After enjoying the Gil Evans Big Band video yesterday, I found this nugget.

I think this is the first time I’ve heard the pianist interviewed, and he has a lot of interesting stuff to say.

I’ll leave it to rickstolk, who posted the video on YouTube, to introduce the interview:

Please check my jazzblog at http://jazzpages.tumblr.com

From the jazzpages personal archives, I bring you the intriguing documentary ‘The Universal Mind Of Bill Evans’. Several years ago, Rhapsody released a 21-minute video called ‘Bill Evans On The Creative Process’, a badly edited reduction of a 1966 TV program introduced by Steve Allen, the first host of the now famous ‘Tonight Show’. This short film is a restoration of the original 45-minute telecast. Here is Evans, his hair slicked back, his terrible teeth uncapped, a cigarette waving in the air, in intense conversation with his composer brother Harry Evans (a professor of music at Louisiana State University) on the nature of creativity in jazz.

This documentary features in-depth discussion of Evans’ internal process of song interpretation, improvisation, and repertoire. Through demonstration on the piano, Bill uses the song ‘Star Eyes’ to illustrate his own conception of solo piano and how to interpret and expand upon the melody and underlying chord structure.

Onstage, Evans was famously reticent about speaking, but here he’s surprisingly, stirringly provocative.