Book Description

Amazon.com
Perhaps it was a white jazz musician's need to negate his very ordinary American boyhood, or maybe it was in the genes he inherited from his alcoholic father--no one can be quite sure--but Bill Evans, one of the most influential American jazz pianists ever, was a drug addict. He picked up his habit shortly after joining the Miles Davis Sextet in the 1950s, but it took Evans more than 20 years to be swallowed by the abyss of heroin, methadone, and cocaine. Sitting at the piano in the shadow of Davis, John Coltrane, Cannonball Adderley, Paul Chambers, and Philly Joe Jones--the era's paragons of cool--could not have been easy for the retiring musician who suffered harsh ribbing at the hands of both bandmates and fans. Ironically, as the drugs distorted Evans's body and soul, his fingers coaxed ever more sublime music from his keyboard. Biographer Peter Pettinger was himself a professional pianist and a longtime listener of Evans, so he is expert at articulating the nuances of the music. He is perceptive too in exploring the forces that imbued in one life so much beauty and so much pain. The result is a book that is both a memorial to a burdened man and an homage to his transcendent music.

The New York Times Book Review, Terry Teachout
...his book is packed with so much shrewd critical commentary that it reads at times more like an annotated discography than a biography.

The Wall Street Journal, Adam Bresnick
For all his enthusiasm and musical knowledge, Mr. Pettinger has produced a curiously flat book that reads more like an annotated discography than a bona fide biography.... One has the sense that Mr. Pettinger is a fanatic devotee of Evans, but not really a jazz fan.

The Los Angeles Times Sunday Book Review, Grover Sales
The book may appeal more to specialists than to the casual reader, because Pettinger, with his practiced ear, examines every Evans record, composition, club date and collaborator, his literary gifts and his tragedy-ridden life...