I don’t know of any classical pianist who does not admire the late composer and jazz keyboard icon Bill Evans, who died thirty years ago on September 15th, 1980. Everyone talks about his sensitive touch, his immense lyrical sensibility, and his impressionist-tinged chord voicings. However, there was a lot more to Evans’ artistry than received opinion continues to dole out.

As a budding teenage pianist with an intense interest in jazz, I was aware of Evans, yet his music didn’t strike me as particularly special. The few trio recordings I heard on our local New York jazz radio station WRVR went in one ear and out the other, as did his understated, muted contributions to the seminal Miles Davis album Kind of Blue. McCoy Tyner’s forceful modal style and Cecil Taylor’s overwhelming physical presence at the instrument had more of an immediate impact on me, along with the brilliant virtuosity and extraordinary harmonic imagination of Art Tatum’s solo recordings. My childhood mentor Dick Hyman also proved a decisive influence in the way he fused traditional stride piano with modern jazz, and his unique use of the sostenuto pedal. Stanley Cowell was another two-handed virtuoso who could play “outside” and “inside” at will, and he remains one of the most underrated jazz pianists to this day.

Still, Bill Evans eluded me, until one evening in October 1977. My classmate and erstwhile two-piano partner Gordon Reynolds (who studied with Claudio Arrau) wanted to catch Evans at the Village Vanguard, and asked me to go with him. I figured, what the heck, I’ll give Evans another chance. I’ll leave after the first set and be done with it.

We paid the $4 cover charge, and got seats fairly close to the club’s venerable brown Steinway. Right away I noticed Philly Joe Jones’ name on the bass drum. I’d never heard the legendary, incendiary drummer from Miles Davis’ seminal 1950s groups in person. Was he going to light a proverbial fire under the piano bench? The answer was a big, beautiful Yes. Bill played with a kind of assertive sweep and virtuosic joy that threw me for a loop. The lyricism was there too, but it was how the piano and drums interacted that got to me, with all due respect to bassist Eddie Gomez’s wonderful work. It was as if this pianist had ducked into a phone booth as Clark Kent, emerging as Superman, or as if Myra Hess had suddenly morphed into Vladimir Horowitz. When I met Bill after the last set, I told him, rather naively, that his records didn’t do him justice. He was gracious, and wrote out his Closter, New Jersey address and phone number for me on back of a Radio Shack receipt. A month later I sent him my transcription of “Here’s That Rainy Day,” which I had painstakingly figured out from Bill’s solo album  “Alone.”

I soon found out that this newly energized Bill Evans was no fluke. Just about every time he played the Vanguard henceforth, I made sure to be there, at least one night during the run. If anything, his new trio with bassist Marc Johnson and drummer Joe LaBarbera inspired the pianist to higher creative and pianist levels. I dragged all of my classical pianist friends to the Vanguard. One night in June 1980, Bill surprised me with a proposition that I edit and fix transcriptions for an upcoming book for his publisher TRO Music, and I jumped at the chance. Judy Bell, TRO’s editor, supplied me with galley proofs with Bill’s corrections from which to work (I still have them). In a few instances, Bill’s emendations didn’t exactly correspond to what was on the recordings. I called him, and we went through the music, bar by bar, over the phone, with me at the piano. “Bill, you wrote this chord in the proofs, but you played that chord on the record. Which one do you prefer?” It went on like this for some time, and I wound up with quite a phone bill!

When my future wife Célia and I met for our first date at Fat Tuesday on September 9th, 1980 to hear Bill, I tried to catch the pianist between sets, say hello, and give a progress report, but his manager Helen Keane wouldn’t allow me access. She told me to call her the next day. I did, and she was most unpleasant. Little did I know that Bill had been seriously ill, and shooting cocaine in prodigious amounts, and I’m sure that Helen was at her wit’s end. On September 15th I returned to my apartment after teaching all day. One of my pianist friends had left three messages to call back, no matter how late. She didn’t want to leave the news that Bill had died on my answering machine.

Fast forward 30 years on September 15, 2010, when Laurie Verchomin (Bill’s girlfriend from May 1979 until his death) will read from her new memoir The Big Love/Life and Death with Bill Evans, and I will frame her words with solo piano music, at the Cornelia Street Café in New York. Bill’s old friend poet Bill Zavatsky also will read and play piano. I have no idea what Bill Evans would make of this presentation. But I’m sure he’ll be pleased that the integrity and focus of his musicianship played a crucial role in my artistic development, to say nothing of thousands of other pianists and composers lucky enough to cross paths with him during his all-too-brief earthly life.