill. She starts to draw him out but by now Evans has overstayed his welcome
and Harry is annoyed at his brother’s sneaking out to score.
Bill is sent to his
parents in Florida and falls back into the dependency of childhood in his
mother’s presence. Communication is still an issue but Harry Sr. ignores the
obstacle and simply pulls Bill into his life of golf, the bar and talks about
‘man’ things, ‘sport and TV, politics and weather’. Bill says nothing but Harry
decides that ‘He will talk for two and in that way help Bill out’.
One day the postman brings a letter from the record company about the new album and that night his parents lie in bed and hear Bill playing piano again. Soon after, on his journey back to New York, he finds he has ‘half a tune in his head which he can’t quite bring to his lips’, but ‘he can only take it so far … it is the expression of a defective mechanism, mind and body and soul, bound together in hapless unbeknowing’.
This isn’t a simple story arc from despair to recovery,
though, there is a glimmer of something when Bill and Paul Motian, the drummer
in the Trio, meet with Chuck Israels and the next chapter in Evans’ musical
life can begin.
Owen Martell gives us
three sketches of Evans during this period but he still remains an enigma. The
simplicity of the writing, the absence of speech marks, indeed, the brevity of
the novel (162 pages) itself serve to emphasise this. This is a novel not a
biography (go to the excellent Bill Evans: How My Heart Sings by Peter
Pettinger for that). Conversations and characters’ thoughts are the
imagined flesh on the historical bones and the mood reflects the Trio’s music
as much as the events.
Martell is a bit of
an enigma himself. Intermission was his third novel and his
first in English. He grew up in Pontneddfechan in South Wales and his only
connection to the story seems to be that Harry Sr. was descended from Welsh
immigrants to the US. At one point he bemoans the fact that the Irish uprising
of 1916 wasn’t exported over to Wales.
One for Evans
devotees? Then yes, I would count myself among that number, indeed Bill Evans
was the first jazz artist that I got into. I bought A Kind of Blue because
he was on it.
Dave Sayer
Owen Martell - Intermission (Heinemann 2013. ISBN: 9780099558828)
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