Everybody Digs Bill Evans: a gentle sonata of loss

When I first got hold of Bill Evans’s LP Sunday at the Village Vanguard (1961), I had just moved into a new, unfurnished flat. Playing it for weeks on end, I also moved into a new musical subterrane. I delayed furnishing the flat, fearing the furniture would absorb the sound and ruin the clarity of the bass, played on the album by Scott LaFaro, who had died in a car accident only 11 days after the recording.

Everybody Digs Bill Evans – named after another celebrated LP by the jazz pianist – is about what happens between the recording of that live album on 25 June 1961 and its release in October of the same year. In between, it’s about a pianist grieving not necessarily over a lost friend, but over himself.

Grant Gee’s reticent film, however, is not about jazz, nor is it about Bill Evans the pianist. It’s more of a family story – of failed, troubled sons and fathers. But, to some degree, the film still leans on the dark side of jazz lore – the needle-and-spoon side. It’s a tale of dependency: on drugs and on people who were like heroin to Evans, such as LaFaro, who “understood” his music, and his girlfriend Ellaine, who mothered him.

The actor and musician Anders Danielsen Lie has imported to the role some of his spleen from Oslo, August 31st (2011), and has avoided falling into the pitfalls of Evansian mannerism, which any actor could imitate with slicked-back hair, brow-line glasses, and a back so bent that his nose can touch the keys. But Evans’s tragic handsomeness is not there – a presence so immersed in music that his physique seemed to diminish after each performance. Gee has left Evans’s music out and has modernised his ennui. The film’s focus is on when the music has stopped, and life has entered an interregnum of eerily stage-like houses and austere interiority. Absent are the pavements and the urban grime to which Evans responds by letting his music drift away into the serenity of his inner landscape. (This is, no doubt, because the film was entirely shot in Ireland.) The only time the film tries to compensate for the lack of exteriority, it makes its biggest mistake, using D.A. Pennebaker’s colour short Daybreak Express (1953), one of the fundamental jazz movies, as black-and-white stock footage, with its Duke Ellington score removed.

I don’t know whether the film’s clever three-act structure comes from the source novel, Owen Martell’s Intermission (2013), or is the screenwriter Mark O’Halloran’s invention. After a brief prologue in the Village Vanguard and the car accident, Evans is placed in three environments, interacting with people close to him. First, his brother Harry – gentle, firm, the artistically failed version of his younger sibling – takes him under his arm; then Evans visits his parents in Florida – the most potent segment, mapping Bill’s relationship with his quietly troubled father and protective mother. This is followed by a return to New York, to his girlfriend and needle-mate Ellaine, for the final act. Each section features a poignant scene of Evans reluctantly or undecidedly doodling one of his signature tunes on the piano.

In between these defining acts are jumps forward in time, marked using colour in what is otherwise a black-and-white film (excellently shot by Piers McGrail). These time skips lead to suicides: Harry, fighting depression, shoots himself in 1979; Ellaine jumps in front of the New York subway in 1973, and Bill’s incorrigible drug abuse – a slow suicide – leads to his demise in 1980, aged 51.

Some years ago, I got hold of a unique compilation CD of Evans’s recordings chosen by the filmmaker Chris Marker. I wondered what drew Marker to Evans; I suspect it had something to do with what this film is after. The magic of Evans, for Marker, lay in tracing loss in the passing of time. Some of his finest tunes were about the things and people he had lost. His biggest loss, however, was time itself. Evans’s ‘Time Remembered’ was one of the tunes Marker picked for his mixtape. Grant Gee seems to be on a similar search and, in the process, has turned the pianist’s life into a gentle sonata of loss.

► Everybody Digs Bill Evans is in UK cinemas 11 September.