Bill Evans Peace Piece 1978

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Peace Piece, is a timeless, meditational, reverent, pastoral improvisation that is more a mood than a composition.
Just prior to his association with Miles Davis, Evans recorded an unrehearsed modal composition entitled “Peace Piece” for his LP "Everybody Digs Bill Evans". Recorded in December 1958, four months before Miles Davis’s album Kind of Blue. "Peace Piece" is one of the most beautiful and evocative solo piano improvisations ever recorded and an unique entry in the Evans' discography: a pastoral improvisation built on a gentle two-chord vamp. The song has been used for soundtracks of motion pictures, as music for ballet choreography and inspired poets. "Peace Piece" has been recorded by contemporary fellow jazz musicians and classical musicians made transcriptions. The gentle two opening chords of "Some Other Time" from the musical On The Town composed by Leonard Bernstein served as the building blocks to "Peace Piece".

Bill Evans was often asked to perform "Peace Piece" in later years after the1959 recording, but he usually resisted, claiming that it had been the inspiration of the moment, and not something that could be recreated, he considered it as a one-time thing. Only on this occasion in 1978 he performed "Peace Piece" with the Bill Evans Dance Company in Seattle.
There are conflicting memories about the genesis of "Peace Piece". Bill's theory teacher at the Southeastern Louisiana University testifies that it was a written out homework composition when Evans was still a student. Peri Cousins , Bill's girlfriend during that years ("Peri's Scope" from Portrait in Jazz and We Will Meet Again) remembers that she often asked Bill to play "Some Other Time" for her. She had heard Bill improvising on ostinato of the first two chords of “Some Other Time” before the recording session for "Everybody Digs Bill Evans". She felt that “Peace Piece” was the culmination of an idea Bill had been toying with for months. She said that in a phone interview with Win Hinkle for his newsletter "Letter From Evans".

This Peace Piece, extracted from the video, recorded in 1978, is probably the only recorded performance after "Everybody Digs Bill Evans" from 1959. Peace Piece is a "practiced improvisation" and you can hear how Bill adapts his playing to the choreography of the dancers compared to his 1959 solo performance.

Jacques Réda is a French poet and jazz critic. He wrote 5 poems with the title “Tombeau de Bill Evans,” with reference to “Tombeau de Couperin” by Maurice Ravel. One of those poems was inspired by Bill Evans’ Peace Piece. (L'improviste II' - Jouer le jeu, Gallimard 1985), also published in the French Jazz Magazine, #334, 1984.