Bill Evans

Pettinger gave it the old college try and came up just a bit short. The early part of the book gets two stars thanks to prose so saccharine as to cause dental rot in the reader; “tinsel-bedecked arpeggios”? Really? REALLY? Then the prose gets less drippy and easier to read. The real problem is one that plagues the whole book, i.e., if you are going to write a biography, maybe devote the greater number of pages of said “-ography” to a “bio-“ and not a “disc-“ style. Even when Pettinger is doing that, he misses the mark more often than not. All of this complaining aside, it is the best thing we have, and it is a worthwhile read for the overall picture. But a guy like Evans, with so much influence and such a story to tell, deserves a better book than this.