Bill Evans: Everything Happens to Me: A Musical Biography Paperback – March 1, 2002

I am a Jazz Piano player & from an early age found the great Bill Evans & from then on proceeded to obtain every recording & interview he ever did. This book exceeded all my expectations with such in depth information about his life & his music , a must for every Jazz musicians library

for bill evans fans

Five stars for the subject matter, 2 stars for the tiny print.

The author should be ashamed to have something unreadable attached to his name, but he doesn't. Sorry I spent money for this🤬🤬🤬

Like Tahwuh2002, I wanted to push up the unfairly low rating of this book. It seems to be the case that too many of the reviewers here just prefer the mystique over the reality. This is a very much better book than Pettinger's -- more detailed, more thoroughly researched and more clear-sighted. It's also, I would guess, substantially longer than Pettinger's book, though you'd never know that from the page count (yes, the tiny print, square format and narrow margins are somewhat hard-going on the eyes -- but you get used to it after a while).

I honestly don't know what the other people who rated this book are talking about. It's tremendous, as beautifully designed and informative as anything I've ever read on Evans. If there are minor discography errors here and there - few books this all-encompassing are letter-perfect - it hardly means the work is a travesty. On the contrary, it's absolutely brimming with useful information, both personal and technical, and the photos are great. A joy from beginning to end, regardless of what some obsessives (or the apparently cheesed-off Bill Evans estate) would like you to think.

I attended SLU and heard him play in our Jazz band while there,,I recently visitedRoselawn cemetary in Baton Rouge where Bill and brother Harry are buried.,my home town. J. Davis

Nice paper.Cool photos, coffee-table-book-style.Some essential, unique source material for Evansologists, and some good musical analysis.Awkward square shape.Ridiculously small print.(Was this planned as a REAL coffee table-sized volume, like Shadwick’s excellent ILLUSTRATED HISTORY OF JAZZ, until budgetary restraints gutted it?)`Not as good a “read” as, but offering more musical analysis than, the other general Bill Evans biography, Pettinger’s HOW MY HEART SINGS.Nevertheless, both Pettinger and Shadwick (published in 1998 and 2002, respectively) could do with a revision. This is due to the enormous amount of newly discovered, top-drawer Evans recordings (live and studio), superbly “de-bootlegged” by Zev Feldman and released on the Resonance and Elemental labels, since 2012. Most of this material is, in fact, so much more inspired and “characteristic” than, say, most of the commercial Verve sessions of 1962-1970, that an overall re-appraisal of Evans’ work is called for. (Certainly, none of the other Verve trio albums reach as high a level as the 1966 Town Hall or 1968 Montreaux Festival discs.)To be fair to both Pettinger and Shadwick, such recently unearthed treasures were mostly unknown, hidden, only available as sonically compromised bootlegs, or contractually unreleasable until Zev Feldman’s efforts in the 2010s & 20s. (Although Pettinger DOES mention the March 25, 1969 Hilversum, Netherland date, and writes that “the session would make a fine CD,” which of course it eventually did when Zev Feldman de-bootlegged it as part of BEHIND THE DIKES: THE 1969 NETHERLANDS RECORDINGS.)I won’t quite throw out my copy of EVERYTHING HAPPENS. But, needing a less frustrating layout AND a revision, this falls short of being the comprehensive re-appraisal of Bill Evans we have been waiting for…Perhaps Marc Meyers will do it?(Sorry.)

Perfect

Deeply Interesting insight into a magical period of time for music and one of the men who shaped it.

Not for musicians only, the story is seamlessly written and the many nice photos (some of which I had never seen before) make it up a pleasant and interesting bio of one of the most prominent figures in modern jazz.

今年出たばかりの、ペティンガーの伝記に続くもの。ペティンガーのものはゲラ刷り段階で初めて見たそうです。まだ半分、ヴァーヴ時代の初期の当たりまでしか読んでいませんが、「音楽的伝記」と副題にあるとおり、レコードを丹念に追っていくポリシーが長所でもあり短所でもあるという感じ。やはりファンとしては、いかに通俗的といわれようとも、実人生に関するデータがもっとほしい。珍しい写真もふくめて１００以上が掲載されているのは魅力。ラファロ、モチアンとのトリオのバードランドでの海賊盤がオミットされているのがふにおちない。しかし、充分な力作と思います。