You could start with “Like Someone in Love” or “You Must Believe in Spring” but I’m pretty sure “Peace Piece” is Bill Evans’ summit. Forget me though. Just listen up now—those thrill-trills in the piano’s higher register might make you forget how hard it is to die.
Evans sensed he’d improvised something extraordinary in the recording studio, though he went into it thinking he was playing Leonard Bernstein’s show tune, “Some Other Time,” not flashing on his own chimes of freedom. He refused to play “Peace Piece” live (except once when he accompanied a modern dance performance in the late 70s). Per the Bill Evans website (and Wiki), he thought the composition “would lose its value and meaning as it had been an inspiration at the moment only.”
Miles Davis picked up on that moment. Davis’ blurb—“I’ve sure learned a lot from Bill Evans. He plays the piano, the way it’s supposed to be played”—graced the front cover of Everybody Digs Bill Evans—the 1958 album that had “Peace Piece.” (Davis’s lines are on there along with praise from an odd mix of other somebodies—Ahmad Jamal, George Shearing and Cannonball Adderly.) Davis wanted to record a version of “Peace Piece” on Kind of Blue, but, instead, he and Evans used the opening chord progression to ease into “Flamenco Sketches,” which is its own Spanish thing, with wonderful solos by Davis, Coltrane and Adderly.
I doubt I’d’ve connected those two songs if the link hadn’t come up in Time Remembered (2017), the Evans bio-documentary (which you can watch here). I get a lift from that lineage but I’m locked on a less obvious relation. I’d bet “Peace” came through to Coltrane who was probably more attuned than Davis to Evans’ hindu-gumbo-Ruski spiritualism. “Peace’s” highs rest on an earthy ostinato and I hear the wonder of that repetition down in the groove of “A Love Supreme.”
Evans and Coltrane shared something else—an addiction to heroin. But Coltrane got off hard drugs, while Evans only managed to kick for a few years in the 70s. That Evans documentary, Time Remembered, doesn’t romanticize his addictions. You’re not meant to sail past images of a head-hung down Evans at the piano, pre- or post-nod. Thinking back on his characteristic bent posture in performance, I recall a frozen figure from the insane asylum in Titticut Follies not the hero of Let’s Get Lost—the faux-documentary about another beautiful jazz boy-genius, Chet Baker.
Maybe that’s because Time Remembered’s approach to its subject is more humane and familial than Let’s Get Lost’s enabler aestheticism. The Evans doc benefits from the presence of the women in his life. His sister-in-law and her daughter are good story-tellers. As is the charmer with a winning smile who married his lost bassist buddy, Scott LoFaro. Evans’ wife, who threw him out in the late 70s when he started leaving syringes around the house where she was trying to raise kids isn’t in the movie, but Evans’ last girlfriend, Laurie Verchomin, is fully there. She evokes the beginning of their affair and Evans’ end. She watched him bleed out in the back seat as his drummer was driving him to a new spot to get methadone. Not that Evans was looking to kick.[1]
A few of Evans’ friends allow he hurt a lot people who loved him. Ms. Verchomin isn’t bitter, though she’s aware Evans carried a sense of entitlement along with his demons. She told an interviewer that “he knew exactly how extraordinary he was.”
JW: Give me an example.
LV: One time we were on 14th Street in New York waiting for a cab. I was dressed up, wearing a ¾-length pleated skirt and suit jacket. We were on the curb when a group of kids drove by in a car and threw eggs at us. It wasn’t even Halloween. It was just New York in the late 1970s [laughs]. Well, the eggs bounced off of him onto the street but the ones that hit me broke and splattered all over my jacket. I was so dismayed. Bill noted the irony and quietly said in jest, “Just goes to show our places in the universe.”[2]
Ms. Verchomin could take a hard goof. She’s still here, making it through. Peace be with her.
Notes
1
LV: Bill was always on drugs. That was just part of who he was. He never got up because he never went to sleep the entire time I knew him. He’d lay down resting. He’d nod out. But he was never really asleep. You have no idea how much cocaine he was doing.
JW: How much?
LV: A couple of ounces a week.
JW: Is that a lot?
LV: Most people back in the late ’70s then said they had a gram for the weekend. Think about how many grams are in an ounce—28. That’s where he spent all his money.
2 You can read the rest of Verchomin’s Q&A at https://www.jazzwax.com/2009/08/interview-laurie-verchomin-part-1.html. It includes a photo of her in her youth which makes you understand why she made Evans want to hang around a little longer though his body was a scar.
