Peace Piece

Peace Piece is an album track, not a single, on Everybody Digs Bill Evans, released by Riverside as RLP 12-291 in March 1959. On the original LP it is the second track on side two and runs 6:37. Bill Evans plays it alone: the bassist Sam Jones and the drummer Philly Joe Jones, who are on the rest of the album, are not on this track. The 2024 remaster used on hypersongs is listed at 6:45 on Craft Recordings' digital release.

It was recorded on December 15, 1958 at Reeves Sound Studios in New York, with Orrin Keepnews producing. It is an improvisation done at the end of the session, over a two-chord progression, C major seventh to G ninth suspended fourth, that Evans had already used earlier that day on Some Other Time, the Leonard Bernstein song from On the Town. WFAE has Evans first meaning it as a long introduction to Some Other Time before seeing that it could stand alone.

What listeners hear in it

Chuck Israels, who later played bass with Evans, called it an ostinato piece that owes more to Satie and Debussy than to Ravi Shankar. Others have heard Chopin's Berceuse in D-flat major, with its two-chord left hand under an ornamented melody, and Charles Cornell suggests Satie's Vexations; the album's Wikipedia article adds Scriabin, Ravel and Messiaen to the list of comparisons. PopMatters's Matt Cibula in 2007 called it a crystalline piano solo that evolved into a modal song about as close to perfect as anything ever recorded. As reported on Wikipedia, a teenage fan said on first hearing it that they felt like he was standing all alone in New York.

The same progression opens Flamenco Sketches on Miles Davis's Kind of Blue, recorded in 1959 with Evans on piano; Davis liked the piece and wanted to reuse the idea.

Rarely played, often reused

Evans refused many requests to play it live, feeling it belonged to its moment. By Wikipedia's account he performed it in public only once, in Seattle in 1978, to accompany modern dance with the Bill Evans Dance Company; setlist.fm was not checked for a count.

It has been used in films including Corrina, Corrina in 1994, Peace Is Every Step in 1997, Jack Goes Boating in 2010 and Roman J. Israel, Esq. in 2017. Covers include Richie Beirach, Liz Story, Stefano Battaglia, Jean-Yves Thibaudet in 1996, Igor Levit in 2018, Herbie Mann on flute and the Kronos Quartet in 1985 as a string quartet. Lady Blackbird's Fix It, from Black Acid Soul in 2021, uses it as its musical base; that last fact comes from Wikipedia and could not be checked at WhoSampled.