It’s not polite to speak ill of the recently departed, but in the case of drummer/percussionist Michael Evans – whose sudden death of an apparent heart attack on 13 August stunned the New York City experimental music community – this unspoken rule probably won’t need to be enforced. It’s hard to recall anyone ever uttering a negative word about Evans, a veteran of the NYC scene. In my conversations with acquaintances of his, and in the deluge of Facebook posts mourning his passing, several adjectives came up again and again: “sweet”, “warm”, “loving”, “gentle”, “generous”, “kind”. In the words of WFMU DJ Fabio Roberti, one of Evans’s closest friends and the proprietor of Brooklyn record shop Earwax, where Evans worked on and off for 20 years: “I can’t think of a single person who ever met Michael who didn’t like him. And the same was true of him. He could never say a bad word about anybody. You could try to push him: ‘That guy is a real asshole,’” Roberti says with a chuckle. “He’d say, ‘No.’ He didn’t have a mean bone in his body.”

Evans had a head spinning list of credits and collaborations to his name, to the point where even people who had played with him regularly were surprised at the number and range of first person stories that began to circulate after his death. He is probably best known for his long tenure recording and touring with the Downtown noise-rock/queercore band God Is My Co-Pilot in the 1990s and his involvement in the New York improv scene since then, but he also played with Aimee Mann (in her early group The Young Snakes), Karen Mantler, Mitra Sumara’s ‘Farsi funk’ outfit, and the New York hardcore bands Artless and The False Prophets. Among his many other collaborators were Jason Willett, Samm Bennett, David First, Rick Brown, David Grubbs, LaDonna Smith, Shelley Hirsch, Ron Anderson, Peter Gordon, Jac Berrocal, Peter Zummo and Andrea Parkins. He was a member, along with Jim Pugliese and Christine Bard, of the trio EasSide Percussion (whose 1997 release was produced by John Zorn) and leader of The Swirling Lotus Blossom Bandits Band, which played, in bandmate Zummo’s description, “that backwards South African funk stuff”.

Describing Evans’s playing is nearly impossible, largely because he could and did play in every style imaginable, from helter-skelter tabletop chaos to Afro jazz to “Greco-Turkish improv” (in a spur of the moment gig with guitarist George Barba Yiorgi). He had enviable chops (he studied tabla, Haitian/Afro-Cuban hand drumming, frame drumming and dumbek, with Milford Graves among other notable instructors, and was also an accomplished thereminist), but his humour and bottomless curiosity were his most striking characteristics. As Grubbs put it in a Twitter post, “He stood out as someone radiating in the moment joy and madcap energy.” Cornet player Stephen Haynes described him as “a cross between a shaman and a trickster”. And Parkins wrote that Evans “seemed more alive than almost anyone I’ve known. He was the first person with whom I felt comfortable enough to freely improvise.” I played in an improv group with Evans on Zoom from time to time, and whatever locale he happened to be calling in from (say, his mother’s house in Miami), we knew he’d find some household object to eke musical sounds out of. Ron Anderson, who frequently performed in incendiary improv combos with Evans, said “he was open and curious about the world. When I moved back to New York from California, Michael had a more West Coast vibe, had a big sense of humour, and that came out in his approach to art, that playfulness.”

Most of all, Evans was an experimenter. “He was always probing, trying to find the next thing,” Roberti says. “He was fearless; he wasn’t afraid of failing. He just wanted to see where it would go.” Vocalist/performance artist Shelley Hirsch told me, “We were in a car driving back from the Electric Eclectics festival in Canada, and he was doing a stream of consciousness thing, vocalising and talking in a very musical way, for hours. We decided we would have to do another ride and record it. He was such a curious person that he took my workshops, because he wanted to do things with language.”

Evans was a gourmet chef and baker who had worked at some of New York’s best vegan restaurants, and he regularly prepared meals for the attendees at Electric Eclectics. “We would cook together,” Roberti recalls, “and it was always a lot of fun, but we’d bicker a lot, and people would always comment that we should do a YouTube channel of us cooking together.” It was completely in character that, shortly before his death, Evans had relocated to Florida for a month for the sole purpose of tending to, and cooking elaborate meals for, his ailing mother.

Evans’s humour was at its zenith in the wildly original dadaesque performances staged with his longtime partner, choreographer Susan Hefner, in which he hammered out fractured rhythms on cobbled-together percussion rigs. These collaborations, presented in venues around the world and occasionally for small audiences in Evans and Hefner’s home, were frequently described as “zany” – a perfectly apt label, as a simple Google image or video search will corroborate. Vocalist Viv Corringham remembers inviting the duo to perform in her series The Klinker, which was run, oddly, out of a small meeting room in a sterile office tower in Midtown Manhattan. “I remember that at a certain point in the performance Michael wrapped himself in a chain, he hung various percussive objects off himself, and he crawled on all fours out of the door and along the corridor past all these faceless offices.”

Still – being a drummer, after all – Evans could be relied on to hold things down when necessary. “I liked to stand next to him,” Zummo says. “When Mitra Sumara discussed or tried something new, Michael listened with a palpable focus and intensity. When he started playing, he was in the zone.”