Chapter 04
Navigating Uncertainty
Jazz Interlude · 04
Bill Evans
Peace Piece
Bill Evans. “Peace Piece,” on Everybody Digs Bill Evans. Riverside RLP 12-291, released March 1959. Recorded at Reeves Sound Studios, New York, 15 December 1958; produced by Orrin Keepnews. Evans (solo piano). Composed by Bill Evans from the vamp used for Leonard Bernstein’s “Some Other Time.” Approximately 6:37.
XIII · Improvisation distributes judgment through moving constraints
A ground that stays fixed lets the whole band tell a signal from a drift.
Listen
Recorded alone at the piano at Reeves Sound Studios, New York, in December 1958.
Bill Evans recorded “Peace Piece” alone at the piano in December 1958 at Reeves Sound Studios in New York, during the sessions for the album Riverside issued as Everybody Digs Bill Evans. Orrin Keepnews produced and Jack Higgins engineered. The record came out in March 1959 as Riverside RLP 12-291. The piece runs six minutes and thirty-seven seconds, and the other musicians had gone by the time he played it.
Listen for
The constraint supplies the conditions under which the improvisation can be perceived at all.
The left hand
The left hand repeats the same harmonic pattern throughout the performance, alternating between C major seventh and G ninth suspended fourth, a tonic and a dominant. The accompaniment does not develop: at six minutes, the harmonic cycle is the same as at ten seconds.
The right hand
The music above it grows increasingly restless. The right hand begins by echoing the descending fifth within the ostinato, then builds denser phrases. Cross-rhythms accumulate, and later passages venture beyond the home key, including a whole-tone line near the end that intensifies the harmonic tension. Throughout these departures, the left hand continues its repeating pattern, making the right hand’s increasing rhythmic and harmonic freedom audible against a familiar accompaniment.
What the ground makes audible
Small changes in the right hand register as events because the listener has an unmoving reference to hear them against. Remove the ostinato and the same phrases become ambiguous, since nothing establishes whether the music has moved or the ear has. The constraint supplies the conditions under which the improvisation can be perceived at all.
The relationship between a recurring accompaniment and an unfolding improvisation in “Peace Piece” became a starting point for “Flamenco Sketches.” Speaking in a 1979 radio interview, Evans recalled that Davis had asked him for something along those lines. They worked together at the piano on the morning of the session, replacing the single ostinato with a succession of harmonic settings. What Evans had explored alone now gave an ensemble a shared basis for improvisation. The harmony could change from one setting to the next while giving each soloist room to develop an individual line.
Weak ground plus sustained tension produces something else, which is drift that everyone can feel and nobody can name.
From Chapter 04, “Navigating Uncertainty”
Signal or drift
In an organization, something has to stay fixed so that variation elsewhere carries information.
In an organization, something has to stay fixed so that variation elsewhere carries information. A purpose that stays put, a set of decision rights that does not move each quarter, an interface between teams that stays where it was: these are the ostinato. They make it possible to tell whether a team’s different choice is a signal or a drift.
The demand this makes on leadership is patience of a specific kind. Evans holds the tension for nearly seven minutes and never resolves it, and the performance stays interesting because the ground is strong enough to support what is happening above it. Weak ground plus sustained tension produces something else, which is drift that everyone can feel and nobody can name.
The lesson: A ground that stays fixed lets the whole band tell a signal from a drift.
The mark · IV · 04
In the making
Chapter 04 places the record in “XIII · Improvisation distributes judgment through moving constraints.” An unchanging ground making small changes above it audible as events. The left hand holds one two-chord figure for nearly seven minutes while the right grows dense and eventually moves outside the key, and the ground never acknowledges any of it. Remove the ostinato and the same phrases become ambiguous.
The mark
The two-chord vamp runs unbroken underneath and the right hand's events sit above it. The pulse count reads the vamp and waits on a timing of the record.
The music
The left hand repeats the same harmonic pattern throughout the performance, alternating between C major seventh and G ninth suspended fourth, a tonic and a dominant.
From The Interludes. Position along the line is time and height is stress. How to read a mark · Download The Interludes (PDF)
The poster
A ground that stays fixed lets the whole band tell a signal from a drift.
The record
Bill Evans. “Peace Piece,” on Everybody Digs Bill Evans. Riverside RLP 12-291, released March 1959. Recorded at Reeves Sound Studios, New York, 15 December 1958; produced by Orrin Keepnews. Evans (solo piano). Composed by Bill Evans from the vamp used for Leonard Bernstein’s “Some Other Time.” Approximately 6:37.
Bill Evans, “Peace Piece,” on Everybody Digs Bill Evans (Riverside RLP 12-291, 1959).