Bill Evans brought an almost mathematical discipline to jazz improvisation and co-created the best-selling jazz album in history, while friends described his 51 years as a prolonged act of self-destruction. This episode looks past the tortured-artist cliche to the mechanics of how he transformed the piano. Growing up in a turbulent New Jersey home, he learned by watching his older brother Harry's lessons, then studied Mozart, Beethoven and Schubert from age seven before hearing Tommy Dorsey on the radio at twelve. After an Army band experience that shattered his confidence, he spent a year in seclusion playing Bach and rebuilding his technique around arm weight and gravity to produce a sustained, singing tone.

The hosts follow his 1956 debut New Jazz Conceptions, which sold about 800 copies but reached the right ears, his 1958 audition for  ...