Bill Evans

Bill Evans played the piano like a poet thinking aloud – inward, harmonically rich, touched with a melancholy beauty that influenced nearly every jazz pianist who followed. He voiced his chords in a new way, stacking the notes so they shimmered, and he had a singing touch that made even fast passages feel reflective.

He’s the pianist on Miles Davis’s Kind of Blue, and his sensibility shaped that landmark deeply – the spare, modal, impressionistic feeling owes a great deal to Evans’s love of classical composers like Debussy, Ravel, and Satie. He brought the harmonic language of European impressionism into jazz and made it swing, or at least breathe.

His own great achievement was the trio, especially the 1961 group with bassist Scott LaFaro and drummer Paul Motian. They played with a radical equality, the three instruments conversing as peers rather than soloist-plus-accompaniment, a quiet revolution in how a piano trio could work. The Village Vanguard recordings from that year are sacred texts.

Then LaFaro died in a car crash days later, and Evans was shattered, barely playing for months. His life carried a long shadow of drug addiction that eventually killed him at 51. But the music stayed luminous and searching to the end, the sound of a man turning beauty over in his hands.