FOLLOW YOUR HEART: MOVING WITH THE GIANTS OF JAZZ, SWING, AND RHYTHM AND BLUES
By Joe Evans with Christopher Brooks
University of Illinois Press, $24.95, 167 pages, illus.
REVIEWED BY WILLIAM F. GAVIN
When Ken Burns produced his PBS documentary “Jazz” in 2000, some said he concentrated too much on the giants, Louis Armstrong and Duke Ellington in particular, thereby giving an unbalanced view of music which, from the beginning, has been a collaborative effort. I do not share this view because many in the PBS audience were unfamiliar with the history of jazz. The outsized personalities, legendary accomplishments and prodigious skills of the great American musicians brought a human face to music which is unfortunately seen by many as esoteric and inaccessible.
And yet the critics had a good point. For every Armstrong or Ellington or Charlie Parker, there were countless musicians, their names unknown even to jazz fans, whose skill gave jazz the solid foundation it needed. In “Follow Your Heart,” jazz journeyman Joe Evans, now in his 90s, presents the story of the sideman, the unsung hero of the golden age of jazz, someone who could read music, learn new tunes quickly, take solos if necessary and swing all the time.
In many decades of listening to and reading about jazz, I confess I can’t recall coming across Mr. Evans’ name. But his book captures what it must have been like to be a skilled, dependable, widely admired craftsman, not a star, but still a part of the golden age. Over the years, when the spotlight was on Armstrong, Parker, Lionel Hampton, Jay McShann, John Coltrane and other luminaries, Mr. Evans was often sitting in the band supporting them. He showed up on time and did the job, a blue-collar musician with pride in himself and in his work. Like Woody Allen’s character Zelig, Mr. Evans seemed to pop up everywhere that important things were happening in jazz or rhythm and blues. He was also a music business executive and a student who earned a masters’ degree when he was in his 50s.
Mr. Evans was born in Pensacola, Fla., in the ’teens of the last century. As a child, after two failed attempts to learn how to play a musical instrument, he finally discovered the alto saxophone. He was trained (at $1.50 an hour, real money back then) by no-nonsense local teachers like Raymond Sheppard, who respected craftsmanship and accepted no excuses for inattention. This education served Mr. Evans well for the rest of his professional life. In later years, when he joined a band, he often surprised his new colleagues by the quickness with which he familiarized himself with tricky arrangements.
He began his professional career playing in what were called territory bands, musical organizations that played in specific geographical regions, with infrequent forays to distant areas. In 1938, he decided to try his luck in New York City, where the best musicians eventually came to challenge all comers. For the next twenty years he worked steadily in New York, on the road, and in Europe, until in 1958, the legendary Savoy Ballroom in Harlem closed, “the end of a musical era.”
His book is rich in colorful anecdotes. One of my favorites concerns a 1940 jam session in a Harlem nightclub. Mr. Evans was about to join in when a young man he did not know said: “Man, do you mind if I blow one on your ax [i.e., Mr. Evans’ alto]?” The stranger began to blow chorus after chorus of a standard tune, “Rose Room,” transforming it. As Mr. Evans listened, he experienced the shock of the new which would come to so many in the next few years, because the young man’s name was Charlie Parker. Even then, unknown, Parker was playing in a way that left professional musicians in awe.
There are two final points I wish to make about this excellent book. First, Mr. Evans is fortunate in having as co-author Professor Christopher Brooks of Virginia Commonwealth University whose persistence led to the book’s publication. In 1994, when Mr. Evans was in his 80s, he audited professor Brooks class on black American music and offered his personal reminiscences. e owe Professor Brooks a debt of gratitude for recognizing Mr. Evans as a living national treasure of American music.
My second point is this: The book is not only about music, but about what it was like to be an African-American man from the 1920s onward. It is story of injustice, fear, the fact or threat of official violence and the irrationalities of racism. But it is also a story of courage, resilience, patience, common sense, endurance, good humor and, in Mr. Evans view, gradual, as yet incomplete, but unmistakable progress in race relations. Thank you, Mr. Evans, not just for the music you made, but for the man you are.
William F. Gavin is a writer living in McLean, Va.
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