Bill Evans

Haven't had enough Bill Evans? Here's an opportunity to fill up your already teeming Evans shelf with yet another multiple-CD collection. Packaged in an astonishingly ugly steel box, this 18-CD collection covers Evans' entire output for Verve during the period between 1962 and 1970. Typically, the compilation is loaded with alternate takes, false starts, assorted studio dialogue and a few bonus items.

It's highly probable that any living music legend you could eavesdrop on during the recording of an album would unearth anecdotes and life lessons. Celebrated American-standards crooner Tony Bennett is that guy in "The Zen of Bennett," filmed by his producer son Danny and director Unjoo Moon as he recorded last year's Grammy-winning "Duets II" on the cusp of turning 85. Given an artfully lighted, lounge-club atmosphere (sometimes facile-ly so) by cinematographer Dion Beebe, the movie allows Bennett - mostly through overheard chats - to wax coolly on dressing well, how fame goes but quality stays, and the greats he's known: Basie, Ira Gershwin, Bill Evans.

Harry Pickens playing a musical tribute to pianist Bill Evans is a little like George Gershwin playing a tribute to Debussy. Their two styles could not be more different. Evans, a major though little-known figure in the history of jazz, is remembered most often for his quiet, introverted delicacy. He died in 1980. Pickens, a dynamic, 6-foot, 9-inch pianist who has a commanding stage presence, works in an exuberant, extroverted style that is almost the antithesis of Evans'.

Paul Motian, an influential and much-admired jazz drummer who first gained renown in the late 1950s as part of the Bill Evans Trio and later became a composer and the leader of his own groups, has died. He was 80. Motian died Tuesday at Mount Sinai Hospital in New York City of complications from myelodysplastic syndrome, a bone marrow disorder, said Tina Pelikan, a spokeswoman for ECM Records. During his nearly six-decade career, Motian (pronounced like "motion") spent a substantial amount of time with two of the finest jazz pianists: Evans and Keith Jarrett.

Bill Evans ranks with Duke Ellington, Louis Armstrong and Miles Davis among the most recorded of jazz musicians. In addition to these two collections of previously unreleased material, Fantasy has already released "The Complete Riverside Recordings" on 12 CDs and "The Complete Fantasy Recordings" on nine CDs. Sometime next year, Verve plans to issue an 18-CD boxed set of the pianist's complete work for the label between 1962 and 1970.

It's natural for David Benoit, a keyboardist known for his expressionistic ways, to play the music of Bill Evans, the late pianist revered for his own expressive, deeply revealing style. Benoit, who appears at the Coach House tonight, says he'll open the concert with the title tune from his latest album, "Letter to Evan." The tune, written by Evans a year before his death in 1980 from a bleeding ulcer and pneumonia, was addressed to his then 4-year-old son.

Imagine you're a jazz singer looking for some interesting new material. There's always the material in the Great American Songbook, of course. Rarely heard gems, perhaps, from Cole Porter, Jerome Kern or the Gershwins. Or maybe a few offbeat Ellington items or some Jon Hendricks scat lyrics. OK, but how about Bill Evans? Most singers, at this point, would take a deep breath and say, "The jazz piano-playing Bill Evans?"

On the heels of Scott DeVaux's monumental "The Birth of Bebop" and Ted Gioia's definitive one-volume survey of America's classical music, "The History of Jazz," a bonanza of recent books testifies to the dogged endurance of the art form. In 1960 Dwight Macdonald marveled at "the amazing survival of jazz despite the exploitative onslaughts of half a century of commercial entrepreneurs."

"Starlight Express," the $8-million roller skating musical about a railroad race across the United States, has again postponed its Broadway opening and will premiere on March 15, instead of Thursday night. "The actors simply need more performance time," Bill Evans, a spokesman for the show, said Tuesday. The musical, written by Andrew Lloyd Webber and Richard Stilgoe and directed by Trevor Nunn, has sold $5 million worth of tickets. It was to have originally opened Feb.

Re "Wasilla gadfly swirls in a storm," Column One, Sept. 30 Public service and informing the readers is a charter your news organization performed well in publishing the article about Gov. Sarah Palin's critic and watchdog-gadfly, Anne Kilkenny. Keep up the good work. We need all the help we can get in these times of media operatives and half-truths. Facts and a search for truth help citizens make up their own minds and exercise the core principles of this republic -- get out and vote.

Apple on Thursday shaved $500 off the price of the upgraded version of its supermodel-thin MacBook Air laptop, to $2,598 from $3,098. The base model, with a slower processor and hard-disk drive instead of the solid-state drive, remains $1,799. Apple wouldn't say whether the price reduction had anything to do with the July 11 release of its highly anticipated iPhone 3G. Said spokesman Bill Evans: "From time to time we adjust the price of configure-to-order options for our systems."

Like many of the jazz pianists who arrived on the scene in the past few decades, Fred Hersch has clearly been impacted by the late Bill Evans. But for Hersch -- unlike many of his contemporaries -- that influence has served as a creative stimulus rather than a model for emulation.

Morgan "Bill" Evans, who guided the landscape design of Disney's theme parks for half a century, from the planning of Disneyland to consulting in the planning for Hong Kong Disneyland, expected to open three years from now, has died. He was 92. Evans, of Malibu, died Saturday at St. John's Hospital in Santa Monica. The cause was not reported.

When pianist Evan Horne arrived in Europe, hoping to kick-start the career comeback that had been eluding him, the mystery surrounding Chet Baker was the last thing on his mind. But when his friend Ace Buffington, who was writing a book about Baker, asked him to get together at Amsterdam's Prins Hendrik Hotel, the very place where Baker died, he agreed. Why not, Horne figured.

Vital Information's press data describe the band as an "all-star soul/jazz/rock super group." OK. But even granting the fact that its members--drummer-leader Steve Smith, keyboardist Tom Coster, guitarist Frank Gambale and bassist Baron Browne--have a collective resume that includes gigs with the likes of Journey, Chick Corea, Santana and Billy Cobham, that's a lot of hyperbole for anyone to have to live up to.

Re "Wasilla gadfly swirls in a storm," Column One, Sept. 30 Public service and informing the readers is a charter your news organization performed well in publishing the article about Gov. Sarah Palin's critic and watchdog-gadfly, Anne Kilkenny. Keep up the good work. We need all the help we can get in these times of media operatives and half-truths. Facts and a search for truth help citizens make up their own minds and exercise the core principles of this republic -- get out and vote.

Morgan "Bill" Evans, who guided the landscape design of Disney's theme parks for half a century, from the planning of Disneyland to consulting in the planning for Hong Kong Disneyland, expected to open three years from now, has died. He was 92. Evans, of Malibu, died Saturday at St. John's Hospital in Santa Monica. The cause was not reported.

Roseanna Vitro's Texas blues roots didn't surface until the very end of her first set at the Jazz Bakery on Tuesday night. Prior to that, she devoted a substantial portion of her program to songs from her new recording, "Thoughts of Bill Evans." As the title indicates, the material is a collection of tunes in which words have been added to some classic Evans compositions.

Imagine you're a jazz singer looking for some interesting new material. There's always the material in the Great American Songbook, of course. Rarely heard gems, perhaps, from Cole Porter, Jerome Kern or the Gershwins. Or maybe a few offbeat Ellington items or some Jon Hendricks scat lyrics. OK, but how about Bill Evans? Most singers, at this point, would take a deep breath and say, "The jazz piano-playing Bill Evans?"