Audio CD (August 19, 2003)
Original Release Date: August 12, 2003
Number of Discs: 1
Format: Live
Label: Milestone
Track Listings:
I Should Care
How My Heart Sings
Gary's Theme
I'm Getting Sentimental Over You
Quiet Now
Re: Person I Knew
The Peacocks
Emily
Song From M*A*S*H (Suicide Is Painless)
Turn Out The Stars
When I Fall In Love
In Your Own Sweet Way
But Beautiful
I Love You
recorded at the Village Vanguard, New York, NY, 15 January 1978 by Mike Harris. Bill Evans, piano; Michael Moore, double bass; `Philly' Joe Jones, drums.
Danny Boy
Evans' classical background was crucial to this process. Davis, again in his autobiography, remembers that "Bill brought a great knowledge of classical music, people like Rachmaninov and Ravel," and moreover he recalls that "besides Ravel and a whole lot of others, Bill Evans had turned me on to Aram Khachaturian, a Russian-Armenian composer. I had been listening to him and what intrigued me about him were all those different scales he used." Evans played with Davis regularly from February to November of 1958, a period of which only a few, important recordings are left to testify. Three of these, recorded in May, are especially interesting. In each of these selections (On Green Dolphin Street, Fran-Dance and Stella By Starlight) Evans does some solos that we could call premodal. He simply creates peaceful, wide melodic lines harmonized with two hands, and completely abandons the long hornlike sequences typical of the bop approach. Evans lays down his chords calmly and unhurriedly and leaves them resounding for a long time. Those sonorous silences create a sense of waiting for something that is never going to happen. His choice of notes forming the chords (what is commonly called voicing) is made dissonant by the frequent use of major second intervals, something which has more to do with achieving luminosity than with making the chords harsh.
Evans improvises and admirably harmonizes melodic "micronuclei" that follow a distant trace of the original melody and sound like its echo. Here we have an inner song, a sort of resounding and response to the given melody, sung by no one but seeming as if someone were singing it (hadn't Davis maybe done this shortly before?). So those micronuclei float like water-lilies on Chambers and Cobb's relaxed, swinging ‘walk.’
