One Magical Sunday

This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.

The New York Sun

Bill Evans’s “Sunday at the Village Vanguard” is – like Miles Davis’s “Kind of Blue” (on which Evans played), Sonny Rollins’s “Saxophone Colossus,” and John Coltrane’s “A Love Supreme” – one of those albums that happen only when the stars are properly aligned. Now that all 26 tracks recorded on June 25, 1961, alongside bassist Scott LaFaro and drummer Paul Motian have been reissued in a three-CD box, “The Complete Village Vanguard Recordings, 1961” (Riverside 4443), we can see the total picture of the threesome that redefined the boundaries of what a jazz piano trio could do.


The piano trio had become a standard format in the late 1940s, and generally featured a leader-star accompanied by two sidemen on bass and drums. Within a decade, both Ahmad Jamal and Evans were opening up the format so that the drummer and bassist had as many solo opportunities as the pianist. Even more important in the Evans trio was the way the three voices fit together and supported each other: Evans could never have flown out on his legendary lyrical flights of fancy had not LaFaro and Mr. Motian supported him so strongly.


Prior to forming the trio that played at the Vanguard, Evans (1929-80) had spent eight months in Davis’s band; before that, he had been introduced to jazz’s major leagues by the clarinetist Tony Scott. He played with LaFaro, and Mr. Motian from the winter of 1959-60 until the 25-year-old LaFaro was killed in a car crash two weeks after that amazing Sunday at the Vanguard.


During this brief time, they recorded only two studio albums, “Portrait in Jazz” and “Explorations” – despite the efforts of Riverside Records producer Orrin Keepnews to corral the threesome into the studio more often. “I felt constantly in danger of having this marvelous source of creativity and imagination slip away from me,” Mr. Keepnews writes in the booklet notes for the new set.


LaFaro had already collaborated extensively with free-jazz pioneer Ornette Coleman, and had established himself at a very young age as one of the most remarkable soloists the bass has ever known. His playing was fast and imaginative, his tone distinctive. LaFaro’s innovations left Mr. Motian with even more rhythmic responsibility; on the Vanguard recordings, the bassist at times seems to be playing his instrument like a second piano. The one previously unissued track on the new box, a new take of LaFaro’s “Gloria’s Step” (heretofore suppressed because an electric outage during the show caused a major dropout) shows that here was one bass soloist whom no crowd would ever talk over.


Evans influenced a generation of keyboardists with his signature touch, which is generally described as expressively lyrical and intensely romantic. By the end of his life, however, he seemed to resent being known as a man who inspired introspection among more contemporary musicians than could possibly be numbered. When Evans appeared on Marian Mc-Partland’s “Piano Jazz” show on NPR in 1978, he made a point of talking about what was important to him: not the concepts of lyricism and romanticism, but rhythm.


“[My] rhythmic construction [has] evolved quite a bit,” he said. “Now, I don’t know how obvious that would be to the listener but the displacement of phrases and the way phrases follow one another and their placement against the meter and so forth, is something that I have worked on rather hard.”


You can hear what he means on “All of You,” which he played three times at the Vanguard on June 25, 1961, and again for Ms. McPartland 17 years later. Even though he starts solo and in ballad time, he never quite states Cole Porter’s melody. After the first chorus, where a jazzman would normally switch from melody to improvisation, the tempo intensifies and Evans gets even more deeply into the changes, laying down long, cascading patterns that flow against the rhythmic grain. In the 1978 interview, Ms. McPartland compares this effect to “swimming against the tide.”


Evans, LaFaro and Mr. Motian played five sets that magical Sunday (two in the afternoon, three in the evening), resulting in 153 minutes of music. There are two sumptuous readings of Evans’s most famous composition, “Waltz for Debby”; the exuberant “All of You”; another 3/4 beauty, “Alice in Wonderland”; and touching readings of Evans’s signature ballads, “My Foolish Heart,” “Detour Ahead,” and “I Loves You Porgy.” There are also two tributes to Evans’s ex-boss Davis that the pianist would virtually never play again: “Milestones” and “Solar.” The latter is the strongest bopper on the package, and it is a delight to hear Evans negotiate the changes of “How High the Moon.”


But the highlight of the box is Leonard Bernstein’s “Some Other Time,” which the bassist launches with a compelling vamp. This is essentially a slow, two-note pattern that becomes a backdrop over which Evans is free to state all manner of melodies in a feathery light, piano dynamic. In his 1958 sessions for his second album, “Everybody Digs Bill Evans,” Evans used this vamp both as the intro to “Some Other Time” and as the background for a mostly free-form improvisation titled “Peace Piece.”


The Vanguard “Some Other Time” begins with the “Peace Piece” vamp, which sounds even better with Evans stating the tune on top of it, graceful and light as can be, with an emotionality that’s implied rather than directly stated. He picks up the tempo slightly in the bridge, which modulates up a sixth, and slightly varies his dynamic throughout the improvisation. He has long since figured out how to use his beloved rhythmic displacements, his remarkable harmonic sense, and his crystalline touch to enhance both the melody and the emotional message of whatever he’s playing.


The pianist would later return to “Some Other Time” with singer Monica Zetterlund and, most famously, Tony Bennett in 1975. As hauntingly beautiful as the Evans-Bennett version is, the presence of a vocalist with the Evans-Motian-LaFaro trio would have been redundant. Perhaps that’s why both Evans albums with Bennett were strictly duets: It was impossible to improve on the Vanguard trio rendition of the Bernstein melody.


Listening to “Some Other Time,” one can’t help but wonder what Evans might have become if he hadn’t been so self-destructive – that is, had he not been so determined to kill himself with drugs. Evans was already using heroin in 1961, and it’s as if he knew even at the age of 33 that he wasn’t going to have time to do half the things he wanted to. He wasn’t apologizing, just telling us that we should be glad for what we had and what was to come.


wfriedwald@nysun.com


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