Bill Evans recorded something like 50 albums as a leader between the 1950s and his untimely death at age 51 in 1980. He’s best known for his late-1950s and early-1960s recordings, particularly the albums taken from his legendary live sets at The Village Vanguard in 1961, and How My Heart Sings in 1962, all on Riverside. He also had unevenly productive years with Verve in the mid-60s, and indeed continued playing and recording until the death of his older brother in 1979, after which his own health went downhill. But as this reissue of the 1996 box set of his complete recordings for Fantasy in the 1970s shows, he remained quite productive during that decade, and indeed had some of his best years then, in terms of his health and his musical output. (Evans was troubled by drug addiction — alternately heroin and cocaine — for the second half of his life, but was clean from 1968 through much of the ’70s.)
The picture I have in my mind’s eye of Bill Evans is of the gaunt, spectral Evans of the 1950s at the keyboard, his hair slicked back, his haunted eyes gazing through black hornrim spectacles, wearing a narrow necktie and narrow-lapelled jacket. It’s a beefier, more relaxed and hairier Bill Evans on the cover of this set, much more in tune with the look of the ’70s, obviously healthier, smiling, his clear eyes piercing through similar hornrim glasses.
I said Evans is “best known for his late-1950s and early-1960s recordings” but perhaps I speak only for myself. The Fantasy recordings include one Grammy winner, Evans’s final on the label, 1977’s I Will Say Goodbye, a trio recording with Eddie Gomez on bass and Eliot Zigmund on drums; and two Grammy nominations, the first Fantasy release The Tokyo Concert and Alone Again, Evans’s only solo date on the label. (Bassist Gomez is a near-constant presence on this set, appearing on pretty much all of the dates for Fantasy except Alone Again, the Tony Bennett album, and the first quintet date that resulted in the durable release Quintessence.)
This set includes nearly 100 performances by Evans between 1973 and 1977, in solo, duet, trio and quintet configurations, as well as the first of the two albums he released with vocalist Bennett. Most are studio dates but they also include some definitive live recordings, in settings from clubs to concert halls to festivals.
I was a little shocked when I first heard the sound of a Fender Rhodes electric piano, which shows up on several of the tracks on Intuition, Evans’s studio duet album with Gomez. Bill Evans, after all, is known first and foremost for his lovely voicings on the keyboard, his control of the shadings, colors, tonalities and other micro-effects that so few pianists ever venture into, let alone master. And then here he is, in the middle of the second track, Mercer Ellington’s sublime “Blue Serge,” vamping chords on piano with his left hand and suddenly improvising with his right on the Fender! Not only that, but a heavily phase-shifted Fender - at least it’s not hooked up to a wah-wah! Of course everybody was messing around with the Fender Rhodes in the mid-’70s, and it features heavily on some of my favorite soul-jazz and fusion recordings from the era, but .&mbsp;. . Bill? Actually, it turns out that Evans was one of the early adopters of the instrument, and although he didn’t record many albums with it, he got a kick out of it. And it actually works quite well on some of these tracks on Intuition, particularly the jaunty take on “Show-Type Tune.”
How to pick highlights on a set with nine discs that covers 12 releases with 98 tracks? Well, there area couple of obvious ones, to me at least. The first is the first Fantasy release, the widely acclaimed The Tokyo Concert, which kicks off with the lovely “Mornin’ Glory” and upbeat “Up With The Lark” and wraps with a smashing encore of “On Green Dolphin Street.” The audience in the Yubin Chokin Hall on this January night in 1973 was pin-drop silent during the performances and enthusiastic with applause.
Another high point for me is the first quintet date, which produced the album Quintessence. What a lineup: Harold Land on tenor, Kenny Burrell on guitar, Ray Brown on bass, and Philly Joe Jones on drums. It opens with Kenny Wheeler’s “Sweet Dulcinea Blue” and just doesn’t quit — Burrell’s blues strut “Bass Face” locks into a really sweet groove. The previously unreleased 1976 live performance from Paris with Gomez and Eliot Zigmund also just leaps out of the speakers. Paris loved Evans from the beginning and the energy is high on this set — Gomez and Zigmund really propel even familiar pieces like “34 Skidoo” and the angular “T.T.T.T.” and the show concludes with a fresh-faced version of “Waltz For Debby” on which Gomez in particular stands out.
An extra treat, at least for me, is the inclusion of Evans’s appearance on Marian McPartland’s Piano Jazz which is the whole of the ninth disc. McPartland’s long-running program on National Public Radio was instrumental in building my own love for jazz piano, and the two make some beautiful music together, including a fun take on Dave Brubeck’s “In Your Own Sweet Way.”
As with others in this superb series of Concord jazz box set reissues, this one comes with an excellent booklet that documents the performances in various ways. It has an informative history by jazz writer and critic Gene Lees and another by Evans’s longtime friend, manager and producer Helen Keane, the set’s producer. As with this year’s earlier release of the Thelonious Monk Riverside set, my only quarrel is that the booklet makes you dig for a listing of which albums the tracks appeared on. Other than that, The Complete Fantasy Recordings further burnishes Bill Evans’s legacy in the pantheon of jazz pianists. This is an essential set of recordings for any lover of jazz music.
(Fantasy, 2015)
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