Man wird ihm nicht in allen Punkten folgen mögen, aber anregend sind seine Gedanken zu Bill Evans alleweil…
“I’m hoping the trio will grow in the direction of spontaneous improvisation rather than just one guy blowing followed by another guy blowing,” was the way Evans described his goal. But a somewhat different story is told by the four albums that Evans, LaFaro, and drummer Paul Motian made for the Riverside label between 1959 and 1961–Portrait in Jazz, Explorations, Waltz for Debby, and Sunday at the Village Vanguard (the latter two both recorded at that club during a June 1961 engagement). Listening to those recordings in chronological order, one hears an exquisitely tender romanticism subduing all other moods–so much so that the more aggressive 1959 performances (“What Is This Thing Called Love?” and “Autumn Leaves” from Portrait in Jazz) would have sounded unthinkably bold by Evans’s 1961 standards. If “spontaneous improvisation” was the stated goal, with each new recording Evans also moved several steps further into LaFaro and Motian’s lush, fluid textures–diminishing the volume level of his playing and softening its rhythmic profile until the pianist had become an almost ghostly presence, hovering near the pulse to add subtle touches of harmonic and melodic color.
Den ganzen Essay aus seinem Buch hat Larry Kart hier ins Netz gestellt.
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"Don't play what the public want. You play what you want and let the public pick up on what you doin' -- even if it take them fifteen, twenty years." (Thelonious Monk) | Meine Sendungen auf Radio StoneFM: gypsy goes jazz, #151: Neuheiten aus dem Archiv – 09.04., 22:00 | Slow Drive to South Africa, #8: tba | No Problem Saloon, #30: tba