Discovering the first collection of duets between popular singer Tony Bennett and jazz pianist Bill Evans—an event that occurred one afternoon deep in the heart of the ’70s—popped my top and buttered my bread.
Hey, I was a sensitive kid deeply geeked out about jazz. I was cool enough to know that listening to The Starland Vocal Band or Kansas or Styx was a dead end, but I was hardly hip enough to know that certain kinds of sincerity—quiet, earnest expressions of feeling—were the very essence of command. Tony Bennett, to my ’70s teenage ears, was one of those singers my parents put on the “hi-fi” when they were drinking “highballs” with other people who didn’t like rock ‘n’ roll. He left his heart in San Francisco, I knew that much.
Bill Evans, on the other hand, was one of the hippest and most influential of all jazz pianists, a tortured loner of a guy (and an addict, too) whose music ripped at your soul. The flat-out genius behind Miles Davis’ Kind of Blue, Evans was The Real Thing. So, when I saw an album cover featuring the two of them together I thought, Huh? What were these guys doing recording together?
Loving What I Barely Understood
But the moment I put the record on, I was blinkered and dazzled, hardly listening to anything else for weeks. The Tony Bennett Bill Evans Album came out in 1975 on Fantasy (Evans’ label), but I didn’t discover it until 1977 or so. I was a 16-year-old kid with a girlfriend named “Holly” and all of suburban New Jersey at my disposal, yet for a couple of weeks all I did was sit in front the stereo in the den, listening to “Young and Foolish” or “Some Other Time”. Hip-notized.
Bennett, I immediately concluded, was no square. His approach to these great songs made him about the best jazz singer you’d ever heard. That is to say, he sounded like a male Billie Holiday: no flippy-dippy scatting or Bobby Darin affectation, but just a deep understanding of the lyric expressed in subtle but masterfully swinging rhythmic variations. Bennett was three years older than my parents (49 the year that first album was recorded), but I forgave him instantly. Middle age, man—it was instantly cool. Bennett’s voice dripped with world-weary knowledge. I wanted some.
As I already knew, Bill Evans’ impressionistic approach to the piano was better than hip—it was elegant and genre-defying. Though he could play with as much fire and swing as Red Garland or Horace Silver, Evans added to the jazz arsenal certain shades, pastels if you wanted to hear them that way, that gave jazz another way to penetrate deeper than finger-popping. Teamed up with this Bennett guy? It almost seemed like classical music.
One example is enough to explain it. How often does a jazz singer begin a song a cappella? On “The Touch of Your Lips”, Tony jumps right in, taking three full bars before Bill even nudges into the action. Together, they are as relaxed as two brothers chatting about a baseball game. But then Tony steps aside to let Bill play the “A” section solo, tit for tat. When Tony reenters after 16 bars, the duo has modulated to a new key where they get in a jaunty groove.
Evans’ proper solo contains minimal departure from the melody, almost as if the pianist were paying tribute to his partner, mimicking Bennett’s subtle rhythmic shifts and jogs. It’s unusually complete piano playing even though it’s not flashy—that is until Bennett rejoins on the second half of the melody and makes you feel that these artists must be joined at the hip.
I listened to The Tony Bennett Bill Evans Album and didn’t care whether it was “jazz” or whether my parents also liked it. It was great music, period. It seemed enough to inspire a kid to get himself a serious girlfriend prontissimo so he’d have a reason to put this platter on the hi-fi yourself and dim the lights. It instantly became my favorite jazz vocal album. Sorry, Ella, Billie, Louis. And, Mr. Francis Albert Sinatra—this album made me forget you even existed, even though I’m from freakin’ New Jersey.
Searching to Find the High Again
The problem with this disc was in replacing it. Only 35-minutes of music: you could listen to it twice in the time it took some people to get dressed. There had to be more jazz that found this balance. Probably another duo. Probably another great singer and accompanist.
And I looked. In the mid-70s, a movement of brilliant instrumental duos was apparent. Chick Corea and Gary Burton produced Crystal Silence on ECM in 1972 and achieved riveting, meditative beauty without sacrificing a sense of jazz urgency. Burton’s first duet set with guitarist Ralph Towner (Matchbook, also ECM) contained intimate, delicious versions of “Icarus”, “Goodbye Porkpie Hat” and even Bernstein’s “Some Other Time”.
Problem was: every time I listened, I heard Tony singing it in my head. As a pianist, I fell in love for a while with the two double-album collections of Chick Corea and Herbie Hancock playing live duets together (CoreaHancock on Polydor and An Evening with Herbie Hancock and Chick Corea on Columbia, both 1978), but some of the tracks here were half-an-hour long. Bloated music does not for romance make.
Vocal duets were harder to find. Ella Fitzgerald recorded a mostly-duo collection with Oscar Peterson (Ella and Oscar on Pablo) in 1975, which led me to her early duo discs (Pure Ella in 1950 with Ellis Larkins and The Intimate Ella from 1960 with Paul Smith). Nearly all of these are wonderful, and—to my chamber music ears, anyway—infinitely preferable to Ella’s famed “Songbook” albums where her voiced is slathered in schmaltzy strings.
“Mean to Me” from 1975 is irresistibly playful, and “I’m Getting Sentimental Over You” from 1960 features all of the singer’s richness but also her intimacy. But none of these sides strike the sparks of Bennett/Evans: the 1950 and 1960 dates keeps the pianos far back in the mix where they never get to be an equal partner, and Oscar Peterson spars with Ella more than he works with her. Those duets are fun but not breathtaking.
More genial and personal are the many duet records that Ella recorded for Pablo with guitarist Joe Pass between 1973 (Take Love Easy) and 1986 (Easy Living). I listened to Fitzgerald and Pass… Again (1976) about a million times because hearing Ella sing “My Old Flame” accompanied only by an acoustic guitar gave me chills.
Ella was not quite 60 when this track went down, and the critics who felt she’d lost her voice by then were just crazy. Here was a mature woman at the height of her powers—if not vocally then certainly interpretively—singing intimately about her past. If it’s been done better, then it could only be by Bennett and Evans in their version of “Young and Foolish”. Ah, you see, it all comes back to that record.
Plenty of Love, but No Musical Spark
Plenty of Love, but No Musical Spark
When I first encountered the Bennett/Evans duets, I was a kid getting my first sense of what musical romance really felt like. I fell in love with nine performances that expertly straddled the strengths of pop singing (directness, emotional clarity) and jazz (elastic swing, spontaneous communication, surprise).
But what foolish searchers we were back in those days of hanging in “record shops” and flipping—kind of “whumping” the 12-inch LPs in their shrink-wrapped cardboard sleeves—through collections by hand. No Internet, no Amazon, no DowntownMusicGallery.com. So I had no reasonable way of knowing that Bennett and Evans had, in fact, recorded a second collection of duets in September of 1976, but that this second collection was released by Bennett’s small Improv Records, with weak distribution.
Together Again looked terrible when I finally found it in a cheesy compact disc reissue on DRG Records, with a color scheme in Kelly green and neon blue and a cover photo with Evans in a leather jacket and ghastly full beard. I dashed home, turned down the lights, and made my wife listen with me. Plenty of love there, but no huge musical spark.
The ’76 session wasn’t awful; it just wasn’t what I’d dreamed of for two decades. Where the first record had given us the near perfect sentimentality of “Waltz for Debby”, Together Again seemed cloying with “Make Someone Happy”. Hearing the duo on Thad Jones’ modern jazz classic “A Child Is Born” is a treasure, but the version of “Some Other Time” from the first set is so good that it has become the definitive version of the tune.
Before the first disc, few people had heard “When In Rome”, yet it was then instantly familiar. Before hearing Together Again, I didn’t know “Two Lonely People”, and after hearing it, well … I’d wish to skip it in the future.
Possibly I had simply fetishized the first recording through two decades of reverent repetition. But I never thought so. Until now.
Revision and Revival
In the past month I have listened to both discs—plus much more—with fresh ears. Fantasy has released The Complete Tony Bennett Bill Evans Recordings, a two-disc set that collects both original recordings, plus unreleased masters of “Who Can I Turn To” and “Dream Dancing” (from the ’76 session), plus a full disc of complete and solid-gold alternate takes. It is Bennett/Evans heaven this summer. Happily, I still have my wife to pull to the couch.
The news is this: the second recording is, in fact, another treasure. It’s a bit more downbeat, perhaps, but it gleams just as brilliantly. Bill Evans’ harmonies on “You Don’t Know What Love Is” are both surprising and perfect. As the partners move into that song’s bridge, it is remarkable how Evans syncopates the attack of the chords yet still provides Bennett with a proper groove to move over.
“Lucky to be Me” becomes that song you didn’t really know before but suddenly can’t stop digging, wondering why other singers hadn’t properly discovered it. “You’re Nearer” is Rodgers and Hart pure and true: simple, warm, logical. The two “new” performances both deserved to be heard from the outset, too. Why didn’t I love this the first time I heard it?
The alternate takes prove what listeners had intuited from the beginning: these performances were pure classics. The unused takes, in most cases, are just as good as those chosen for release. But they are significantly different. The alternate “Young and Foolish” not only contains the rarely heard introductory verse, but it also features a series of different musical choices by both men—tones held longer into decay, smart melodic variations, and moments of pure togetherness that are incandescent but were plainly not carefully planned.
Going back to “The Touch of Your Lips”, we find an alternate that is not introduced by the a cappella singer, and also a busier sense of give-and-take once the pair are both in the track. It’s a less spare recording—cuter, more fun, more swinging perhaps, and with a few notes that seem more daring. Or how about “Some Other Time”? Bennett varies the rhythm of the main melody in the very first line of the lyric.
Of course, Bill Evans’ improvised solo is utterly different if just as lyrical. To hear a different version of something this timelessly lovely simply takes the breath away. With their differences all bolstered by remarkable mastery, the alternate takes prove both how spontaneous these sessions were and how comfortable each player was with the material and with each other.
Breathless
When I first encountered the Bennett/Evans duets, I was a kid getting my first sense of what musical romance really felt like. I fell in love with nine performances that expertly straddled the strengths of pop singing (directness, emotional clarity) and jazz (elastic swing, spontaneous communication, surprise). Intuitively, I understood that what I was hearing was over my head.
The music was being performed by two men each with a good half a life behind them. Therefore, the music expressed a deep knowingness about disappointment, longing, serenity, value, and joy. It was a graduate class in feelings I was only then starting to imagine I could have.
Today, listening to it all again as if for the first time, I’m almost exactly the age of Tony Bennett and Bill Evans at the time they recorded their duets. And I think for that reason, the music sounds wonderfully changed. It’s less likely now to inspire me to grab my girl and much more likely to make me wonder if I really appreciate her.
When I hear “Make Someone Happy” now, I don’t hear a cloying sentiment as much as I hear a strain of impossibility. “Make someone happy / Make just one someone happy / And you will be happy too”. Ahhhh, I think today. “Harder to do than any young person knows …”
Bill Evans, a man who perhaps never found a real way to be happy, left us in 1980 after what a friend called “the longest suicide in history” from drugs and alcohol. If I could, I would thank him for a couple of dozen different records he made that simply own my ears. ut mainly I’d thank him for these duets with Tony Bennett because they own my heart.
Tony Bennett remains, in 2009, a joyous performer. He still sings many of these songs, but I’ve never heard him dare to perform them with just a pianist helping out. To Tony, I feel I owe more than thanks. Your singing, man—your honest understanding of the lyrics and your ability to put that into the music as plain humanity—it made me see past distinctions between “jazz” and any other alleged category or style. Thanks, Tony, because you taught me the value of open ears as well the importance of facing my feelings.
Just like Debby, the little girl in Bill Evans’ great tune on these records, I’m not a kid anymore. Thanks to this music.
![Call for Papers: All Things Reconsidered [MUSIC] May-August 2024](https://www.popmatters.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/all-things-reconsidered-call-music-may-2024-720x380.jpg)
