Bill Evans: How My Heart Sings, by Peter Pettinger Yale, 346pp, £19.95 in UK
All of us have defining moments in our lives, moments when we first meet someone who is to profoundly influence us or become an inextricable part of our existence, or when we first see or read or hear something that will alter forever the way we will look or read or listen in the future.
From my early infatuation with the arts I can recall four such moments with great clarity: going along to the Fine Arts cinema club in Busaras at the age of sixteen and seeing Francois Truffaut's Les Quatre Cents Coups; discovering in Rathmines public library a year later both Ford Madox Ford's The Good Soldier and Kenneth Tynan's Curtains; and, a few years after that, in a southside bed-sit, hearing Bill Evans playing the opening chords of "Flamenco Sketches", the last track on Kind of Blue.
That classic album was first released in 1959 and it was very much Miles Davis's Kind of Blue (it said so on the record sleeve), but for me, right from the outset, it was Bill Evans's Kind of Blue - those stately and subtly insistent modal chords, as if Debussy had reincarnated himself in mid-century American jazz, provided the framework from which Miles and Coltrane and Adderley were enabled to take flight with such effortless ease.
I didn't know anything about Evans then - not even that he was a white man enlisted, against protests, by Davis into an otherwise black ensemble - and until I read Philip Pettinger's lucid and sympathetic biography, I had learned little more, beyond that he was a middle class, classically trained pianist from New Jersey who became a junkie in his 20s and who died in 1980 at the age of 51.
I had come to know the music, of course, especially those legendary trio sessions (with bassist Scott LaFaro and drummer Paul Motian) at New York's Village Vanguard in 1961, which resulted in two of the loveliest albums in all of jazz, Sunday at the Village Vanguard and Waltz for Debby.
There were other notable early recordings too - Everybody Digs Bill Evans (1958), Portrait in Jazz (1959), Explorations (1961), Undercurrent (1962) - as well as some arresting later solo albums and a fine collaboration with Tony Bennett, but too much of the 1970s work by this "Chopin of jazz piano" (the phrase is that of Berlin jazz festival producer Joachim-Ernst Berendt, who also astutely likened his touch to Artur Rubinstein's) had a cocktail-lounge feel to it, technically impeccable but uninvolving.
No, it's his work with Davis and with the ill-fated Village Vanguard trio (ten days after the sessions, LaFaro was killed in a car crash) for which Evans will always be remembered.
Philip Pettinger, himself an outstanding classical pianist, writes with the empathy of a fellow artist, and though this doesn't blind him to the self-destructive nature of Evans's drug addiction, it ensures that his subject's musical achievement is never lost sight of amid the accumulated details of a messy, often chaotic and ultimately sad life.
Evans spoke of his own art with disarming simplicity. "It bugs me," he said, "when people try to analyse jazz as an intellectual theorem. It's not, It's feeling . . . I think in technical terms, but what I play is human." And he continued: "I believe all music is romantic, but if it gets schmaltzy, romanticism is disturbing. On the other hand, romanticism handled with discipline is the most beautiful kind of beauty."
Pettinger would agree. In the preface, he describes how, at the age of thirteen, he was first thrilled by the Evans sound: "It was the plaintive harmony, the lyrical tone, and the fresh textures that captivated so; it was the very idea that one style of music could be played with the skills and finesse normally only brought to another; it was a timeless quality, a feeling that the music had always been there; and above all, it was a yearning behind the notes, a quiet passion that you could almost reach out and touch."
This is beautifully put, and you can hear the plaintive harmonies, the unforced lyricism, the fresh textures and the yearning behind the notes in any of those earlier recordings. Just listen to the Waltz for Debby album, and especially to the magical opening bars of "My Romance" - tender, tentative, but unmistakeably setting out on a questing journey - and you'll know exactly what Pettinger is talking about.
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