My Comments

This enthralling book is a first step to get acquainted with Bill Evans' mesmerizing works throughout his largely calm and tranquil musical career. Peter Pettinger, as a concert pianist, explores Bill's life from a classical musician standpoint without forgetting to shed insights into Bill's jazz playing. Pettinger employs a praiseworthy mechanism to compliment Bill's immaculate accuracy, flawless timing and superb style. Having studied Rachmaninoff and influenced by Bach as a youth, Bill continued to explore the quiet side of jazz by listening to Bud Powell and Nat King Cole Trio as these two figures served as his initial inspiration. Never swinging quite like Red Garland and Wynton Kelly, Bill got a call from Miles Davis and emerged as the leading white pianist in the world's best black jazz group.

Pettinger's book not only outlines Bill's roots in European classical music, his heritage in Russian culture, his childhood life in New Jersey, but also travels through Bill's musicianship as first a sideman of Tony Scott's band, and then a remarkable pianist of the legendary Miles Davis Sextet, going to make the masterpiece Kind of Blue, and later as a leader of his various trios, but most notably the one with Scott LaFaro and Paul Motian. This biography also centers on Bill's experience of racial discrimination (in the black neighborhood), his talents for sports, love for the Village Vanguard (as he calls his "home") and heroin addiction.

Though Bill's later career was not as successful as his earlier one (as in the case with most musicians), this book does Bill a favor not to romanticize on Bill's dreamlike celebrity status, but instead offers an authentic account of what really happened, not through first-person interviews, but through objective third person accounts from people who knew Bill the most. No wonder why Pettinger describes his book as a product of "eavesdropping" in his Prologue, "I could never pick up the confidence to speak to [Bill]. Courage apart, though, part of me did not really want, or need, to meet him. It may sound sentimental to say so, but the music was enough, and I do not regret the anonymity."

The title of the biography is aptly titled, How My Heart Sings. This book is best accompanied with Bill's most influential recordings such as "Sunday at Village Vanguard, " "Waltz For Debby," "Kind of Blue," "Portrait in Jazz," etc. Only by doing so, in addition to hearing how his heart sings, one will also feel how his heart cries. Echoing the author's sentiments, Bill's music is enough - it is enough for us to reflect on our past, re-evaluate relationships with people we love, recapture the very things that make our hearts sing.

Henry Y. Chung
Washington D.C. January 28, 2001