I’ve gotten back into practicing keyboard regularly.

As a pianist, I’ve always found Bill Evans to be an inspiration, whether as collaborator with Miles Davis on Blue In Green, on his own (credited) compositions like Waltz For Debbie or Very Early, or playing standards. There’s a wonderful interview on YouTube, given during the last year of his life, while he was driving around on errands accompanied by his interviewer. He had many tapes in the car, of his own recordings. He said in this interview (to quote loosely): “I only play what touches me. I don’t just play standards for the sake of playing them.” His choice of standards tends towards the lyrical and melodic. Someday My Prince Will Come, What Kind Of Fool Am I?, Make Someone Happy. These are all such wonderful songs.

So but, voice leading. Why voice leading? I started picking apart his solo recording of What Kind Of Fool Am I?. The act of transcribing a complex sound is one of approximation and degrees. You can imagine first hearing just the main melody line – which in itself might be a challenge (see John Coltrane’s Interstellar Space) – but that is only the surface of the complexity that is in a Bill Evans recording.

As a next step you can imagine just playing some chords that come to mind, around this melody. This exercise in particular showed me just how nuanced the recording is. I picked out some chords, and they sounded.. okay. But then I went back and tried to go very slowly through the first few seconds of the A section in the recording. The last time I tried to do this with Bill Evans’ music (Very Early) I was shocked how my playing immediately got more deliberate, nuanced, softer, subtler. In this case, what I found specifically was that he was using classical voice leading techniques to form what on the surface sound like “jazz chords.” He might as well have been playing Bach.

I recently bumped into a quote by a music educator – somewhere on the internet, and to loosely quote – “I always tell my students that it’s Bill Evans’ voice leading that differentiates him as a pianist.” In studying jazz, particularly as a pianist, it is easy to lose the forest for the trees by starting to create sounds using complex chord and scale theory. This is of course valuable, but what I experienced in trying to play exactly what Evans had recorded was that it really is the voice leading in his playing that makes it sound so rich, romantic, melodic – all the attributes his music brings to mind.

It’s no surprise that his playing is so lyrical, and that often the tunes he likes to play are songs. It’s because he literally plays multiple melodies. This is true of Rachmaninoff, one of the most prominent Romantic composers – and in fact the difficulty in performing his music is exactly in doing justice to all the voices hiding in the dense textures. It is also true of Bach – whose music I understand Evans studied intensively as a teenager. Bach of course did not exist in a vacuum; he also stood on the shoulders of the earlier tradition of medieval Church music. The earliest music in the classical tradition tended to be Church music – they had the funds, culture, and object of admiration towards which to express glory via the voice. And the voice was the closest thing at hand, available to all. The original church music was the Gregorian Chant – it was sung by one voice. I think this is what Mahler had in mind when he wrote about his 8th symphony (which he based partly on a 9th century chant)

Imagine that the universe begins to ring and resound, no longer with human voices but with revolving planets and suns and the voice is also an instrument.

and

The whole of the first movement is strictly symphonic in form, yet it is completely sung. It is really strange that nobody has thought of this before; it is simplicity itself, “The True Symphony,” in which the most beautiful instrument of all is given the role it was destined for.

So but Bill Evans. He was standing on the same shoulders. This became deeply present for me when I figured out those first few chords on What Kind Of Fool Am I?.