Bill Evans: Always On Sunday

Bill Evans died twenty five years ago today. To borrow what John O'Hara said when he heard of George Gershwin’s death, I don’t have to believe if I don’t want to. His music is here through dozens of recordings, but his presence goes beyond aural artifacts. Evans is part of jazz today because he is woven into the concept of nearly every pianist who followed him, and of many who were established when he became an important player in the second half of the 1950s. Indeed, his influence extends beyond pianists to players of virtually every melody instrument; listen, as an example, to the trumpeter Tom Harrell.

Hearing the new Riverside box set of the Bill Evans Trio at the Village Vanguard in 1961, it is easy to imagine that he is still with us. So he is, in a demonstrable way, because he, bassist Scott LaFaro and drummer Paul Motian changed the concept of the piano trio from that of a soloist accompanied by bass and drums to that of three musicians who breathe, think and function as one. Among important jazz trios in the twenty first century, adaptations of the Evans approach to performance are the rule, not the exception.

In addition, LaFaro had the greatest impact of anyone since Jimmy Blanton in Duke Ellington’s band of the early 1940s, on the way bass players use their instrument. He was not only a phenomenal master of the technical aspects of playing the double bass, he was also gifted—quite likely a genius, as was Evans—in matters of harmonic choices, melodic construction and rhythmic placement. It is an unintended consequence of LaFaro’s pervasive influence that regiments of young bassists imitate his ability to play high and fast, but most do not or cannot begin to approximate his lyricism, beauty and timing ,or the depth of his tone, which Evans likened to the sound of an organ. New bassists—not all, but many—emulate the technique they hear from LaFaro on the Evans recordings without understanding how it fits into the complex relationship among Evans, LaFaro and Motian and, particularly, how his note choices relate to the impressionistic chord voicings that give Evans’s playing so much of its character. Worse, they overlook at least half of what made him a great bassist, the power of his straight-ahead swing.

For all of Evans’s legend as an introspective, withdrawn musician, his playing had muscle and grit, and there is plenty of swing in the Vanguard recordings. Originally issued on a forty-one-minute LP, they helped to expand the reputation he made as a New York session musician, occasional leader and Miles Davis sideman. For the next nineteen years, he built his career in great part on the foundation of the trio with LaFaro and Motian and on the Vanguard sessions. In the years since Evans died in 1980, Fantasy, Inc. has reissued that album many times in several formats. The initially released tracks, and almost everything else recorded at the Vanguard on June 25, 1961 are in the huge Bill Evans: Complete Riverside Recordings box.

The new three-CD box has only one “new” track, a previously unissued take of LaFaro’s composition “Gloria’s step,” slightly marred by a brief dropout resulting from a power failure. The set is the most complete possible account of an amazing afternoon’s and night’s work by the Evans trio, two-and-a-half hours of music. Quantity is not, however, what renders the set compelling. Nor is it the fact that the performances are in their proper sequence; that is true in the big Riverside Evans box. In that collection, however, they begin and end, unavoidably but annoyingly, in the middle of CDs. Here, they begin at the beginning of the first CD and conclude at the end of the third. No, it is the intensity and joy of the music itself, and the sense of occasion, that have kept people going back to these performances for four decades. The recordings are remastered so that listening to them, preferably with closed eyes and a glass of something good at hand, we are as near as possible to being with Evans, LaFaro and Motian in that little wedge of a club beneath Seventh Avenue South in New York. Through expanded intervals between numbers, chatter of the audience is now a greater part of the ambience. We hear snippets of discussion among the musicians about repertoire choices, and we hear their occasional reactions to one another’s playing.

Orrin Keepnews, who produced the original sessions, was not involved in preparing the new reissue, but wrote liner notes for the package. In the essay, he admits to initial skepticism about the idea of yet another release, but says that his doubts were erased when he heard the results. When I knew the box was on the way, I had about decided that it would be redundant. It is not. I have had it playing for days. I am making room for it on my Bill Evans shelf.

Adam Gopnik of The New Yorker wrote of Evans’s playing in these recordings, “They are as close to pure emotion, produced without impediments - not at all the same thing as an entire self poured out without inhibitions, the bebop dream - as exists in music.” This is a good day to read “That Sunday,” Gopnik’s 2001 account of the Evans Vanguard sessions on the occasion of their fortieth anniversary. It is a good day to remember one of our greatest musicians.