The special season when winter turns to spring always gives rise to philosophical reflection. Winter is a metaphor for dark times (the days are the shortest of the calendar) and hard times (especially this year in New England with incredible amounts of snow). To observe the gradual change, with the sun rising earlier and staying out later, and warmer temperatures melting winter away, is a comforting experience. And again, an analogy for our lives, which move from good times to hard times and back again.
There is this song written in 1967 that has become my favorite, perhaps. In any case, it is in my head during this transition time. It is called “You Must Believe in Spring.” It is by Michel Legrand. It originated in the French film “Les Demoiselles de Rochefort” (as “Chanson de Maxence”). It’s a piece about holding onto hope, renewal, and love even through the darkest, coldest seasons of life, and how winter inevitably gives way to spring, or how buried emotions can bloom again.
“When lonely feelings chill, The meadows of your mind, Just think if winter comes, Can spring be far behind? Beneath the deepest snows, The secret of a rose, Is merely that it knows, You must believe in spring. Just as a tree is sure, Its leaves will reappear, It knows there’ll be more sap, Within its heart next year. It’s a lesson to be learned, Though winter’s near, You must believe in spring. Just as a sleeping rose, Awaits the kiss of May, So in your hour of darkness, You must believe and say, You must believe in love, And trust it’s on its way. You must believe in spring.”
For years, I heard this extraordinary melody mainly through Bill Evans’s stunning album by the same name. Evans recorded this in 1977, but the full album did not appear until after his death, in 1981. All told, and after a lifetime of listening to and playing jazz, I can say with full confidence that this album is my No. 1 favorite. I could listen to it any time of day every day forever, thousands of times, and never tire of it. It’s all quite perfect.
If you don’t know Bill Evans, I can understand why. He is surely one of the most underrated of all jazz pianists, even though he was both the composer and performer on the best-selling jazz album of all time, “Miles Davis’s Kind of Blue.” The songs and the modal moods of that epic album were entirely of Evans’s making, even if he was never given proper credit.
Evans’s piano here is even more supportive and conversational than in the trio version. He frames Bennett’s vocal lines with delicate chords and fills that echo the lyrics’ imagery. The absence of a rhythm section makes every note and breath feel exposed and intimate, like two old friends sharing a late-night conversation about hope amid grief.
As for Evans himself, there are crucial biographical features here that come into play. He was a tragic and desperate heroin addict, a problem that I cannot understand and with which I cannot identify, but there it is. It even feels odd to mention that because he always tried to hide it. He was an extremely serious musician, and his problem never affected his perfectionism in achievement. When he was playing “You Must Believe in Spring,” he was suffering the despair of two suicides: those of his longtime common-law wife and his brother.
Evans had trained at conservatory, and even graduate school, in the classical tradition. He mastered Bach, which changed forever his understanding of composition, performance, and the relationship between harmonic voices. His aesthetic sense was further shaped by the late 19th-century French impressionism. He loved the early 20th-century innovations of Prokofiev and Stravinsky. All this musical past was built into his hands, mind, and vision of the future.
Evans then left the world of “classical” music to embrace the new world of jazz in the post-bop era. The world needed to move forward to the next thing. But what was it going to be? Evans brought his vast understanding of modal scales and deep appreciation of the musical line to create a new sensibility that moved a step beyond 1950s-style bebop as a follow-up to the big-band pop of the ’30s and ’40s. “Kind of Blue,” under the quiet tutelage of Evans, became a kind of hinge of music history.
And then he left that group to form his own. Evans mostly played with small-scale groups, preferring the trio (with drums and bass, with something approaching equal voicing) to anything else. Drawing on his training in baroque and modal scale theory, he recreated the intimate chamber sensibility of 18th-century parlor music to embed it within a new style. And he continued this approach throughout the rest of his career, leaving an amazing legacy of music. He became our Bach, our Haydn, our Schubert.
To our ears today, it just sounds like the effervescent feel of jazz, all spontaneous, smooth, and inventive. But actually, it is not that simple. To achieve that level of mastery requires knowing and understanding everything that came before. As my old teacher told me, great music consists of at once learning all things and then forgetting all things to make something new.
This is what Evans did, leaving us a new world, but never quite getting (or expecting) the credit.
I somehow suspect that Evans poured all his heart into his rendering of “You Must Believe in Spring.” This is because so much of his life was spent in winter. He had to believe. So must we all.
