by Nonna Skumanich (C-RS, Durham, NC)
Published in New Rusyn Times 2006, Vol. 13, No. 2
Prepared from the original by Peter Simkins Sluk (C-RS, Cleveland, OH)

To any student of American music, Bill Evans (1929-1980) is a well-known figure-considered one of the greats in Jazz. He worked with a number of top jazz artists including Charles Mingus, Art Farmer, Stan Getz, and Miles Davis. He did a number of recordings building a vast discography. Described by many as the “fountainhead of modern jazz piano,” with a rich and lyrical improvisational and compositional style, his influence extended to artists such as Herbie Hancock, Keith Jarrett, and Lyle Mays to mention only a few. It is less widely known that Bill Evans was half Carpatho-Rusyn! And what’s most interesting about his music is the way in which he infused it with his ethnic sensibilities. 

I first learned of Bill Evans quite by accident. A friend of a friend played a recording of his when we were visiting and right then I noticed something quite special in the quality of his music. Years later I came across the biography, Bill Evans: How My Heart Sings by Peter Pettinger, and discovered that Bill Evans was actually half Rusyn and half Welsh and grew up surrounded by the music of his Rusyn immigrant family including the sacred music of the Orthodox Church. Interestingly, Pettinger missed the fact that Evans was part Carpatho-Rusyn, describing him as Russian, but when one reads in the book of Evans’s maternal grandparents, the fact is inescapable. His mother, Mary Soroka, wasn’t Russian but was in fact Rusyn. 

Mary’s parents had come from Galicia and settled in Old Forge, Pennsylvania. Her father, Ivan Soroka came from Brunary, a Lemko village in southeastern Poland, while her mother, Anna Matijcak, was born in Carna, at the foot of the Carpathian mountains. Carna was part of the Brunary parish. When Mary Soroka’s father was killed in a coal mine accident, she and her sister lived for several years in the nearby Orthodox orphanage where they spoke only Russian according to Pettinger. This must have been the orphanage established at St. Tikhon’s Monastery in South Canaan, Pa., just up the mountain from Scranton. 

Both of Bill Evans’s parents were musical. His father, Harry sang regularly in a barbershop choir, and often with his drinking buddies. His mother loved the music of the Orthodox Church and also played piano. In a letter to the editors of Down Beat magazine, Evans stated that he had many childhood memories of the singing and spirit of his “Russian” heritage from frequent family gatherings. Mary’s family would often sing the church music together, freely and intuitively switching parts as they went along. Pettinger wrote in his biography: “Their traditional singing on festive occasions or after dinner at home, was some of the first music that Bill Evans heard, and they passed along to the youngster their reverence for fine music.” And yet it wasn’t just “fine music.” Slavic music is unique, often done in a minor key with sometimes dissonant harmonies, unusual rhythms and distinctive vocal qualities. 

Born William John Evans on August 16, 1929, in Plainfield, New Jersey, Bill Evans took up the piano at an early age and had a legendary ability for sight-reading. He was exposed to a diverse range of music as everyone was growing up in the 1940s listening to the radio. And he mentioned “fully digesting” Stravinski’s Petroushka as a child before discovering jazz at the age of 12. In high school he started to improvise when playing with the school band. 

Even though his mother, Mary Soroka, had stopped his grandmother from teaching him “Russian” out of fear he wouldn’t learn English, he had always wanted to visit Russia. And though he never did manage to travel there, it was interesting to read that Evans considered Russia his ancestral land. 

I had the same sense growing up. My grandfather, John Berdy, would always declare to me in his thick Slavic accent, that he was Russian and not Ukrainian. When I got older and learned about the Rusyns, I realized that many of our grandparents called themselves Russians probably because that was the easiest translation into English. No one in the New World knew about Rusyns. They weren’t on any map of Europe. And “Roo-sin” and “Roo-shin” sound very close to each other, especially when said with a Slavic accent. 

There are other ways in which Bill Evans’s early life experiences were shared by other Rusyns in America. Both of my grandfathers worked in coal mines, father told stories of childhood growing up in Wilkes-Barre, when he and his brother would sing with their parents the church service at home: his father, Peter Skumanich, singing the priest’s role while they would sing the responses. He also spoke of singing Slavic carols and liturgical music at Christmas time. Meanwhile my mother, Mary Berdy, grew up across the river in Edwardsville, where the church was the center of all social activities. St. John the Baptist Orthodox Church had a professionally trained choir director, Dimitri Ressetar, a charismatic and striking-looking man, who demanded a high level of professionalism from his singers. My mother was disappointed that she was too young to be allowed to join the choir-Ressetar had set an age limit for participation. On social occasions the church had a band that would play the old folk dances and other tunes loved by its Rusyn parish members. Many of these folk dances are still done today where Russians and Rusyn gather for social events. 

A child of the 1960s, I grew up hearing the sacred and popular tunes so prevalent in those communities while listening to all the other music popular with American kids my age. I only came to jazz as an adult and had never heard of Bill Evans until 2000. When I listen to Bill Evans’s music, it’s a wholly American music, and yet it does have a quality to it, a certain smoothness and transcendence that I have to believe comes from his Slavic sensibilities. His musical style was informed by a childhood immersed in the immigrant experience. Through his art he added to the melting pot that makes this country so great. How wonderful for us all to trace these elements back to their origins in the past, to the Old World from where they set sail.