To this day, jazz musicians tend to be admired for their improvisatory skills but undervalued for their ability to compose substantial works.
Thus one rarely hears complete performances of extended pieces by James P. Johnson, Duke Ellington, Gil Evans, Max Roach and so forth.
Yet when a gifted performer addresses this music with the seriousness it deserves, the results can be startling, as they are in “Conversations With Bill Evans,” a revelatory recording by French pianist Jean-Yves Thibaudet.
Though the young Parisian has established an international reputation as a classical pianist, he has plunged into new, and potentially dangerous, waters with this recording. It isn’t often that a major classical artist sifts through a jazz pianist’s old LPs searching for particularly inspired solos to re-record.
That Thibaudet dared to commission note-for-note transcriptions of venerable Evans cadenzas, then re-cast them according to his own, distinctly French sensibility, would seem likely to raise the hackles of jazz purists .
“That was my biggest fear,” says Thibaudet, speaking impeccable English from his apartment in Paris.
“Actually, I had two fears. First, I thought the classical world might say: `Why is he doing that? It’s a stupid idea.’
“But my bigger fear was that the jazz people would say, `Who does he think he is?’ “
Though it’s too early to tell how either world will react to Thibaudet’s experiment, it surely has yielded one of the most provocative and sumptuous piano recordings of the past several years.
Anyone familiar with Evans’ pianism, itself a source of controversy in the oft-combative world of jazz, will be startled by Thibaudet’s interpretations. For if Evans’ playing broke new ground with its harmonic sophistication and quasi-Impressionistic sound (drawing ample criticism along the way), Thibaudet’s recording explores these very musical elements in great depth.
Listen to Thibaudet’s versions of Evans’ wistful “Waltz for Debby” or his shimmering “Turn Out the Stars,” and you’re hearing one pianist getting to the essence of another pianist’s work. “Conversations With Bill Evans,” in other words, brings forth particular elements of Evans’ music as only a major interpreter can do.
“Bill Evans was a great solo pianist, but it was Evans as a composer that interested me most,” says Thibaudet.
“Even if the notes I play sometimes are very close to the ones he played, this recording is my own, personal reaction to his music. It has my own heart, my own moods and feelings.
“In some ways, I sound like him, because our touch, and our approach to the piano are very close. But I’m still approaching his music with a classical pianist’s ears and eyes and touch and technique.”
The challenge, then, was to convey the jazz essence of Evans’ music while bringing something of Thibaudet’s own French pianism to the recording, no simple task.
In the liner notes, Thibaudet thanks several people for their help, none more than the exceptional American pianist Joel Silberman. The two had met at the Spoleto Festival in Italy, and Silberman, writes Thibaudet, “gave me so much of his precious time, taught me everything about this music and jazz in general.”
So how did Silberman teach a classical pianist to swing?
“When Jean-Yves first asked me to listen to him playing Evans, and to help him, I said to myself, `What am I possibly going to say to this brilliant man?’ ” recalls Silberman.
“But I found that he didn’t understand what it meant to keep strict time in jazz, and also he tended to play Evans’ music in one long phrase, which is how classical musicians often approach scores.”
Indeed, remembers Thibaudet, “Joel taught me that, in jazz, every phrase has its own little drama. In classical music, we always have very big and long lines, but in jazz there are a lot of different little (melodic) cells that each tells its own story.”
The result, says Silberman, is a recording that gives Evans’ music “the regard it deserves. Bill Evans is a brilliant composer, but he’s generally glossed over, the depth of his music was overlooked even by Evans himself.
“When Evans was in clubs, he played the music over and over, sometimes when he was drinking, or worse,” adds Silberman, referring to a pianist who died in 1980, at age 51, after years of drug addiction.
“For me, Thibaudet’s reading takes Evans’ music extremely seriously, and therefore breathes a new life into it.”
Exactly where the Evans project will take Thibaudet is anyone’s guess, though he says recently he has begun playing a recital program that opens with music of Ravel (“Pavane for a Dead Princess” and “Jeux d’eau”), continues with music of Evans (“Waltz for Debby” and “Turn out the Stars”) and concludes with works of Debussy (three Preludes and “L’Isle Joyeuse”).
The juxtaposition of French Impressionism and Evans’ brand of jazz “makes a perfect fit,” says Thibaudet, who will perform Saint-Saens’ Piano Concerto No. 5 Aug. 16 and 17 at the Grant Park Music Festival.
“When I play Bill Evans,” he writes in his liner notes, “I feel free to explore a range of my own feelings in a way that’s hard to explain, but in ways I’ve never felt playing other music.”
Perhaps it’s because Thibaudet has found a kindred spirit in the music of Evans.
Or perhaps it’s because Thibaudet dares to take “as serious an attitude toward this body of work as one normally does with a Bach fugue (or) a Beethoven sonata,” writes Jed Distler, who penned most of the recording’s transcriptions.
“It is a tribute to Bill Evans’ genius that his classic recordings still retain their cogency and depth as re-created by a pianist who has . . . the courage to make this music his own.”
