Mike Harris

Although native New Yorker Mike Harris isn't a professional musician or a behind the scenes employee of the music industry -- he hasn't earned his living as a producer, publicist, A&R person, promoter, or manager -- he deserves to be mentioned in the jazz history books because of his connection to the late pianist Bill Evans (as opposed to jazz saxophonist Bill Evans, who like the pianist, was once a Miles Davis sideman). Harris has actually earned his living as an optical physicist; the thing that makes him important to jazz is the fact that he recorded pianist Evans' live performances extensively and paved the way for some posthumous releases on Milestone/Fantasy in the '90s and early 2000s (including a lavish eight-CD box set).

Born in the Big Apple in 1935, Harris studied classical music as a kid and grew up listening to both jazz and classical; Russian composer Sergei Rachmaninoff is one of his favorites. But Harris never pursued a career in the music business; after graduating from high school in the early '50s, he studied to become an optical physicist and eventually went on to work on the Apollo space program and the Hubble Space Telescope project. However, his interest in jazz and Euro-classical remained, and it was in 1962 that he heard Evans for the first time. That year, he became a hardcore Evans fan after hearing the bop/post-bop pianist's original 1956 recording of "Waltz for Debbie" on a radio program that jazz pianist Billy Taylor had on New York's WLIB-AM at the time; in addition to purchasing all of Evans' Riverside LPs, he faithfully attended his performances at the legendary Village Vanguard in Manhattan's Greenwich Village area. In 1966, Harris asked the late Vanguard owner Max Gordon if he could tape Evans' performances for his private collection -- Harris wasn't trying to be a professional bootlegger -- and Gordon gave him permission. Harris went on to record countless Evans appearances at the Vanguard, and by the time the pianist died on September 15, 1980, at the age of 51, Harris' private collection of Evans' Vanguard performances was huge.

For many years after Evans' death, those recordings didn't see the light of day and remained in Harris' home in suburban Connecticut. But eventually, Harris realized that he was sitting on a cultural gold mine and got in touch with Fantasy Records (which owned the vast majority of Evans' non-Verve albums) about the possibility of the Vanguard recordings being released commercially. In 1996 -- after everyone had gone through the proper legal channels -- many of the Vanguard performances in Harris' private collection found their way to Milestone/Fantasy's eight-CD, 104-track box set The Secret Sessions (which spanned 1966-1975). But as generous as that release was, Harris still had a wealth of unreleased Vanguard performances in his collection -- and in 2003, Milestone/Fantasy released a 73-minute Evans CD titled Getting Sentimental, which contained performances Harris had taped on January 15, 1978. ~ Alex Henderson, All Music Guide