Miles Davis

Miles Davis (1926-1980).

While the writing credits of Evans's contributions to the album is disputed, both Davis and Cobb state that Evans's unique voicings and composition helped to paint the album's unique tonal portraits.

With the Sextet

Meeting Miles

Evans recalls in an interview that a particularly "gratifying" moment at the Village Vanguard occured when playing with Milt Jackson in what he described as a "breakthrough":

"I looked up, opened my eyes while I was playing, and Miles’s head was at the end of the piano listening."

Davis states in his autobiography that George Russell had turned him onto Bill after inquiring about a pianist who could play modally. Two stories with slight variation describe how Evans had joined Davis’s ranks as told by Russell and Evans respectively:

Miles was having a problem with substance abuse in his band and asked me if I knew of any pianist who could play the job. I recommended Bill.

“Is he white?” asked Miles.

“Yeah,” I replied.

“Does he wear glasses?”

“Yeah.”

“I know that motherfucker. I heard him at Birdland—he can play his ass off. Bring him over to the Colony in Brooklyn on Thursday night.”

Bill’s story reports that Miles had called him personally:

“Although I’d never really met the man,” he recalled, “the phone rang one day and I picked it up and said hello and I hear, ‘Hello. Bill, this is Miles—Miles Davis. You wanna make a weekend in Philadelphia?’ I almost—you know—fainted; I made that weekend and he asked me to stay with the band.”

Evans also describes the positive influence that Davis’s approval had on his own self-image as a pianist.

“I had always had a great respect for Miles Davis,” he said some years later. “And when he asked me to join him I realized that I had to revise my views about my own playing. If I continued to feel inadequate as a pianist, it would be to deny my respect for Davis. So I began to accept the position in which I had been placed.”

Influences

Miles states in his autobiography that Evans's interest in classical music broadened his musical palate, and helped to refine the feel he desired for the upcoming sessions. He notes changing the group's sound to adapt to Evans's unique style of playing:

"Bill brought a great knowledge of classical music, people like Rachmaninoff and Ravel. He was the one who told me to listen to the Italian pianist Arturo Michelangeli, so I did and fell in love with his playing. Bill had this quiet fire that I loved on piano. The way he approached it, the sound he got was like crystal notes or sparkling water cascading down from some clear waterfall. I had to change the way the band sounded again for Bill's style by playing different tunes, softer ones at first."

This love for classical music would linger for Miles, noting that his fondness for it is likely due to Evans's influence, when the two had gotten to know each other.

“It was because of Bill's influence, I think, that I always had classical music on around the house. It was so soothing to think and work by. I mean people would come by and expect to hear a lot of jazz on the box, but I wasn't into that at the time and a lot of people were shocked to hear me listening to classical music all the time, you know, Stravinsky, Arturo Michelangeli, Rachmaninoff, Isaac Stern.”

With Miles

Evans spoke to the benefit he got from touring with Davis, despite the ambitious schedule:

"I felt exhausted in every way—physically, mentally, and spiritually. I don't know why. Maybe it was the road. But I think the time I worked with Miles was probably the most beneficial I've spent in years, not only musically but personally. It did me a lot of good."

Six months before Kind of Blue, in 1958, the sextet informally recorded a set at a Columbia Records party thrown at the Plaza Hotel. Irving Townsend notes the unofficial nature of the recording in the album's liner notes, stating that the musicians did not know they were being recorded:

"It's not unusual for a record company to present its artists in live perforrnance these days, but in those days it was. The fact that the affair was recorded was fortunate, but it was not a record session. It was a party. We taped it because we wanted to remember it, in case it never happened again. It hasn't.

Coltrane and Adderley sit out on the performance of My Funny Valentine, highlighting the interplay of Evans and Davis and foreshadowing the voicings he would bring to Kind of Blue. Almost all of the rest of the tracks are counted off and performed at breakneck speed, particularly Straight, No Chaser, during which Evans pays tribute to Thelonious Monk by incorporating a lick from his composition "Blue Monk."

After Kind of Blue

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Pat Evans, sister-in-law of Bill, paints a more comical depiction of their connection, stated that their relationship was "close" and that Miles "often called him [Bill] up in the middle of the night to go bowling or some such thing."

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