I’m doing Spartacus! Specifically the 1963 version by the pianist Bill Evans – not to be confused with the pianist Gil Evans. Top tip: if you want your kid to be a great jazz pianist, name him Phil Evans.
Experimentation is a big part of jazz, and I’m not talking about drugs (though Evans was no stranger to those). Released on Verve, Conversations with Myself is so called because Evans plays three piano parts on top of each other. By the early ’60s overdubbing had been used in recording but was virtually unheard of in jazz, whose purists took a dim view of such manipulation – and as I’m sure we’ll see many times on this blog, every musical revolution is inevitably met with some resistance.
What I find interesting about this project is that its conception was not so much a technical decision as a creative one. Inspired by the near-telepathic interplay he achieved with his famous trio, Evans realised that playing with himself (minds out of the gutter please) would create the most simpatico trio imaginable. “If there is one man who can read the mind of Bill Evans, it is Bill Evans,” Gene Lees writes in the sleeve notes. I love the elegance of that logic; it sounds obvious but takes a mind like Evans’ to envision.
It also takes a musician like Evans to execute. He would play one piano track, listen to it back while adding a second, and then a third, and the result is dazzling to behold. Three Bill Evanses (one in the left channel, one in the right, the other in the centre) improvise interweaving, cascading lines, gracefully moving from a classical style to swing and back again on ‘Love Theme From Spartacus’. Listen to the way one Bill Evans will finish a thought introduced by another, or echo each other’s phrases like ripples on a pond. It’s at once unfathomable that this is all one person, but impossible that it could be anything else.
At the end of the session Evans apparently shrugged and said: “Well, I always wanted to be an orchestra.” The word genius gets bandied about a lot, but listening to Bill Evans here, no other conclusion seems plausible.
For more serene piano from the maestro, check out our ‘In A Tranquil Mood’ and ‘Kings Of The Keys’ playlists over on Spotify.
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Your Spotify playlist seems to play the original love theme from Spartacus not this virtuoso Bill Evans version.
Otherwise an impressive project with some very promising content already.
Good luck jazz cats