Ernie Royal, Richard Williams, Snooky Young (tp, flh) Howard Johnson (flh, tu, bcl) Dave Baker, Garnett Brown (tb) Dave Bargeron (tb, tu) John Clark (frh) Jimmy Giuffre, Joe Henderson, Sam Rivers (reeds) Bill Evans (p) Webster Lewis, Ted Saunders (el-p) Sam Brown (g) Eddie Gomez (b) Ron Carter, Herb Geller (el-b) Marty Morell, Tony Williams (d) Marc Belair (d, per)
George Russell (arr, cond)
*Bill Evans: piano, rhodes electric piano
*Eddie Gomez: acoustic bass
*Marty Morell: drums.
*Snooky Young, Ernie Royal, Richard Williams,Stanton Davis: trumpet
*Snooky Young, Ernie Royal, Richard Williams, Howard Johnson: flugelhorn
*John Clark: french horn
*Howard Johnson, Dave Bargeron: tuba
*Jimmy Guiffre, Sam Rivers: tenor saxophone, flute
*Sam Rivers: obo
*Howard Johnson: bass clatinet
*Ron Carter (on 5,7), Stanley Clark (on 1,2,3),Herb Bushler (on 4,6,8): fender bass
*Sam Brown: bass guitar, electric guitar
*Ted Saunders: electric piano, clavinette
*Webster Lewis: organ, electric piano
*Tony Williams: drums
*Marc Belair: percussion
*02.: Living Time - Event II (8:24)
*03.: Living Time - Event III (2:50)
*04.: Living Time - Event IV (5:32)
*05.: Living Time - Event V (11:56)
*06.: Living Time - Event VI (4:16)
*07.: Living Time - Event VII (2:10)
*08.: Living Time - Event VIII (5:41)
SEE...
"Evans got involved in two projects with large orchestra at this time. The first, in 1972, was the controversial Living Time, conceived and worked out with his friend George Russell. It was Evans himself, in an effort to satisfy Columbia Records' urging for more saleable ideas, who had come up with the idea of an album featuring him with a large ensemble. As had already happened other times in the past, Russell again appeared to be trying to force Evans into formally freer situations, acting out his usual role as “stimulator of the new and unknown” which left Evans more than a little uneasy. Russell's score on this occasion was a daring fusion of rock, informal jazz and modal music where Bill seemed a bit like a fish out of water: “Bill played like he was being pushed into some other level, hit over the head, kicked in the behind,” Russell is quoted as saying, adding, paradoxically, “I love and respect Bill's playing so much that I really couldn't resist the challenge.” The album turned out to be difficult for the average listener as well. Even with the presence of musicians like Jimmy Giuffre, Sam Rivers, Joe Henderson and Ron Carter, the outcome was a complex music which had trouble moving ahead as a result of Russell's need more to scratch his experimental itch than to accommodate the natural feeling of the musicians involved."
(Bill Evans: Ritratto d’artista con pianoforte/Bill Evans: The Pianist as an Artist.Enrico Pieranunzi, Rome 1999, Stampa Alternativa)
In reality, the problem of a drummer that was not easy to resolve for a pianist like him. He was perfectly aware of the volume problems that a drummer, discreet as he may be, could pose to his music. His ideal "group" was a duet with the bass, but he knew that to achieve a certain effect a drummer was necessary. As would come out in an interview he did in 1972 for the French magazine Jazz Hot, his biggest problem with drummers was their difficulty in lowering the tension and volume of their drumming once they had intensified it - a defect which, as Evans pointed out, robbed the performance of its "breath" and weighed it down unnecessarily.
Near the end of 1977, at more or less the same time, Zigmund and Gomez - who had been with Evans for eleven years - quit the trio. Evans was left with the job of forming a completely new group. He played for about a year with the trusty Philly Joe Jones on drums, alternating different bass players, until an old college friend called his attention to a young bass player playing at the time with the Woody Herman orchestra, and who he thought had “something special that Bill would like.” Marc Johnson, the 24-year-old son of a pianist, had grown up listening to Bill Evans records. He had studied cello for a while before taking up the bass, and this, along with a truly unique musical sensibility, gave his playing that "vocal" appeal that Evans had always set such high store by in his own music and in that of his partners. The two finally met, after a certain hit-and-miss period of trying to hook up, and their first gig together was at the Village Vanguard. "Before we even finished the first number, I got the feeling immediately that this was the guy."
Evans had recently recorded another solo album 
In July of 1978 Evans went off on a European tour. The Johnson/Jones combination worked well, regardless of some imbalances between the boisterous drummer and the refined young bass player whose true value and potential began to shine through. Johnson, gifted with an instinctive, genuine capacity for interplay, proved to be tuned in to Evans and also had a lot of his own things to say when soloing. The three performed at various European festivals (among which Umbria Jazz and Montreux), playing at times with guest musicians such as Lee Konitz and Kenny Burrell.
The Village Vanguard Sessions well-illustrates the contrast between the iconoclast LaFaro and the introverted, subtly conservative Evans. The young bass player who lived life to the fullest “and tasted it down to the last drop wanted more than anything to take risks” (“I don’t like to look back because the whole point in jazz is doing it now.”) This he does with extraordinary results in All Of You, lingering a long time on a very dissonant minor second, that he "walks" confidently along the piece, refusing to stay consonant with the chord flow; or in Milestones, where LaFaro even succeeds in dragging Evans along on a couple of very daring excursions, from which the pianist withdraws immediately to go back to chiseling out his bewitching neo-Impressionistic harmonies. Also in this piece, the bass player seems deliberately to refuse to "walk" in 4/4 in the footsteps of Motian’s orthodox comping, preferring to depart with a solo line of his own that counterpoints what Evans' is doing with his piano. At the end of the tune, LaFaro fools around rather provocatively with some notes, to the laughter of the crowd, while Evans stays locked himself inside his dark, doubt-filled world.
Other roads, with their hidden perils, were waiting to seal Scott LaFaro's tragic fate. At the end of those historic sets, as the three were leaving the Village Vanguard, he had spontaneously expressed with great joy to Motian and Evans, “these two weeks have been exceptional, I've finally made an album I'm happy with!” On the night of July 5 1961, ten days after that magical evening, while going home after a visit to a friend, and having ignored the urgings of pianist-composer Gap Mangione to stay over and leave the next day, he lost control of his Chrysler and went off the road into a tree. Both he and the friend riding with him were killed instantly.
Explorations [RLP-351; OJCCD 037-2] was recorded on February 2, 1961. The demanding, critical Evans was in no rush to record, something which made Keepnews very anxious. The Riverside label was going through an expansion and image-building phase in which Evans played no small part. Between 
How Deep is the Ocean
The roles are inverted for a while in Nardis. The theme stated, LaFaro soars into a magnificent solo (maybe this amazing performance had something to do with the fact that just two days earlier he had recorded the Atlantic album Ornette! with Ornette Coleman, Don Cherry and Ed Blackwell); Evans backs him with a simple but engagingly voiced melody, its tone permeated with that French Impressionist aura he loved. He is extremely sensitive in adapting to LaFaro's improvisational line, accurately choosing the height of the sounds and alternating open or close harmony to modulate the color of his voicing. When Bill's turn comes up his very colloquial solo proves how maximum results can be achieved with minimum means. His right hand, in fact, plays a few sparing notes loaded with an emotionally dense "specific weight", giving us a clear example of his ability to make the piano “a complete expressive musical medium.” LaFaro then takes up his own individual path, playing in counterpoint to the new melody that Evans is extemporaneously composing and interpreting on the piece's chord changes. Finally, in its coda, Nardis offers us a fleeting memory of the celebrated Prelude in C Sharp Minor, by Rachmaninov, whose marked Russian-ness he had always been very fond of. 
Beyond everything already said above, and the fact that the version that we are talking about was the first that Evans recorded in trio, Nardis deserves a special digression, which is a little story in itself. As any jazz student or professional jazz player knows, in every jazz tune collection Nardis is generally credited to Miles Davis even though, surprisingly, its composer never recorded it. According to a personal recollection of Evans', referring to a 1958 session with Cannonball Adderley, “Miles came along to the studio with it, and you could see that the guys were struggling with it. Miles wasn't happy with it either but after the date he said that I was the only one to play it in the way that he wanted. I must have helped his royalties over the years, because I have never stopped playing it. It has gone on evolving with every trio I have had!”
His musical processes are, of course, technically analyzable. In the first of the two selections, for instance, he never plays the original melody, landing there only at the very end of a sort of (re) compositional journey founded on completely new melodic lines. Warren Bernhardt, pianist and Evans' personal friend, states that despite the fact that he never plays the original melody here, he brings out its “quintessence.” The something that makes How Deep Is The Ocean (as it did Spring Is Here) an extremely significant musical event is to be found, in reality, in silence, in the unspoken - but for this reason spoken in a more penetrating way – “communication by implication.”
Although the concert takes place before an audience, the three seem to interact exclusively among themselves and relate only to the music. This contributes to the almost palpable, breath-taking density of these recordings where the musicians follow their itinerary of pure, almost merciless honesty. In the background you hear the chatter and laughter of the audience, but the trio pays no heed. Each of them is totally concentrated on his own sound while carefully listening to that of the others: the inner mechanism of the trio has been carried to its perfect balance. Each of the three completes a little revolution, My Foolish Heart (which Evans records for the first time here) being an excellent example. Here only the melody is played, but the calm sense of humble and participant singing with which Evans interprets Young's song is exalted by the parsimonious interventions of LaFaro, whose profound and resonant notes seem to anxiously await the melody in astonishment, and to dialogue with it. This performance is permeated with the sense of the yet-to-be-discovered, an unknown dimension in which Motian’s role is decisive; in fact, he plays with the melody, making of the delicate contact between his brushes and cymbals emotionally meaningful interjections that closely follow the "little story in music" that Evans is telling.
LaFaro is the real co-protagonist of this historical recording. His relationship with Evans is telepathic. He inserts himself naturally among the piano's silences and breaths, almost always stubbornly refusing to ‘walk’ as the majority of his colleagues did in those days. Even in All Of You, where he could do it, he breaks up the tempo, thus creating a contrast with Motian. Observing these performances a bit more closely, it is clear that some of the material has to do with Miles Davis, both because they use two of his compositions (Solar and Milestones) and because of some important performances of his (All Of You and Gershwin's My Man’s Gone Now and I Loves You Porgy). All of which is understandable given Evans’ recent association with the trumpeter.
