Re: Person We Knew, a Bill Evans tribute
with

Bill Zavatsky, writer
Remembering Bill Evans in poems and stories

read about Bill Zavatsky here

and

Laurie-Verchomin, writer
reading from her new memoir
The Big Love: Life and Death with Bill Evans.
Featuring Jed Distler, piano, with direction by Arnold Barkus.

visit Laurie's website here

doors open at 5:45PM
$10 general admission
+ food / one drink minimum
Cash only
reservations: 212-989-9319

visit our events page for more info about upcoming events at the Cornelia Street Café.

RANDOM NOTES

We open our 2010/11 Serial Underground season with a unique evening to celebrate the great composer/pianist/jazz icon Bill Evans on the thirtieth anniversary of his death on September 15, 1980. Bill was an early mentor of mine. Although it took me a long to appreciate his influential lyrical side, the hard-swinging extroversion that characterized how he played in his last years grabbed me. I suspect our casual friendship arose from common musical interests; for instance, our mutual appreciation of great classical pianists. Bill set me up with a job fixing up and editing his transcribed solos for a book. and we painstakingly cross-checked details over the phone (this was before fax machines and computers, remember). I¹d plunk out a chord on my piano, and he¹d say yes or no or change this or keep that, and so forth.

Tonight¹s guest writers certainly bring us closer to the man behind the music. Bill Zavatsky¹s poems stay with you long after you read or hear them. Laurie Verchomin¹s upcoming memoir about her life with Bill Evans in the last year and a half of his life runs the full emotional gamut. Once I started reading it, I couldn¹t stop. Laurie and I decided to frame her words with piano music, and although I¹m using Bill¹s compositions or, in some cases, songs associated with him, strangely enough, I¹m not playing like him. Maybe a chord or two, or a favorite lick, but I just can¹t do my once letter-perfect Bill Evans imitation anymore. Perhaps that¹s a good thing. When I told Bill how much I had stolen from him, he said "Go right ahead. That¹s what I did when I was young. It only took me forty years to evolve my own style!"

Célia and I attended the opening night of what proved to be Bill¹s last engagement, September 9, 1980 at Fat Tuesday (a long gone jazz club on 16th Street and 3rd Avenue). It was our first date, and thirty years later we¹re still together, still married, and still dating.