Jessica Williams - 'Love And Hate'

One good pianist deserves another – and Jessica Williams was one of the finest. Appropriately enough, she recorded 'a solo tribute to Bill Evans', aptly entitled Joyful Sorrow because one feels such a similar aching sense of beauty and sadness while listening to both pianists. Not that Jessica Williams was a mere Bill Evans acolyte: she also recorded tributes to Duke Ellington, Thelonious Monk and John Coltrane among the sixty or so albums she made in her curtailed lifetime. In this extended solo performance there is, too, more than a hint of McCoy Tyner.

Although she recorded mainly in a solo capacity or within the classic piano-trio format, she told fellow jazz pianist Marian McPartland that her main influences were in fact horn players such as Coltrane and Miles Davis, and there's a certain sense of the latter's mid-period minimalist approach to jazz in 'Love and Hate'. It was recorded on the 6^th January 2006 in Seattle on the Pacific west coast where she holed up for much of her career, which helps to explain why she remained so comparatively underrated and little known outside her adopted California and her native Baltimore. I forget how or when I first heard her, but remember buying her album Nothin' But The Truth when wandering the streets of Cologne with a baby girl strapped to my chest. Her mother was appearing in some obscure drama commissioned by S4C, the Welsh language TV channel, so I took the opportunity to bond with my perplexing infant daughter. Subsequently, I somehow managed to scratch the album's finest moment, the pianist's interpretation of Monk's 'Ugly Beauty'. It makes me doubly sad every time I listen to it.

The liner notes to the LP are typical of an artist who was rarely if ever flashy and who never took herself too seriously. 'I was born and raised in Baltimore,' she writes, 'studied the classics at the Peabody Conservatory there, started gigging at fifteen, and moved to Philadelphia in my twenties, where I played with the great "Philly Joe" Jones [late of Miles Davis's 1950s band] among others. The year 1978 saw me in San Francisco, where I became "house pianist" at the now-defunct Keystone Korner.' A star is born. You'll hear her classical roots at play here: If you created a Venn Diagram, elements of Debussy, Bill Evans and McCoy Tyner would intersect somewhere in the middle ground where jazz meets classical. Indeed, in the mid section of the piece – somewhere between the six-and-a-half and nine-and-a-half minute markers, before the repetitive Tyner-like motif returns – there seems to be a bit of Mozart thrown in for good measure.

It's all a bit on the mauve side and, at 13-plus minutes, it demands ones undivided attention and a certain patience, but since it appears to be the only live video of Jessica Williams at work on YouTube, it's a precious record of a true artist in the throes of creation. Take a few deep breaths and find a very quiet spot...

In the liner notes to Nothin' But The Truth, Jessica Williams writes with true insight about the process of performing music: 'When you play out "at" an audience, you perform... It's a one-way affair. When you play inward, the music becomes conversational, personal, and inventive; the audience is invited into the circle of cross-talk, and becomes an active participant in the process. Of course, this is asking something of our audience, in that their capacity to listen and assimilate our conversations is crucial.' Listen and watch. The camera's ability to home in on a subject adds a fascinating dimension, as we get to see in close-up how the pianists two hands work in tandem: the insistent left-hand motif builds a sense of underlying drama that threatens to undermine the delicate figures created by her busy right hand. Similar to Keith Jarrett in its meditative quality – except that Jessica Williams makes no verbal noise – the delicate, fragile beauty of her improvisation leaves an impression of something slightly Japanese about it: like a 'floating world' woodcut of the 19^th century that's both of this world and beyond it. Typically, too, of this modest, somewhat unsung heroine, her quietly epic creation ends not with a showy rumpus, but with an understated treble note that resonates briefly, almost apologetically before the audience wakes from its trance.

She also vividly suggests what music meant to her – and probably to many of us who find it hard to articulate. 'Music is, to me, a great mansion; a palatial yet warmly-inviting mansion filled with art treasures, relics, trap-doors, hidden passage-ways, dark closets and sun-drenched reading rooms. Like a huge old house that you can live in for years and never know all of its secrets.' In 'Love And Hate', Jessica Williams takes us on an extended tour of that house, lingering mainly in the luminous reading rooms, but never shying away from the hidden passage-ways and dark closets.

Bill Evans - My Foolish Heart

To pick up where I left off last time with the Kind Of Blue ensemble, here's Bill Evans looking like a frazzled civil servant wrestling with a dossier from some self-important junior minister. It's 1964 and in a few short years Evans would change his look so dramatically as to be almost unrecognisable, becoming a long-haired bearded lecturer in the liberal arts at some red-brick university. By then, the pianist was troubled by stomach ulcers, liver problems and drug-dependence that would carry him off to The Last Piano Show in 1980 at age 51. Clearly, the man was a troubled soul, yet – like so many great artists – capable of creating works of intense heart-wrenching beauty. Orrin Keepnews, head of Riverside Records with whom Evans recorded some of his greatest work in the late Fifties and early Sixties wrote of how hard it was to 'shake off first impressions... of a diffident young musician who set almost impossible standards for himself and was quick to find fault with his attempts to reach his goals.'

I chose this particular performance for a number of reasons. It seems, to my untrained ears at least, a virtually faultless rendition of a song that was a staple of Evans' live performances – a song, moreover, that illustrates the ability of jazz musicians to take popular material (in this case a song, written by Victor Young and Ned Washington for a film of the same name, which sold a million when the baritone jazz crooner Billy Eckstine recorded it in the early Fifties) and turn it into timeless art. Despite numbers like 'Waltz For Debby', Evans wasn't best noted for his own compositions; instead, he made a career of interpreting this kind of popular song with mainly infallible taste and distinction (apart from a few questionable numbers like 'Theme From M.A.S.H').

And, for most of that abbreviated career, Evans recorded in the context of a simple piano trio. While this video doesn't feature his most celebrated line-up – that of Paul Motian on drums and the prodigious Scott LaFaro, whose death in a car accident just over a week after the classic Sunday At The Village Vanguard album on which the song first appeared absolutely devastated the pianist – nevertheless it shows what the piano-bass-drums format is capable of: the depth of feeling and the sincerity is there for all to see and hear. What's more, it's an unadulterated and uninterrupted interpretation: Evans and Evans alone, which wasn't always the case with his democratic trios, with no break for a double bass solo nor for the more occasional drum solo. Drum solos generally bore me rigid, break up a prevalent mood and trigger nightmares of Ginger Baker flailing away at an oversized kit for minute after tedious minute. Double bass solos are generally much more delicate and sympathetic affairs. Chuck Israels nailed the slot during the hiatus between LaFaro and Evans' long-term trusty cohort, Eddie Gomez. He doesn't solo here, but his tone is as big and round as the drummer's (probably Larry Bunker, who would go on to work with the likes of Tim Buckley, Diana Krall and even U2) brushwork is light and unobtrusive.

Tenor saxophonist Archie Shepp believed that Bill Evans' best work was with Miles Davis' sextet, the briefest part of an already brief career. He liked his ballad material 'but Debussy and Satie have already done those things.' It's true that you can hear the influence of such French musical impressionists, a label – like 'romanticist' – that was often given to the pianist, but Evans was an important stylist rather than a copyist and you can also hear how his quietly personal innovations would influence many a great jazz pianist to come: Herbie Hancock, Brad Mehldau and particularly Keith Jarrett. His music could be rarefied at times, but it was also arguably the most consistently sensitive and moving of any of the major-league jazz pianists. For someone who has often been likened to Frédéric Chopin, another prolific pianist who died way too young, Bill Evans left a considerable body of recordings, any one of which makes for a perfect soundtrack to Sunday morning breakfast in this household – when you don't want anything too challenging or obtrusive, but you don't want pap either. As Abe Gibson comments, 'Folks if ya don't dig this stuff then ya ain't got any soul.'