Coincidentally, just a few days ago, I was downloading some Bill Evans just the other day from eMusic, prompted by both Richard Williams and John Fordham. On Monday, Fordham wrote about Keith Jarrett's Köln Concert, citing Evans' work as a forerunner. That sent me back to Williams' The Blue Moment
Then the random number generator picks out this record from my collection, one of those passed on to me by my friend Steve in his guided giveaway of some of his vinyl (see also).
What's amazing is that this recording was apparently made by the same trio (Evans, Scott Lafaro, Paul Motian), in the same year, in the same city (New York) as Sunday at the Village Vanguard and Waltz for Debby. Yet, it's clearly not from the same performances as the piece Autumn Leaves, for example, wasn't played at the Village Vanguard. I'm not qualified to say whether this album is of comparable quality to the Village Vanguard ones — though Steve is, and he recommended it to me — but even if it were sub-prime, you'd think that any music so physically and temporally close to greatness would have got a fair bit of attention. Far from it. The album was released in Italy in 1985 and was deleted some time ago. Confusingly another Bill Evans live album, also called Autumn Leaves, was recorded in 1969 and released in Italy in 1980. In fact, Musicbrainz has three Bill Evans albums called Autumn Leaves (1, 2, 3) and none of them are the one I've got, which seems to be the most obscure of the lot. The anachronistic cover — clearly a photo from Bill Evan's later years, and more than a decade after the recording — raises the question of whether this could be a bootleg. However, there are no typos in the tracklisting, which makes it unlikely.
That's what I've scouted out as a curious beginner. I'll leave you with Richard Williams' appreciation of the title track as it appeared on Evan's studio album, Portrait in Jazz
An even more remarkable initiative occurs in Autumn Leaves… in which Evans and Motian stop playing in order to allow LaFaro to begin an unaccompanied solo, only to join him for a passage of genuine three-way intervention, full of counterpoint and counter-rhythms, each musician listening hard to the others.
Though it's not quite like that on the version on this album.
| Buy from eil.com | Discogs entry for this album |
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