Bill Evans

For my birthday a couple of weeks ago, J.'s father sent me some CD-Rs of Bill Evans that he burned from iTunes downloads. One of them was Half Moon Bay – a live trio gig at a small private club in California that Milestone did not release until the late 1990s (and thus omitted from the official discography in Peter Pettinger's book on Evans) – that I finally finished listening to the other night. Good stuff. Recorded in 1973 with Eddie Gomez on bass and Marty Morell on drums, it probably qualifies as “late,” and since I'm only really familiar with the famous first trio (with LaFaro and Motian) records on Riverside, this is a side of Evans I rarely come in contact with. Overall, there is definitely more energy and perhaps less delicacy here than in the Riverside stuff, but it is no less introspective. The extreme harmonic and rhythmic displacement that Evans became known for later in his career is in evidence, but it is not distracting – there is plenty for the listener to latch on to and just float along as Evans develops his long, flowing lines. The highlights, for me, were Sareen Jurer – a dark mid-tempo tune that didn't enter his repertoire until later in life and one I therefore had not heard before, Quiet Now, an Evans standard but really a beautiful tune that should be far better known, and a high-energy, boppy take on Who Can I Turn To that gives the lie to the suggestion that Evans couldn't cook with the best of them. The disappointments, relatively speaking, are minor. One is the version of Autumn Leaves – in an effort to give Gomez as much solo space as possible, Evans has him play the head, and frankly, I think it robs the melody of its lyricism. I am biased, of course – it's one of my favorite standards. Gomez's tone, too, is a little unnerving at times – poppy, constricted and more than a little whiny. I suspect amplification is to blame – the stereo imaging is quite good, and the piano tone is surprisingly natural even after it was subjected to iTunes's compression, which leads me to believe that the whole thing was recored with a pair of mikes in the middle of the room. But since Gomez was probably already miked up (using 1973 technology) to equalize himself with the piano, we have two layers of compression going on.