The Bill Evans Trio - The Legendary Bill Evans Trio (2022) {3CD Box Set}

Five albums in a three-disc Box Set featuring the legendary Bill Evans.

“Bill had this quiet fire that I loved on piano. The way he approached it, the sound he got was like crystal notes or sparkling water cascading down from some clear waterfall.” Miles Davis

Bill Evans co-wrote ‘Kind Of Blue’ with Miles Davis and is regarded by many as the most influential jazz pianist of his generation. The trio he formed in 1959 with the brilliant, ill-fated young bassist Scott LaFaro and drummer Paul Motion is surely as fine as any in jazz history.

This three-disc box set edition comprises almost everything this Evans trio recorded; The two miraculous studio albums, ‘Portrait In Jazz’ and ‘Explorations’; the intimate live sets recorded in New York in the summer of 1961, ‘Sunday Night At The Village Vanguard’ and ‘Waltz For Debby’. These masterpieces are complimented by the Birdland sessions – an earlier musical document of the trio in an authentic club setting – with disc three completed by the their first recordings together, with the jazz clarinettist Tony Scott; for the album ‘Sung Heroes’, his homages to Billie Holiday and the trumpeter “Hot Lips” Page.

The Canadian journalist Gene Lees was a close friend of Evans: “Bill wanted it to be a three- way colloquy, rather than pianist-accompanied-by-rhythm-section. And it was. LaFaro, still in his early twenties, had developed bass playing to a new level of facility. He had a gorgeous tone and unflagging melodicism. Motian, Armenian by background, had since childhood been steeped in a music of complex time figures and was able to feed his companions patterns of polyrhythm that delighted them both.

“Pianists waited for their albums to come out almost the way people gather at street-corners in New York on Saturday night to get the Sunday Times: ‘Portrait In Jazz’, ‘Explorations’, and then, ‘Waltz For Debby’ and ‘Sunday At The Village Vanguard’, derived from afternoon and evening sessions recorded live on June 25, 1961. These albums alone, if Bill had never recorded anything else, would have secured his position in jazz.”

Evans’ biographer, Peter Pettinger, on the Village Vanguard site: “The fruits of the group’s imagination that day continue to reward repeated hearings and to renew the listener’s mental and emotional stamina. Each piece occupies its own crystalline world of magic. This legacy has been called Bill Evans’s finest hour, and few would disagree For depth of feeling, in-group affinity, and beauty of conception with a pliant touch, these records will be forever peerless.”