Conversations With Myself

Artist: Bill Evans
Label: Polygram Records
Category: Music

Average customer rating:

Format: Original recording remastered
Media: Audio CD
Number Of Discs: 1

UPC: 731452140920
EAN: 0731452140920
ASIN: B0000047CV

Release Date: 1997-05-20

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Listmania:

Bill Evans: His Very Best CDs
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The Ultimate Bill Evans
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Spellbinding Exercises in Sonic Creativity
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Great music for people who love everything

Tracks:

'Round Midnight
How About You?
Spartacus Love Theme
Blue Monk
Stella By Starlight
Hey, There
N.Y.C.'s No Lark
Just You, Just Me
Bemsha Swing
A Sleepin' Bee

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Customer Reviews:

Still as fresh as it ever was.......2007-02-07

Bill Evans (1929-1980) remains today one of the true avatars of jazz piano in the 20th century, a man whose influence has reached far across the jazz universe. If you aren't careful when first listening to "Conversations with Myself", you may not even notice Bill is the only one playing on these tracks. Using his own 3-way overdubs, Evans produced this revolutionary 1963 recording to mixed reactions in the buying public. Downbeat gave the album a five star review and it also won itself a Grammy award.

On "Conversations with Myself", Evans forms for himself his own trio. The experiment, Evans reasoned, would yield him an even closer affinity to the "other" players. The set kicks things off with the classic Thelonious Monk tune, "`Round Midnight". Evans essentially attains what he set out for on this album. This entire album will pass your taste tests, I'm sure of it. If you take the time to sample the tracks here on Amazon you will see instantly why Bill Evans is considered a legend.

This Creed Taylor recording for Verve has some nice things going for it. This album is a fully restored master edition, transferring analog to digital with 20-bit digital transfer. The disc rests in an attractive digipak complete with liner notes, photography and the original cover art. The sound quality is impeccable on these tracks, and I cannot recommend this one enough.

Not for all Evans fans ..........2004-10-18

I have been listening to Bill Evans since high school and have many of his albums in 33 rpm (revolutions per minute, remember?). He never ceases to amaze, delight, and inspire. "Conversations with Myself" is a definite departure for Evans. Mostly a trio player (with the exception of "Alone"), here he is presented in triplicate. Whether more is less is for each listener to decide. Evans, in the liner notes, seems to have thought that the most interesting question was was this a solo or trio performance?

It seems to be a little of each. Sometimes Piano #1 stops playing chords and plays amazing walking bass lines (How About You? and Blue Monk). These two cuts are brilliant, full of melodic phrases, driving rhythms, and dissonant harmonies. 'Round Midnight, the opener, is haunting ... it will never leave you (and unlike the Romantic Evans, his playing on this cut emulates Monk's choppy, rhythmic style). The last cut, Just You, Just Me, another song in the Monk repertoire, might be a little dense, with all three pianos playing at once, but it is so melodic and frantic ... well, personally when I listen to it, I hope it will never end. And the Love Theme from Spartacus ... it is impossible to describe the beauty of Bill's playing on this. As the album notes say he doesn't just play the essence of a love theme, he plays the essence of love. No argument here.

The other cuts are interesting, but the above-mentioned are my personal favorites, and well worth the price of the CD.

As I said, this Evans album may not be for everybody. Evans himself had questions about the validity of the gimmick of overdubbing. But as someone once said, "There are two kinds of music ... good music and bad music." This is GREAT music.

absolutely necessary...best in headphones.......2004-09-06

"Bill Evans had a lot of ideas and only ten fingers. What great complex things could he do with, say, thirty fingers?"

Well I'm glad you asked becuase your questioned is answered on this very Bill Evans album. He overdubs himself - not once, but twice - to create an astounding and confusing stereophonic experience with three Bills having nice conversations together.

"Well you know Bill played thick enough stuff with only one piano. Doesn't it get really muddy with three of them?"

Yeah maybe a little bit. But most of the time there's only two of them at once. One will be doing the chords and the low end and another will do the melody and some soloing and the third one will echo some ideas or run through really fast complex lies over everything else. Bill generally doesn't get in the way of his own playing, it's almost like he had a lot of things planned out already so that it fit together so well. There are even a lot of parts that sound like the random bursts of creativity that happen when everybody is playing at once, but here they are not playing at once.

"That can't be jazz it's too much like classical music."

Maybe you're right a little bit. It doesn't always swing that hard, and a lot of times it can resemble (in structure) something Bach would have done, but if you dig Bill Evans (and EVERYBODY digs Bill Evans) you would know that a very careful thought out approach is a big part of his playing, and this is just giving it a new setting.

Conversations with Myself is like a solo piano record on speed, or seeing triple, or something. It can get unsteady and confusing or whatever, but it's generally very lucid and who would want to be denied an oppurtunity to hear Bill Evans say so many things at once? That's why it's absolutely necessary, and the stereo separation is why you should use headphones.

contrapuntal experiment.......2004-09-01

It's fitting that Evans recorded this contrapuntal experiment on Glenn Gould's Steinway (Gould would later do something similar, overdubbing himself in a complex arrangement of Wagner's music). Evans wasn't the first, though, to try this: Lennie Tristano, a major influence on Evans, had overdubbed three pianos, each with a different time signature, in his recording "Turkish Mambo." But what makes this album an extraordinary listening experience rather than merely a gimmick is the range of expression, from the hard-swinging "How About You?" to the almost unbearably stark "N.Y.C.'s No Lark" (an elegy to the great pianist Sonny Clark, the title being an anagram based on his name) to the swirling, impressionistic interpretation of Alex North's "Spartacus Love Theme," which in my book ranks as one of the great achievements of Evans's career.

I see this album as one of Evans's more extreme attempts to recapture something like the telepathic rapport he enjoyed in his legendary trio with bassist Scott LaFaro and drummer Paul Motian. Evans spent much of his later career trying to fill the void left by LaFaro's untimely death in an auto accident. I think he saw LaFaro as a kind of "second self," and here he literally plays with two other selves. Yes, there's an artificial, made-in-the-studio quality that prevents this album from reaching the supreme heights of Sunday at the Village Vanguard or Waltz for Debby or Alone or the later Paris Concerts, but it's a bold, fascinating, and moving experiment nonetheless.

A bad idea, all things considered . . ........2001-12-12

Sometime in 1962-1963, apprising the guestlist at a particularly stellar White House dinner, John F. Kennedy pronounced it the finest assemblage of minds "with the possible exception of when Thomas Jefferson dined alone."

A tribute, in his words, to raw genius. But was it that particularly apt? One can only surmise . . .

Skip ahead, some one hundred and sixty years, as another genius "dines alone." For pianist/composer Bill Evans was a genius, in every sense of the word. He constructed chords as no one before him had ever thought to do; he ran those chords together in progressions which had never occurred to anyone before him; whether improvising on a "standard" such as "Stella By Starlight" or working off of original compositions like "N.Y.C.'s No Lark," he established an imprimatur that is impossible for succeeding pianists (myself included, and not anywhere near the fore) to ignore.

So why only two stars for this outing? Simple:

Evans -- and I suspect this is true of virtually all geniuses, whatever their forte (including Jefferson, by the way) -- was at his absolute best in collaboration, in the rough-and-tumble give-and-take of ideas which he bounced (or had bounced upon him) of those surrounding him; whether we're talking the all-time great trio of Evans-Motian-LaForte, or later groupings such as the studio session with Chet Baker, or an even later live gig with the reconfigured Evans trio and tenor saxist Stan Getz (in which Getz, at the last minute, called a tune which they hadn't rehearsed together), Bill Evans' genius shone most brightly in the give-and-take, no-holds-barred atmosphere of improvisation: perhaps it was something in his reclusive nature, a "fear" (whether founded or not) that he would be 'outdone' by those around him -- who can say? -- Evans thrived in these settings, depending upon an instinctive sense of where a fellow musician was headed, as well as his ability to adjust (witness his prodding of Cannonball Adderley in "Kind of Blue"''s 'Flamenco Sketches,' as he tries to lead Adderley into the comp's fourth mode and, ultimately realizing that Cannonball wasn't done with his explorations, settles back to build the tension resulting in the following mode) to propel his musical statements.

This sense -- not to mention the 'tension' -- is lacking here. Evans, overdubbing himself (and frequently overdubbing those initial overdubs), knows exactly where he's going (based upon where he's already been). The ultimate result is, more than anything else, a compositional homage to the "classical masters" he had previously studied (he had a particular fondness for the Russian "moderns," although most biographers tend to overlook the influence of Prokofiev) . . .

But it's nowhere near great jazz; and it's nowhere near Evans' best efforts.

Which, of course, begs the question: What great thoughts did Thomas Jefferson think when he dined alone?

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