365 Days of Song Recommendations: March 22

Peace Piece — Bill Evans

I wish I could write more cleverly about classical music. I just don’t have the words in my lexicon to make sense of Chopin — and the thousands of hours I’ve spent with Chopin. In place of words I have thought nuggets, elusive and slippery, fragmented, not quite the sands of an hourglass sliding between my fingers, more like one-stud Lego bricks, destined to be stepped on next week.

I feel the same ephemeral simplicity in some of Bill Evans’ most personal, most tranquil work.

The breadth of his work on the piano suffocates laypersons who dare to comprehend the man’s genius.

I can imagine how an aspiring pianist would approach Bill Evans or Chopin by way of my admiration for the mad-genius prose of Thomas Pynchon. Break it down, tear it apart, put it back together again with scotch tape; there’s no one magical fiber or fruit that explains singular talent.

A screaming comes across the sky. It has happened before, but there is nothing to compare to it now. — Thomas Pynchon, Gravity’s Rainbow

There’s nothing flashy about those two Pynchon sentences, but they comprise one of the greatest openings to any novel. The simplicity of the language belies the depth and considered purpose. I will never be that good at anything in my life. (Does quoting Ghostbusters in any setting or condition count?)

That’s humbling. Taken in the wrong context, it’s an invitation to quit striving to be better. We must allow ourself not to suffer under the weight of indescribable genius, but use it to inspire. (“When someone asks if you’re a god, you say ‘Yes’!”) Yes! I can be good, maybe even great, and I don’t have to be Bill Evans, Thomas Pynchon, or Frédéric Chopin.

I learned (probably re-learned) the term ostinato the other day, meaning continuously repeated musical phrase. It explains the opening qualities of Bill Evans’ “Peace Piece.” It’s beautiful. It’s simple — and it calls upon a meditative human condition. It requests that we pause, that we listen, that we become present. That we all allow ourselves to be.

In reading about “Peace Piece,” one of his earliest compositions on his first solo album, Everybody Digs Bill Evans from 1959, I found classical music critics who likened Evans opening on this track to Chopin’s Berceuse, Op 57. Here’s Hélène Grimaud’s interpretation of the 1845 composition.

And because Bill Evans was Bill Evans he also took inspiration from Leonard Bernstein’s “Some Other Time” from On the Town, borrowing the bass line and improvising the treble over top — all the while keeping the same chords inspired by Chopin’s Berceuse throughout.

Evans was a technical master, but so often those great jazz technicians created bodies of work to be admired from a distance, to discuss over coffee at 1am. But Evans also inspires and suffocates with abstract conception of being human. He’s the Ludwig Wittgenstein of the ivories — Wittgenstein, who once said, “The limits of my language mean the limits of my world. Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.The world is everything that is the case.”

To paraphrase the enigmatic Wittgenstein, we would be wise to just shut up for a second, let our insecurities fall away, and listen to Bill Evans.

~

You can do exactly that—listen to Bill Evans—on the #365Songs playlist!