Frank Evans
Jazz pianist turned entrepreneur who bought seven mechanical Songbirds in 1939 and wrote all their music
Frank Evans was an eccentric jazz pianist turned entrepreneur, known for odd taste in music and a love of anything that pushed the boundaries of art and technology. In 1939 he purchased the seven remaining Robotic Songbirds from the failed Edison & Fields Automaton Works, refined them in his private studio, and wrote every note they played, because the machines could perform but never create. He renamed them The Atomic Songbirds, after the small atomic core inside each one, and put them on the stages of New York's underground clubs.
In December 1940 he sent four of the seven to Moscow to play Joseph Stalin's birthday celebration at the Tchaikovsky Concert Hall. Stalin was dazzled, and proposed an era of cooperation he called Tekhnosoyuz. The gesture reshaped the century, and it made Frank a target. In the spring of 1941 German operatives bombed his recording studio outside Chicago. He survived, missing all four limbs. Five years later a German delegation delivered a set of prototype prosthetics developed under the Tekhnosoyuz agreements, and within months he was composing and conducting again. He said of it: "They tried to take my music from me. Instead, they helped the world see what we can achieve when we care more about the future than the past."
The miniature atomic reactors in those limbs poisoned him. He was diagnosed with atomic fever in 1953. He had also kept a secret for almost twenty years: the Songbirds had never sung. Their voice was his younger sister, Frankie Evans, who refused to perform under her own name, and Frank made sure the mechanicals took the credit at the microphones. When she was killed by a reckless driver in 1957, the truth came out, and the band was left voiceless.
He answered with his last project. With a clandestine team of American, German and Russian engineers he built a positronic robot vocalist to carry his sister's voice and personality and his own memories forward, and unveiled her in Berlin in 1960 as Frankie Evans. He died that December. His will left everything, his wealth, his copyrights, the rights to his work, to the robot.
Outside the fiction
Frank Evans is a fictional character in the Atomic Timeline, the alternate history The Atomic Songbirds' catalog lives in. The project is written by Illia Tsariuk.
Full authorship statement on the colophon.
Questions
- Who was Frank Evans in The Atomic Songbirds' story?
- The band's founder and songwriter. A jazz pianist turned entrepreneur, he bought the seven mechanical Songbirds in 1939, wrote all their music, sent four of them to Moscow in 1940, survived a 1941 assassination attempt, and in 1960 built the positronic vocalist Frankie Evans to carry his legacy before dying of atomic fever.
- Did Frank Evans know his sister was the band's voice?
- Yes. He ran the concealment himself, letting the mechanicals take credit at the microphones because Frankie Evans refused to perform under her own name. The public learned the truth only after she was killed in 1957.
- Was Frank Evans a real person?
- No. He is a fictional character in the Atomic Timeline, written by Illia Tsariuk.