ABSTRACT
This case study engages with matters of performance and improvisation, directing these considerations to selected music of Bill Evans (1929–1980). Central research issues concern: in what ways do recorded improvisations and other recorded performances both relate and differ? How can one (re)perform an improvisation? How much spontaneity remains, and where might composition enter into this articulation? The starting point comprises Evans’s own re-recordings of numbers such as his “Blue in Green,” as heard on the contemporaneous albums of 1959 Kind of Blue and Portrait in Jazz, with the Bill Evans Trio. To investigate such questions further, however, a particular transcultural prism is adopted: that of the recordings of Jean-Yves Thibaudet-as a French concert pianist-on his? Conversations with Bill Evans (1997), in tribute to Evans’s overdubbed piano album Conversations with Myself (1963). An accessible music analytical approach combines aural analysis with discussion of transcriptions, providing comparative treatment of three main titles. Building upon my discussion of Evans’s “Peace Piece” (Mawer, 2011), these loci include both early and, especially, late utterances: “Waltz for Debby” (1956), “Song for Helen” (1978), and “Your Story” (1980). The chapter argues that boundaries between performance and improvisation, and those between improvisation and composition, do become more blurred through the process of recording and thus fixing. Nevertheless, substantive differences are revealed between the performance styles and sound-worlds of Evans and Thibaudet, even when handling what is ostensibly the same material.
