Bill Evans has been a huge inspiration this year. On the level of Mahler in years past.

A friend asked:

I honestly know very little of him! Where should I start?

Recordings

Philosophy

Jazz is more of a revival, in a different form, of what went on in classical music before; in other words, in the 17th century, there was a great deal of improvisation in classical music. Because of the fact that there were no electrical recording techniques or any way to permanize or to ‘catch’ music and to record it, the music was written so that it could be permanized that way. Slowly but surely the writing of the music and the interpreters of the written music gave way to more and more interpretation and more and more cerebral composition and less and less improvisation until finally improvisation became a lost art in classical music – we have only the composer and the interpreter. The composer, even, very seldom improvised, or didn’t have to, say around the late 1800s or the turn of the century. Jazz in a way has resurrected that process – which I call the “Jazz Process.” Jazz, as we tend to look at it, is a style. But I feel that Jazz is not so much a style as a process of making music – it’s the process of making one minute’s music in one minute’s time; whereas when you compose you can make one minute’s music and take three months to compose one minute’s music. That’s the only basic difference. Now it so happens that because of historical circumstances and where Jazz was born or whatever – came up the Mississippi, and American music and American culture and all – we think of Jazz as a stylistic medium now – which, in a way, it is – but I think we must remember that in an absolute sense, Jazz is more a certain creative process of spontaneity than a style. Therefore you might say that Chopin or Bach or Mozart or whoever improvised music – that is, was able to make music of the moment – was, in a sense, playing Jazz. And we leave style out of it. That’s the way I feel about it in an absolute sense.

source (~6:44-9:00)