Half-Life: The Sad Junkie Art of Bill Evans
And The Destructive Myth of Drugs & The Artist
Would you trade half your life away if you could make eternal art but die early?
The man sits down awkwardly at the piano. The keys are polished so well that the reflection underlights his hands just as his fingers spread to make the first chord. His hands, feet, groin, chest, arms, and legs are punctured by hundreds of needle points where he has injected heroin into his body for years. There is permanent nerve damage in his dominant hand, and he often plays entire performances with a single hand without missing a single note. His mind moves through music elegantly, always a step ahead of his hands. Bill Evans bled all over and into every piano he played. His life was a long series of falling apart despite the eruption of beauty that came from his punctured, bleeding fingers when he played. The man played piano with Miles Davis on Kind of Blue. Pause to consider the importance of this weighed in the chain of great events in human art.
Modal Jazz. They had to invent a term for the music Bill Evans created and shaped his entire life as an addict who made music to make money to buy drugs so that he could keep making music. Miles Davis put the brakes on Bebop Jazz, which by the mid-1950s had devolved from a revolution to an institution. It was one of a hundred musical cycles that happened in the evolution of Musical Art in the 20th Century. Bebop was born after World War II. It was a response to the horror of violence and was mathematical and beautiful. Musicians like Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie were engineers of sound. They blew apart the orchestrated music of Louis Armstrong and Duke Ellington, who themselves started revolutions. This is how revolutions have always rolled forward.
Miles Davis led musicians in a great chill on the music. Instead of intense, chromatic chord changes that whistled in complexity, Modal Jazz dealt with a few chord changes and introduced soloing in scaled patterns like raindrops falling from a leaf into a pond. The music became the pregnant drop hanging at the edge of the leaf for as long as possible before falling into the great pond. This is how Bill Evans played the piano.
But his heroin addiction, then cocaine and alcohol, cut his life short by decades. He died puking blood all over the backseat of a car and dripping out the mouth, being drug through a hospital hallway, where when he was shortly pronounced dead, they were still mopping up his blood from the floor. This sick relationship between artists and destructive substance abuse remains an evil cycle of self-torture. If there was an oracle of truth that junky artists could kneel and pray for an answer, that Oracle might reply in a dusty, ancient voice, “Art doesn’t need drugs to be made or appreciated. And drugs only dull the pain that holds the real art from coming out.”
This paradox, where profound art emerges from profound suffering, is a recurring theme in our creative history. Bill Evans’s music was elegant and vicious in how it presented a sublime sense of melancholy and deep personal pain as if it were beautiful. And god damn, if it doesn’t turn out to be just that. How can something so pretty grow out of a pain so ugly? Bill Evans fed his music with dulled pain that shifted over the years into a more comfortable weight an artist could carry for years at the cost of half their life. That’s a dangerous game when it takes so long to learn lessons so simple as to avoid the people and things that hurt us.
Give Bill Evans a listen today (Apple Music LINK). See if you hear the pain past the beauty.
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