Collection: The Great Jazz Trio

The Great Jazz Trio began at the Village Vanguard, which is where most of the important things in jazz piano trio history begin. Hank Jones had started playing Monday nights at the club with bassist Ron Carter and drummer Tony Williams sometime in 1975 or 1976, three musicians who between them had been inside Miles Davis's second great quintet, Ella Fitzgerald's touring band, and the foundational rhythm sections of hard bop. The name came from East Wind Records, the Japanese audiophile label whose A&R men heard the trio and named them in 1976 before flying them to Tokyo and Los Angeles to document what they had. The first recording session featured Buster Williams on bass rather than Carter, but the seven sessions that followed, including three live sets at the Vanguard in 1977 and studio dates in Los Angeles and New York, established the Jones-Carter-Williams lineup as the definitive version. Ethan Iverson, writing about the East Wind records, noted that all three players "sound like leaders," which is exactly right: Jones's voicings are not accompanist's piano, Carter's bass lines carry melodic weight of their own, and Williams plays with the same post-bebop rhythmic freedom he had brought to the Davis quintet a decade earlier. The Japanese label also brought guest soloists through: Jackie McLean and Sadao Watanabe both recorded with the trio during this period. East Wind's audiophile aspirations extended to direct-to-disc recording experiments, and the covers used photographs of American baseball players, most famously Boston Red Sox pitcher Roger Moret on the cover of "At the Village Vanguard," an aesthetic decision that remains one of the odder footnotes in jazz sleeve design.