To Bill Evans, the Seattle modern dancer, choreographer and performer, it seemed like a stretch, but why not, he thought. An admirer of Bill Evans, the jazz pianist, the dancer asked him in 1978 if he and his trio would collaborate on a dance program featuring the pianist's music. Much to his delight, the pianist was open and willing. Evans, the pianist, had actually performed with a dancer previously. [Photo above of dancer Bill Evans by Jim Dusen]
What followed were two dance programs at the University of Washington separated by a year—Double Bill in 1978 and Mixing It Up in 1979, featuring the Bill Evans Trio and the Bill Evans Dance Company. The pianist was so pleased with the outcomes he was eager for a third and planned to take the dance company with him to Tokyo. [Photo above, from left, of Bill Evans, Michael Moore and Philly Joe Jones]
As you may recall, I recently posted on Double Bill in late April. Since then, I interviewed Bill on his dance performance with the Bill Evans Trio in the late 1970s, how he approached the pianist and how they worked together on stage. At the end of the interview, there are videos of both performances. Images of programs below courtesy of the Evans Somatic Dance Institute.
Here's our conversation from late April:
JazzWax: In 1978, you went to see Bill Evans perform solo at Parnell’s Jazz Club in Seattle. Did you go to hear him play or to approach him about collaborating with you?
Bill Evans: Both. We shared the same name. Before and after I started my dance company, I toured as a solo dancer and called my show Bill Evans in Concert. All of my promotional materials included a photograph of me dancing, but the performance title was just Bill Evans In Concert. Every now and then someone would show up at the box office thinking they were coming to hear Bill Evans, the jazz pianist. There were times when I’d arrive in a city on tour, open the paper and we’d both be appearing in town.
JW: What did you think?
BE: That always fascinated me. Of course, I was familiar with his albums. Then one day in ’78, I read he was coming to Seattle to play solo at Parnell's. I thought it would be fun to go hear him and approach him after to see if he’d be interested in collaborating with me and my dance company.
JW: What happened?
BE: I went and heard him play the first set. Then I walked up to him and introduced myself. He was still seated, lingering at the piano. I introduced myself and told him how people had sometimes come to my shows thinking they were going to hear him perform. He laughed. I asked if he’d like to join me for dinner. So he did, right there at Parnell’s.
JW: So you’re just a complete stranger to him at this point, yes?
BE: Absolutely. He'd never heard of me, as far as I knew. We had dinner between sets. I asked if he had ever worked with a modern dancer before. He said he had, with Carmen de Lavallade, in the early ‘70s when she was teaching at Yale. I gathered it was a brief and very pleasant experience for him. That’s the only time he said he had worked with a dancer.
JW: Did he know your reputation as a West Coast pioneer of modern dance?
BE: I don't think he realized anything, but he seemed very respectful and treated me like a colleague, not a fan. I told him the possible times when my company would be in Seattle rather than on tour. We picked a target date when my company would be at Meany Theater at the University of Washington, which is a great venue for dance and music.
JW: He could have been polite and said he didn’t have the time.
BE: His collaboration with Carmen had been positive, and based on that one experience, collaborating with me was compelling.
JW: Once he agreed, what did you say?
BE: I said, “Well, we have to figure out what we have in common. Where should we start?” We started talking, and I told him I’d developed a dance technique that tries to get the greatest reward for the smallest expenditure of energy. To me that's good technique, when you do nothing more than what’s required to accomplish the movement. He said that was his belief too.
JW: What did you think he meant by that?
BE: I've worked with many, many jazz musicians. A good number of them move luxuriously when they play, but Bill barely moved. He hunkered over the keyboard, and you could barely tell he was moving. Even his hands moved minimally. My thought was he was bonding with the instrument and becoming part of it and doing nothing more than just playing.
JW: What an interesting observation.
BE: He just lifts exactly the right sound out of the instrument that he wants. So we agreed that that was something we had in common. We didn't pursue that idea, but at least we found that we had a commonality.
JW: He must have asked what sort of time commitment he'd have to make to the collaboration, yes?
BE: Yes, he did. I'd already listened to several of his recordings. I said, "I’d like to do a program that runs about a half hour. I've chosen a few of your recordings, including Peace Piece and Waltz for Debby.” I told him I’d choreograph a work to those recordings and then he could arrive a day or two in advance for a few rehearsals. I said all he had to do was duplicate his recordings as closely as possible.
JW: What did he say?
BE: He said, "No problem." He said that while he could do that for Waltz for Debby and the others, Peace Piece would be a little tricky. At that point, he had not performed it live yet. The point being that every time he played the song, it was vastly different.
JW: What was your response?
BE: I said, "OK, well, we'll just keep that in mind." And so my choreography for Peace Piece was open-ended. On the other pieces—Waltz for Debby, Epilogue, Very Early, Epilogue and The Two Lonely People—he was able to duplicate pretty much the number of choruses, the length and tempi he'd used on those recordings.
JW: Who was with him when he came to Seattle two days before the performances on March 17 and 18, 1978?
BE: He arrived with bassist Michael Moore and drummer Philly Joe Jones.
JW: Where did you rehearse?
BE: We went into one of the dance studios at the University of Washington, with windows overlooking the water. When the company ran through everything with the Bill Evans Trio the first time, it was like magic. It just worked. All eight dancers in my company were on a tremendous high. Bill was an extraordinary musician and just being in his presence raised the level of intensity and excitement. The trio was extraordinary.
JW: Did Evans have any suggestions?
BE: No. He was willing to just follow along. All three of them were completely open to any suggestions we made. They were willing to adapt.
JW: What did you ask of them?
BE: Not much. They were so sharp that they took it all in immediately. Bill understood instantly what we needed from him. It was smooth and easy and so wonderfully enjoyable.
JW: How did you choreograph these songs?
BE: Much in the way jazz musicians work. I choreographed a part of it and then part of it we improvised. Once I had introduced a movement motif of several choruses, the dancers were free to improvise on those motifs within my choreography. I had a wonderful company of dancers at the time. The dancers were very courageous and loved to improvise.
JW: What was the audience reaction?
BE: We were completely sold out. The audience went wild for it. They knew it was a collaborative performance. We had advertised it that way. We called our first collaborative performance Double Bill. First we performed our pieces Tin-Tal and Within Bounds. Then there was an intermission. Then the trio came out and we performed Double Bill. There was another intermission and just my company came back and performed Jukebox, set to the recordings of Glenn Miller.
JW: At the start of Double Bill, you're sitting next to Evans on the piano bench, yes?
BE: Yeah. I sat there while he played Waltz for Debby. As he played, I stood up and danced alone for a while. Then my company slowly came in behind the musicians.
JW: I don't think anybody in Evans’s career ever sat on the bench while he played. I think you hold that distinction.
BE: (Laughs) I had collaborated with jazz musicians before Bill, but I had never been around someone who had such a refined sense of hearing. He seemed to hear every little nuance of sound I made when I danced—foot sounds or breathing sounds—and he seemed to be responding to them in a way that no one else ever had. It felt as if we were having a conversation. He was responding to what I was doing. He wasn't just letting me dance to his music. There was a dialogue taking place.
JW: While you're sitting on the bench with Bill playing, you’re just watching and listening?
BE: Yeah. As I watched, I thought it was fascinating that he moved so little and yet created such a full, rich sound.
JW: What happened after the performance?
BE: We all went out to dinner at a Chinese restaurant—the trio and the dancers. We talked about the experience. The dancers were all stunned. It was such a high for them, for all of us, dancing to Bill’s music. The dancers were telling the trio what a pleasure it was to work with them. Philly Joe was the most outgoing and more talkative than Bill and Michael.
JW: Waltz for Debby is like the song in a child’s music box in which a little plastic ballerina dances a pirouette. Your dancing brought that aspect of the song to life.
BE: Now that we're talking about it, I've got it playing in my head and it always gives me a lot of pleasure. It's such a lovely melody. When I’ve taught technique classes, half the work we do in the class is in 3/4 time. I liked the circularity that it brings into the body. So I love dancing to a waltz
JW: Any thoughts about the trio during those two days?
BE: Just how gracious he and Michael and Philly Joe were and how easy it was to work with them. It wasn't something we had to reach for. It seemed so natural and felt right.
JW: You and Evans collaborated again on October 6 and 7, 1979, yes?
BE: Yes. The whole evening was with Bill and his trio then—bassist Marc Johnson and drummer Joe LaBarbera. The program opened with a set by the Bill Evans Trio. Then we reprised Double Bill. The dancers were dressed in all white and we danced on a white floor. Then there was an intermission. When we came back, the floor was turned over so it was black and we were dressed in black. Then we performed a program we called Mixing It Up.
JW: What did Mixing It Up consist of?
BE: I had taken recordings Bill had made of songs composed by others. We used the same formula. I told him which recordings I was using, and I created a sequence from one to the next. We performed John Carisi's Israel; Cole Porter's After You; our original improv called Craps; Bronislau Kaper's Hi-Lilli, Hi-Lo and Irving Berlin's How Deep Is the Ocean.
JW: How did you handle Craps?
BE: Craps was new. I choreographed it in 7/4 time. Bill sat that one out while Marc and Joe improvised in 7/4 time by watching the dancers. It was so wonderful. We performed Mixing It Up for a few years after that with the recording we made that night. I still use the recording of Craps when I restage the work.
JW: Did Evans like collaborating with you?
BE: He really did, especially after the second program in '79. The audience would not stop applauding for 10 or 15 minutes. It was extraordinary how much the audience loved it. So Bill and I agreed to collaborate for a third time. We even planned to use a red floor. [Photo above, from left, of Bill Evans, Joe LaBarbera and Marc Johnson in 1979]
JW: Was Evans excited?
BE: He was. He said, "We’ll take it to Tokyo,” because he had a such a huge following there. We made plans and we were talking with his manager, Helen Keane. Then he died in September 1980.
JW: Makes you wonder what would have happened had you asked him five years earlier.
BE: That’s true. He had given us permission to perform Double Bill and Mixing It Up, so we made recordings of the music during the 1979 performance. We took Mixing It Up on national tours for two or three years afterward. Wherever we went, people loved it.
JW: What’s your impression of your time with Evans?
BE: It was a career high point. We did something extraordinary. I'm so sorry he passed when he did. He was genuinely excited. It was a new dimension for both of us, for Bill as a trio leader to see dancers inspired by his music and for me, to choreograph his music. In both cases, the performances were on our terms, as we felt it should be.
JW: What’s the legacy?
BE: In 2007, the dance department at the Cornish College of the Arts in Seattle asked me to revive Mixing It Up, the collaboration with Bill, Marc and Joe. So I did. The Cornish music faculty brought in Joe LaBarbera to coach the student musicians because he'd been part of the original collaboration. While we were both working on it, Joe and I did a performance together. It was another highlight of my life. Working with him was a joy and reminded me of that glorious night in October 1979.
JazzWax clips: Here's Double Bill in 1978, including Bill's solo dance to Peace Piece...
And here's Mixing It Up in1980, using a recording of the Bill Evans Trio playing during the original performance in 1979. Bill Evans, Marc Johnson and Joe LaBarbera gave the dance company permission to record and use the music in future performances. This performance occurred on September 2, 1980, 13 days before the pianist's death...
A special thanks to Bill Evans, Carol Ross-Durborow and the Evans Somatic Dance Institute.
