Читать книгу The Mojo Collection - Various Mojo Magazine - Страница 35

Record label: Riverside

Produced: Orrin Keepnews

Recorded: Live at The Village Vanguard, New York; June 25, 1961

Released: September 1961

Chart peaks: None (UK) None (US)

Personnel: Bill Evans (p); Scott LaFaro (b); Paul Motian (d); Dave Jones (e)

Track listing: Gloria’s Step; My Man’s Gone Now; Solar; Alice In Wonderland; All Of You; Jade Visions

Running time: 40.11

Current CD: OJC201402

Further listening: Waltz For Debbie (1961); More From The Vanguard (1961)

Further reading: Bill Evans: How My Heart Sings (Peter Pettinger, 1998); www.billevanswebpages.com

Download: emusic

The choice of pianist Bill Evans to replace Red Garland in the Miles Davis group in 1958 was not a universally popular one. For one thing, he didn’t appear to swing as hard as Red, for another he was white. But Miles responded to Evans’s sound – detailed touch, limpid harmonies, emotional scalar lines – which Miles described as ‘like crystal notes of sparkling water cascading down from some clear waterfall.’ As for his time playing, ‘Bill underplayed it,’ said Miles, ‘which for what I was doing now with the modal thing, I liked what Bill was doing better.’

Bill, though thrilled to be in a band with John Coltrane, Cannonball Adderley, Miles Davis and Philly Joe Jones, was stung by the audience’s indifference-bordering-hostility to his contributions – which, in a live setting, were the antithesis of his hard-blowing colleagues – and quit after seven months. He was recalled for the seminal Davis album Kind Of Blue – which Davis admitted was ‘planned’ around Bill’s playing – but was keen to form his own trio which he had very clear ideas about.

‘I’m hoping the trio will grow in the direction of simultaneous improvisation,’ he had said, ‘if the bass player, for example, hears an idea that he wants to answer, why should he just keep playing a 4/4 background?’ After a few false starts (he lost several potential collaborators due to poor treatment at a club supporting Benny Goodman), Bill ended up with responsive drummer Paul Motian and a remarkable young bassist, Scott LaFaro, who was willing and more than capable to fulfil Bill’s vision of concurrent invention. ‘Ideas were rolling out on top of each other,’ Evans said of LaFaro, ‘it was like a bucking horse.’

The trio made two fine studio albums: December 1959’s Portrait In Jazz and February 1961’s Explorations, but with the tapes rolling all day Sunday June 25, 1961 at New York club the Village Vanguard (‘a relatively painless way to extract an album from the usually foot-dragging pianist’ said producer Orrin Keepnews), two and a half hours of glorious, symbiotic music was taped. It was a rich, delicate summation of the trio’s matured conception of interplay. Ten days later, 25-year-old LaFaro was killed in a car crash.

Shattered at the loss, Bill Evans stopped playing the piano for months. The sessions – emerging over three albums of which Sunday At The Village Vanguard is the first – are generally regarded as Evans’s finest and among the most important recordings in all of jazz.