Customer Reviews

Conversations With Myself

5 star:		(11)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

"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.

How anyone can overdub, knowing when and what to play, is pretty much beyond me. How Evans can turn it into a conversation somewhat reminiscent of J.S. Bach (though not nearly as complex) and for the most part keep the textures clean can only be put down to genius. I have a few reservations with the CD - three pianos is probably one too many (producing, on occasion, thick, muddled harmonies), the sound quality isn't perfect, and it probably doesn't swing as much as it could. It's probably not the best introduction to Evans' music (try Sunday at the Village Vanguard), but if you want something a bit different, a little classically orientated and indicative of the man's genius, buy this CD. It's definitely still worth the 5 stars.

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.

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.

Evans' 1963 album for Verve was an overdub experiment featuring renditions of `Round Midnight' and `Stella by Starlight'. On "Conversations with Myself", Evans formed for himself his own trio. The experiment, Evans reasoned, would yield him an even closer affinity to the "other" players. Downbeat gave the album a five star review and the album also won Evans a Grammy. The album comes in digipak packaging and has been fully restored using a 20-bit transfer. Order yourself a copy and be treated to the creative genius of the prolific composer that was Bill Evans.

Conversations with myself is an incredibly original approach to piano virtuosism. I suggest listening to the recording with and without hadphones: with headphones one becomes aware of the subtle game of overdubbed parts, without, you get the beauty of the whole. What strikes me most is Evans' ability to perfectly complement HIMSELF through overdubbed takes. I strongly recommend this recording, at its time a novelty in the idea of solistic recordings.

Let me say right away: I'm a big Bill Evans fan. Big. As in huge. It is only slightly exaggerating to say that because of Bill Evans, I decided to learn how to play jazz piano. Portrait in Jazz blew me away so completely that I had to have more, so I grabbed up The Complete Village Vanguard Recordings, 1961 soon after. That kept me going until I discovered Bill's work on the legendary Kind of Blue, then fell into the male vocal jazz realm and quickly ran across The Tony Bennett/Bill Evans Album. My wife suggested picking up Everybody Digs Bill Evans (XRCD), and that too is so spectacularly rich and rewarding it never gets dusty sitting on the shelf, as it is always out and about being listened to somewhere. In short, I've listened to and pursued Bill Evans' music in every direction and niche and never found anything even remotely unsatisfying or boring. Until this CD. I don't know if Bill made this at the height of his popularity so he figured he could get away with not actually producing any meaningful music, or maybe this was recorded when he was in one of his heroin-induced hazes, (you know, conversing with himself) or something. Whatever the case may be, this doesn't even really sound like Bill Evans. It's not exactly bad, per se. The two Monk tunes and Stella are pretty cool, but most everything else just sounds so completely uninspired and nothing like the Bill Evans music we fans have come to know and love. The songs are lackadaisical. The playing is technically competent but lacking any originality or depth. When the recording was done playing, I was relieved that I could stop waiting for something good to happen. That's right. I was glad that a Bill Evans recording was over. I listened to it a couple of more times over a couple of days, but I regret to have to say, I never felt any differently (or better) about it. I suppose at some point in the future I will play this again. Maybe I'll see something that I'm missing just now. Maybe I'll hear an aspect of Bill Evans I've never heard before. Or maybe, I will put it back on the shelf to languish while I listen to my Bill Evans recordings that don't irritate and disappoint me.

This is an album where Bill Evans plays piano with overdubbing; the sound seems to be too annoying; I strongly prefer his trio albums - piano/drums/bass (in which I think the pianist reaches the highest levels).
I can't help but giving this album 1 star, because, IMHU, this is not the real Bill Evans.

No two ways about it, this is some exquisite work for solo piano, as filtered uniquely through one of our most intelligent players. Even if it does lack some emotional heft at times, the conceptual brilliance behind Evan's dual technicalities ensures an inspired listen.

This record is amazing. Bill evans always had a unique way of playing jazz that made it sound almost classical. His classical style is perfect for solo performances and this album is another example. Bill Evans plays very complex lines at the same time but they rarely get in each others way. In a response to the reviewer that said this album is not good because Bill already knows where he is going is ridiculous. Each part is well thought out and is played to perfection. My favorite tracks are Spartacus Love Theme and How About You.