Bill Evans Trio featuring Scott LaFaro - Sunday at the Village Vanguard (1977 Japanese Riverside Vinyl LP)

Bill Evans Trio featuring Scott LaFaro - Sunday at the Village Vanguard | Vinyl LP - 1977 Japanese Riverside/Victor Reissue (SMJ-6201, Riverside Original Recording Series no. 91)

• The last performance of the Bill Evans Trio with Scott LaFaro, recorded live across five sets at the Village Vanguard on June 25, 1961, eleven days before LaFaro's death in a car accident at age 25
• Routinely cited as one of the finest live jazz recordings ever made, with tracks selected by Evans and producer Orrin Keepnews to showcase LaFaro's bass work
• Japanese pressing manufactured by Victor Musical Industries, with insert featuring Japanese liner notes by Masaaki Awamura alongside Ira Gitler's original English notes

The Bill Evans Trio played five sets at the Village Vanguard on June 25, 1961, two in the afternoon and three in the evening. Orrin Keepnews and engineer Dave Jones recorded all of them. The plan had been to release a single album from the date, but Scott LaFaro's death in a car accident on July 6 changed everything. Keepnews and Evans selected the tracks across two albums, with this one deliberately subtitled "Featuring Scott LaFaro" and sequenced to foreground the bass. The choice is audible from the first notes of "Gloria's Step", a LaFaro composition where his bass enters as a melodic voice rather than a rhythm instrument, trading phrases with Evans in a way that had no real precedent in piano trio music. "My Man's Gone Now", the Gershwin piece from Porgy and Bess, carries an unavoidable weight given the circumstances of its release, Evans playing with a spare intensity that leaves space for LaFaro to fill. "Solar", Miles Davis's composition, runs nearly nine minutes and is the longest performance on the record, all three musicians improvising simultaneously in a way that the trio had been developing across Portrait in Jazz and Explorations over the previous eighteen months.

Side B opens with "Alice in Wonderland", the Sammy Fain and Bob Hilliard song from the Disney film, taken at a gentle tempo that lets Paul Motian's brushwork come forward in the mix. Motian is the least discussed member of this trio but his playing throughout is essential, especially on "All of You", the Cole Porter standard that follows, where his placement behind the beat creates the rhythmic tension that the whole performance hinges on. "Jade Visions", the other LaFaro composition on the record, closes the album at under four minutes and is the most harmonically abstract piece on either side. The album was produced by Keepnews and rushed out by October 1961, three months after the Vanguard date.

This is the 1977 Japanese pressing on Victor Musical Industries (SMJ-6201), number 91 in the Riverside Original Recording Series, with the original Donald Silverstein cover photograph and Ken Deardoff design reproduced. Insert includes Japanese liner notes by Masaaki Awamura.