Bill Evans: How My Heart Sings..........

[Darina]

... by Peter Pettinger


This is a beautiful book. Poetically written, informative, warm. Anyone else here read it? After having read Miles' Autobiography and being soaked in that, it's lovely to see things whilst being Evans soaked. Seeing the same sessions from another side... makes you hear the recordings slightly differently. Very interesting.

[gdogus]

It's now on my Christmas list!

[Darina]

...there's this passage.. a quote of Evans' about the poet William Blake.

"He's almost like a folk poet, but he reaches heights of art because of his simplicity. The simple things, the essences, are the great things, but our way of expressing them can be incredibly complex. It's the same thing with technique in music. You try to express a simple emotion--love, excitement, sadness--and often your technique gets in the way. It becomes an end in itself when it should really be the funnel through which your feelings and ideas are communicated. The great artist always gets right to the heart of the matter. His technique is so natural it's invisible or unhearable."

[jlhoots]

Excellent book.

[mickey/lynn]

I am a huge fan of Bill Evans. I went thru a period where "I" was even contemplating writing a book on him myself!! So you can imagine my joy when I saw this book at Border's. I must say, as far as being an biography, it didn't offer too much information on his personal life, his early years and so on and so forth...Gene Lee's book "Meet me at Jim and Andy's" gave a much more insightful glimpse ito his personal life in 20 pages than this whole book did!!! I'm not knocking the book, I was glad to see it (there's also another book on evan's out--I read a review of it, I have yet to see it) Gene Lees implies in his book that a lot of people who knew evans are reluctant to share their memories of him--I got the impression from everything I have ever read about him, that he was a very intelligent, warm person (think Nat King Cole- I'm a huge fan of his, have yet to come across any negative remarks about him) well liked and loved. The fact that he was a junkie seems to have stunned everyone, and maybe that's why no one really likes to share their memories- how can that issue not be addresed??? Again, I am NOT knocking the book, I did enjoy it.:wink2:

[JuniorMember]

Enrico Pieranunzi
Bill Evans: The Pianist As An Artist/
Bill Evans: Ritratto d'artista con piano forte

The book is accompanied by a CD by Pieranunzi in various settings.
The CD is marvellous. So far I've only caught a glimse of the Italian edition (don't read Italian too well)

It looked very interesting, and I wonder if anyone knows this bilingual edition?