| I Will Say Goodbye | ||||
|---|---|---|---|---|
 | ||||
| Studio album by | ||||
| Released | 1980 | |||
| Recorded | May 11–13, 1977 | |||
| Studio | Fantasy Studios, Berkeley | |||
| Genre | Jazz | |||
| Length | 46:19 | |||
| Label | Fantasy F 9593 | |||
| Producer | Helen Keane | |||
| The Bill Evans Trio chronology | ||||
| ||||
I Will Say Goodbye is an album by American jazz pianist Bill Evans, recorded in 1977 but not released until January 1980. It was his final album for Fantasy Records, making the title quite appropriate. [1]
Most of the material on the album was contemporary and fresh to Evans's repertoire. [2] The two sides of the original LP both open with takes of the title track by Michel Legrand, the second more than a minute longer than the first. Evans had participated in one session of Legrand's classic 1958 album Legrand Jazz, and in the meantime, the Frenchman had become a major film composer and songwriter, whose works, as Evans biographer Peter Pettinger notes "have beguiling melodic appeal, and this, combined with their satisfying construction (Legrand has a strong sense of key relationships within a short span), is what persistently attracted Evans. His tunes also carry much sentiment, and the pianist could turn that to lyrical advantage while avoiding the maudlin." [3]
The album also includes works by "several [other] composers who inevitably inspired the pianist, including ... Johnny Mandel, Earl Zindars, and Steve Swallow." [4] In addition, Evans performs a version of "Dolphin Dance" by his younger contemporary Herbie Hancock, which first appeared on the classic album Maiden Voyage (1965) and had been covered by Ahmad Jamal on his acclaimed album The Awakening (1970). The album includes one Evans original, "The Opener."
The 1992 CD reissue by Original Jazz Classics includes two bonus tracks that round out the material from these recording sessions: [5] an older standard, Jerome Kern's "Nobody Else but Me," and another Legrand composition, "Orson's Theme," an insouciant piece that had been composed for the Orson Welles film F for Fake .
At the 23rd Annual Grammy Awards in 1981, the year after the pianist's death, I Will Say Goodbye won the Grammy Award for Best Jazz Instrumental Solo and We Will Meet Again won the Best Instrumental Jazz Performance, Group awards. [6]
The AllMusic review by Scott Yanow called the album "[f]ine post-bop music from an influential piano giant." [7]
| Review scores | |
|---|---|
| Source | Rating |
| AllMusic |   [7] |
| The Penguin Guide to Jazz Recordings | [8] |
| The Rolling Stone Jazz Record Guide | [9] |
Evans biographer Keith Shadwick says the album is "one of Evans's most consistently inventive and involving latter-day trio albums." He singled out the "elegiac" performance of Zindars's "Quiet Light," which is "played here with delicate blue translucence and perfect control of form," along with the "restrained but exquisite solo piano rendering" of the intro to Burt Bacharach's "A House Is Not a Home" and the "stardust-scattered halt at the end" of the title track. Shadwick also detects some influence on Evans's rhapsodically romantic playing on the album by Erroll Garner, who had passed away just a few months before these recording sessions [10] and whom Evans highly admired. [11]
Credits adapted from AllMusic. [12]
| Year | Chart | Position |
|---|---|---|
| 1980 | Billboard Jazz Albums [13] | 37 |
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Perhaps the hours of greatest pleasure in my life have come about as a result of the capacity of the piano to be in itself a complete expressive musical medium. In retrospect, I think that these countless hours of aloneness with music unified the directive energy of my life. At those times when I have achieved this sense of oneness while playing alone, the many technical or analytic aspects of the music happened of themselves with positive rightness which always served to remind me that to understand music most profoundly one only has to be listening well. Perhaps it is a peculiarity of mine that despite the fact that I am a professional performer, it is true that I have always preferred playing without an audience. This has nothing to do with my desire to communicate or not, but rather I think just a problem of personal self-consciousness which had to be conquered through discipline and concentration. Yet, to know one is truly alone with one’s instrument and music has always been an attractive and conducive situation for me to find my best playing level. Therefore, what I desired to present in a solo piano recording was especially this unique feeling.
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As much as Bill enjoyed playing alone at home, and although by this time he regularly included a solo section in his concert program, he found recording in this context very difficult. It was probably the only area he felt insecure about musically, and the fact that he'd gotten a Grammy for Alone didn't seem to help.
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