Bill Evans, You Must Believe in Spring

For Christmas, J.’s father gave me a copy of Bill Evans’s You Must Believe in Spring. Recorded in 1977 with Eddie Gomez on bass and Eliot Zigmund on drums, it ended up being Evans’s last studio recording with a trio. It is absolutely spectacular.

It would be easy to dismiss the album as a downer: Evans dedicates the opening B-Minor Waltz to his estranged wife who committed suicide shortly before the sessions; We Will Meet Again, another Evans original, is dedicated to his brother Harry, who suffered from clinical depression and also committed suicide around that time, and Evans closes the original LP with the theme from the film and TV show M*A*S*H, subtitled Suicide is Painless. I suppose the fact that I love the record so much says something about my own natural predilections, but I do think Evans is doing much more than metaphorically slashing his wrists. True, much of the music is melancholy, and Evans favors minor keys more than usual (and he had always been more generous towards them than many other jazz musicians). But it is also beautiful in a way that is readily apparent. You don’t have to know a thing about jazz to hear instantly that this is simply gorgeous music. Evans’s soloing also sounds like he is doing much more than just crying into his beer. It is energetic, full of momentum, and the ease of his phrasing belies the underlying rhythmic complexity. The CD also includes three bonus tracks that lean much more in the direction of straight jams. They don’t have the expressive power and lyricism of the main LP material, but they do prove than Evans was still perfectly capable of cooking.

The standouts, for me, are the opening B-Minor Waltz which, while too short to develop properly, functions as a great intro and sets the mood for the rest of the material, the title track, and We Will Meet Again. The award for the most interesting track, though, has to go to Jimmy Rowles’ The Peacocks. Whether Evans dusted off for the occasion the music of Ravel and Bartok that he had studied decades earlier, or whether he was a keen observer of the then-new players coming to prominence in the seventies, I don’t know, but his solos’ harmonic and melodic turns are dark in an atmospheric sort of way that the rest of the album isn’t. I can hear Keith Jarrett, Ritchie Beirach and Steve Kuhn in microcosm.

I have only one complaint – Eddie Gomez again. Too loud, too assertive, not nearly enough subtlety. The more I hear him with Evans, the more surprised I am that Evans has kept him as long as he did. I guess he was willing to suffer Gomez's brash soloing in exchange for his expert comping. Overall, though, the CD is highly recommended. Come to think of it, it wouldn’t be a bad place to start with Evans. Not as classic as his Riverside stuff from the fifties, but probably more accessible to a novice.