20 Never before heard solo piano practice recordings made by Bill Evans himself in his New York apartment at an unknown date; features originals, standards & interpretations of Bach compositions. The first of a series of archival recordings, the restoration and release of which are being overseen by Evan Evans, son of the artist. Quietly released in late August, the 21-track CD comes from two tapes of Evans practicing his craft, unaccompanied in his apartment in the 1960s.
The disc includes few full works, but more riffs and shards of Evans originals along with passages of the work of other jazz composers, as well as several Bach pieces performed by the classically trained musician. Throughout the disc, Evans is faintly heard talking to an unidentified friend or associate, sometimes discussing his technique.
"My father practiced an average of eight hours a day in his later years," Evan Evans writes in the disc's liner notes. "That his music was so powerful can only be a testament to the importance of perseverance, dedication, and above all, as he and I agree, discipline."
The trio with Johnson and LaBarbera evolved rapidly. Bill was satisfied and proud of the extremely fast progress his two partners were making, and of how in tune they were with his musical world. But he was beginning to have serious problems with his health. For some time now, and probably increasingly so following his brother's tragic death, he had been using cocaine, and this was having repercussions on his way of playing, among which a strong tendency to rush the tempo (something of which he was completely aware, according to what he once said to LaBarbera).
The version he played in Paris, and which appears on the The Paris Concert Edition Two is a remarkable one. The long piano solo he improvises on the structure of this piece, whose Eastern flavor has always held a special attraction for him, becomes an amazing recapitulation of all the elements that have contributed to his piano style, of everything that he has ever loved in music. Shades of classical music (Khachaturian, Rachmaninoff, his favorite Russian composers), harmonic derivations from Tristano an entire piano tradition ranging from Romanticism to the 20th century and jazz are fused in this Nardis, something which has no antecedents in either jazz or in the classical music tradition.
The collaboration of the highest caliber offered him by Johnson and LaBarbera was never routine and brought him back that tension and passion for the musical quest with which he had peaked twenty years earlier at the time of his unparalleled collaboration with Motian and LaFaro: “This trio is very much connected to the first trio ... I feel that the trio I have now is karmic.” Having previously been heavily involved in Zen, and also due to his Russian Orthodox background which had given him a natural aptitude and sensitivity for the metaphysical and spiritual, he felt that having these two young musicians alongside him was a sign of destiny, of the "circularity' of things and their inexplicable propensity for moving according to a script already written.
Ttt
Part of this lexicon had already penetrated jazz, thanks to some arrangers of the late 1940s (the Gil Evans of Birth Of The Cool, for example, or some scores by Gerry Mulligan and George Russell) but, outside of big-band jazz, there was a sort of lag in appropriating and using that enormous patrimony. Bill Evans filled the gap.
An artist such as Evans, who had placed at the center of his enterprise a feeling for the keyboard that will allow you to transfer any emotional utterance into it, could not be very interested in "prefabricated" sounds which had little possibility to be "molded" according to one's psychic/emotional dynamic.
There were two important consequences of all this: the first was that Evans had to literally "shift" his center of action towards the upper register of the keyboard; the other was his growing desire to play duets and leave out the drummer. When interviewed by Francois Postif of Jazz Hot after a concert in February 1972 at the 
TTT(Twelve Tone Tune) on The Bill Evans Album is a clear demonstration of his technical mastery. As the title itself suggests, this piece uses the principles of serial music which requires the choice of a twelve-note row, none of which can recur until they are all used up: Evan presents his row three times in three sections of four bars each leaving, however, the relative harmonization to follow a tonal logic. Some interesting scribbles of his allow us to follow the gradual developing of his compositional idea and the process by which he arrived at the final score. Evans worked like a patient bricklayer who, after choosing his materials, little by little builds the piece. This procedure is surely much closer to the practice of classical music than to the instinctive immediacy usually associated with a jazz tune. The piece TTTT (Twelve Tone Tune Two) recorded for the first time in early 1973 and included in the live album 
The lyrics of the song appear to have been a shocking omen of the future: a few years after its composition, in fact, Ellaine, threw herself in front of a subway train after hearing from Bill that he was leaving her for another woman. Brian Hennessey, an Englishman and mutual friend of the couple, would rightly comment on this tragedy saying "artists who show genius in one field often display ignorance in others." Recognition notwithstanding (he was voted best pianist by Down Beat in 1968, and his 1970 album 
