Trio 64 (1964)

recorded in NYC, at December 18, 1963

Personnel:

Bill Evans piano
Paul Motian drums
Gary Peacock bass

Tracks:

:: Little Lulu
:: A Sleeping Bee
:: Always
:: Santa Claus Is Coming to Town
:: I'll See You Again
:: For Heaven's Sake
:: Dancing in the Dark
:: Everything Happens to Me
:: Little Lulu
:: Little Lulu
:: Always
:: I'll See You Again
:: My Heart Stood Still
:: Always
:: I'll See You Again
:: My Heart Stood Still

SEE...

"Something noteworthy was happening in those early 60s: Evans music was settling down into something less audacious than what he had done with Miles Davis or Scott LaFaro while, at the same time, his fame was growing, almost as a delayed reaction. As clear proof of this fact, in 1964, deposing the perennial Oscar Peterson, he was voted best pianist in the Down Beat critics' poll. Unfortunately, in the same year his long-lived collaboration with Paul Motian came to an end.

As a kind of farewell, the drummer left a last taste of his enormous personality and creativity on the album Trio '64, which included the extraordinary, barely more than 30-year-old, Gary Peacock on bass. Motian felt that the trio's music had become static, “tired", no longer innovative, even retrogressive (put more drastically, “cocktail lounge music),” and this album proves he was right. Evans' interest in interplay, in the breaking down of the rhythmic/harmonic confines in jazz language, seems here to have completely vanished.
However, Peacock is revealed as the real possible successor to LaFaro. His solos are daring excursions, in which the given harmony of the theme does not serve for "agreement" but for opposition. His irrepressible energy seems, as had happened with LaFaro, to make Evans uncomfortable, who goes off into a corner to listen to his partner's exuberant soloing, almost incredulous at so much iconoclastic vitality.

On Trio '64 [Verve CD 815-057-2] Evans seems to refuse any compliance with Peacock as well as with the ingenious, unconventional initiatives of Motian. He keeps himself shut away in his reassuring world of sound and does not risk encounter with what his two partners are saying, Even Evans' proposal of a lighter, even playful, repertoire (Little Lulu and Santa Claus Is Coming To Town), a sort of way to musically translate his penetrating and sedate humor, and an attempt to give a witty and joyful image to his music, is unable to make the session an artistically successful one. And so, this album turns out to be a missed opportunity, one which would never be repeated. That kind of dialogue, which had been arrested back on June 25th 1961, would never be fully embraced by Evans again. Motian went on to dispense his genius among the likes of Paul Bley and Keith Jarrett, to then expand his musical quest both as composer and as band leader in the mid-1980s and through the 90s.
Peacock, after his brief stint with Evans, joined Albert Ayler and Don Cherry, two of the most outrageous representatives of the jazz scene of the mid-1960s. By the mid-60s Evans was beginning to be more visible on the European scene. In 1964, along with Israels and Bunker, he made a successful tour of Scandinavia, where over the years he was gaining increasing fame and popularity among jazz fans. The following year he went to France, where he would return many times and where his art has continued to be highly appreciated. The assistance of Helen Keane, by now his artistic "counselor" in addition to being his manager, was starting to bear fruit. Thanks to her Evans was able to win himself an affectionate audience at a time when the prevailing trends in jazz were going in a completely different direction, and in which the dominant and most influential figure on the scene was still that of John Coltrane."
(Bill Evans: Ritratto d’artista con pianoforte/Bill Evans: The Pianist as an Artist.Enrico Pieranunzi, Rome 1999, Stampa Alternativa)