album: Bill Evans: Explorations (1961)

Bill Evans had terrible posture: this much is true. His early days, his limp cigarette and his suit; his late days, his plaid, his beard, his booze belly–Leonard Bernstein describes the modern jazz musician of the 1950s, the Ivy League sweater and the horn-rimmed glasses, and Bill Evans comes to mind: boring. How does jazz turn into background music? What is it about the structure of his chords and how big they seem, how they move up and down the keys like wet bricks and are yet so much more boring than Nat King Cole’s? There’s something so serious about Bill Evans, something so academic and maybe even sterile, that in this whole album I find nothing worth holding onto.