BILL EVANS TRIO - 1960 Birdland Sessions

This isn’t a review as such. For me reviewing a Bill Evans album would be akin to reviewing my sister, my wife – the music, as are the people, is just too personal and entwined around my life to find anything like the right words but…

…I do have a story about the music in this new and incredibly good value re-release – Bill Evans 1960 Birdland Sessions. When I was first playing jazz gigs around London in the mid 1980s packing my doublebass into my VW Beetle I was playing with a pianist, Chris Lowe, from north London. He was a great pianist and also a Bill Evans aficionado – he taught me so much and told me so many stories about Bill and the trio and their performances at Ronnie Scotts in the 60s and 70s he frequently went to see. One day after practicing at his house he pulled out what looked like a homemade rough cardboard vinyl album sleeve – it contained a radio broadcast bootleg of the Bill Evans trio with Scott Lafaro and Paul Motian at Birdland in 1960. The first track he played was Tadd Dameron’s Our Delight. It was the most exciting music I’d ever heard. I stood transfixed - a turbo driven trio going for broke and swinging like the world was about to end with a sense of purpose I’d never heard the likes of before. Such intensity and clarity of thought forever breaking, for me at least, the marketing people’s slant of putting Bill Evans into the ‘For Lovers’ ballads box. I looked at Chris as if he had in his hand the Holy Grail of music. My love affair with jazz trios and what they could be capable of delivering to my ears and heart was cemented.

The badly recorded but somehow vital air shots seemed to strip down the music to two things; swing and lyricism. Lafaro sounding intense and focused, Motian like a modern day Gene Krupa giving the high-hat more than its usual attention. I asked Chris to play it several times over the following years but I lost touch with it and later, him. I still recalled it frequently, that unison, near-demented block chord intro forever etched on my soul, and sometimes I searched for it in specialist jazz magazines but I never found it. Then life interrupted and it got relegated somewhere deeper into my memory until now….thanks to this re-issue.

Our Delight - six minutes thirty-eight seconds of utter unrelenting jazz magic (not to mention the other hour of outstanding tracks from the vintage Evan’s period) and wow, that intro, welcome back.