“My Foolish Heart:” Bill Evans and the Public Life of Feelings

Abstract

After 1961, any published commentary on Evans seemed incomplete without a comment on the peculiar emotional register of his ballad playing in the trio setting. The fervor of Evans's fans and the sheer quantity of praise he received in Down Beat magazine was enough to inspire skepticism in some corners. This essay analyzes the critical reputation of Evans's emotional signature in the 1960s with regard to the material most crucial to that part of his reputation: the popular romantic ballad. Following a discussion of the problem of anti-sentimentalism in jazz criticism and scholarship, the essay moves to the Evans trio's celebrated 1961 recording of “My Foolish Heart.” After considering the film song's lyrics and noting some musical characteristics of the Evans trio's performance, the essay turns to the whirl of critical discourse that met this and other Evans recordings in the 1960s. Special attention is given to the rhetoric of poignancy in jazz criticism. In the late 1950s and early 1960s, “poignant” and a related cluster of evaluative terms about music and emotions (e.g., introversion, introspection, lyrical, impressionistic, and reflective) circulated around the ballad playing of Evans, his former bandleader Miles Davis, and others. The circulation of the term “poignant” and its analogues in jazz writing was in part a response to the gendered reputation of “sentimental music” as feminine, emotionally excessive, and aesthetically inferior. Although he strongly regretted his reputation as a ballad specialist (which he found diminishing), Evans's balladry nonetheless exemplified his stated project of pursuing what he called the “finer feelings” in music. The pianist's sense of jazz's relationship to the “finer feelings” in the 1960s also informed his vocal resistance to emerging paradigms of expanded improvisational freedom and new avenues of tonality, timbre, and emotional communication in music.