In 1997, Grant Gee directed the video for Radiohead’s single No Surprises, a four-minute film that featured Thom Yorke miming the song inside a water-filled diver’s helmet, apparently almost drowning in the process. In the three decades since that promo, Gee has made a host of diverse feature-length films about artists: Radiohead, David Bowie, Joy Division, the Turkish Nobel laureate Orhan Pamuk, the émigré German novelist WG Sebald. They are often impressionistic, dreamlike explorations of art, memory, place and the strange pressures put upon artistic lives.
Someone comes very close to drowning, but doesn’t drown. What does that do to them?” Gee’s new film, Everybody Digs Bill Evans, is also a study of an artist, only this time it is not a documentary but a narrative feature. Yet it feels like a fictional extension of his longstanding preoccupations.
The subject is Bill Evans, the jazz musician whose lyrical introspection helped reshape the piano; he was a crucial voice on Miles Davis’s Kind of Blue and the man who introduced Debussy-ish romanticism to jazz. But the film does not attempt the usual biopic sweep. It concentrates instead on a few months in 1961, a time when Evans was numbed with grief after the death of his double bassist Scott LaFaro.
An initial interest turns into an obsession that turns into wanting to find out everything you can about the subject. In the WG Sebald film, the novelist Rick Moody uses the phrase ‘textual compulsion’, which I like. It describes the way a work of art can compel you to keep going, a love for something non-human.
Innocence of Memories started with me falling in love with Istanbul and wanting to immerse myself in the museum that Orhan Pamuk had created.” Gee’s love affair with Evans started with a photograph. It shows Bill hunched over the piano, with his new bassist and drummer smiling behind him, thrilled to be there. Evans is plumb centre, this super-cool, Ivy-League-looking guy, but he looks haunted, shocked, concentrated.
I hadn’t even heard of Bill Evans at that point, but I felt that I had to know everything I could about him and why he looked so spooked.” The answer came in Intermission, Owen Martell’s novel about Evans. Inspired by real events, it lingers on the few months when a grief-stricken Evans was unable even to sit at a piano. It follows Evans as he is babysat by his brother in New York, then looked after by his retired blue-collar parents in Florida, before returning to his heroin-fuelled life in Manhattan with his girlfriend Ellaine.
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