The Fifth Desk · Evaluation
Act I · The Map
Bill Evans Trio · produced by Orrin Keepnews · Riverside · six tracks on two sides · about 42 minutes
Mode
Jazz; a piano trio of three equal voices improvising on show tunes, a Porter standard, a jazz line and two originals by its bassist
Mythos
The company of equals, voices that answer one another; the widow’s lament carried without its words; the child’s dream glimpsed in a waltz
Phase
One day, Sunday 25 June 1961, across the afternoon and evening sets; chosen afterwards to open and close on the bassist’s compositions, the dirge second
Presentation
Album; six instrumental tracks, three on each side, about forty-two minutes, recorded live and issued by Riverside in 1961; no word sung or spoken
Register
Piano, double bass and drums, with the club audible behind them; tempos from very slow to fast, one mood of inward attention
Scale
Three musicians, one basement club in New York, a small Sunday audience, one day
Governing Proposition
A piano trio that had not sold well plays five sets on a Sunday in a basement club, its bassist dies eleven days later, and the record its producer chooses from the day, opening and closing on the bassist’s music, shows that a rhythm section can stop serving and start speaking, and that three players can each lead and each follow without the line being lost.
Act II · The Essay
Movement I
The record opens on the bassist’s music. “Gloria’s Step” is Scott LaFaro’s composition, and from its first statement the roles are not where a listener of 1961 expected them. The bass states the melody; the piano answers with chords. Then the three go on as they began, each leading and each following, and the theme rises with a held breath. Nothing in the trio is accompaniment in the old sense. The drums colour the time rather than mark it, and the bass has left the walking line for the melody and the harmony.
Three musicians play it: Bill Evans, piano; Scott LaFaro, double bass; Paul Motian, drums. They were recorded live at the Village Vanguard, a basement club in New York, on Sunday 25 June 1961, across the afternoon and evening sets, five in all. The producer was Orrin Keepnews, for Riverside, which issued the record in 1961. Eleven days after the session, on 6 July, LaFaro was killed in a car accident. Keepnews assembled this album after his death, with the bass foregrounded and with two of LaFaro’s compositions opening and closing it.
The turn the track declares had been under way for two years. The piano trio of the day was a pianist with accompaniment, as Oscar Peterson and Erroll Garner had it, and in another way Ahmad Jamal. This trio had already made three equal voices of it on Portrait in Jazz (1959) and Explorations (1961). The record perfects that turn rather than making it; but here it goes furthest, and in public. The stake was a working trio that had not sold well, recorded before small audiences, and released on its bassist’s terms.
Movement II
The second track is the record’s summit. “My Man’s Gone Now” is the widow’s lament from George Gershwin and DuBose Heyward’s Porgy and Bess (1935), and the trio plays it very slow, as a dirge, without its words. Evans’s voicings are dark, the bass insists slowly beneath them, and for six minutes the piece holds a single descent. It grows heavier without growing louder. Nothing could go from it, and nothing in it resolves into a ballad’s warmth: the grief is kept at a walking pace and left without consolation.
The bass here is not a pulse. It is a second voice in the lament, and the weight of the track is shared between two instruments that both carry it. Evans holds that weight without forcing it, and the voicings he uses on this track are among the passages pianists still study. Motian keeps time while seeming not to. The command is of the first rank, and it is the command of players listening at a speed that is itself a craft.
Under the dirge the room is audible: glasses, talk, the sound of a Sunday audience in a basement club. It sometimes lowers the ceiling of the quietest passages, and it is also the record’s documentary truth, the proof that this was done once, live, without the studio’s second try. The trio’s quiet holds against it. What the track does not do is build the myth it carries. The widow’s lament is an old pattern, and the record evokes it by its tune and title; the dirge is real, and the figure is borrowed.
Movement III
Side one closes on its longest track, nearly nine minutes. “Solar”, credited to Miles Davis, is a fast line in a minor key, and here the record proves its method. Bass and piano exchange phrases inside the chorus, not after it; LaFaro’s lines are counterpoint, not support, running against the piano at speed and in tune high on the instrument. Put the bass back on four beats to the bar and the piece becomes an ordinary minor blues. The knowledge of the record is in its texture, three lines at once and none subordinate.
The track swings and exhilarates without rising, and with “All of You” it is the record’s ground. It is also the farthest point from the dirge before it. One is a fast minor line in counterpoint, the other a lament nearly at rest, and both obey one law: three equal voices, the time felt and not marked, restraint even at speed. In “Solar” the piano leaves room as it does in the ballad, and in the ballad the bass speaks as it does here.
That law is the record’s disclosure. A rhythm section can stop serving and start speaking, and three people improvising can each lead and each follow without the music losing its line. It is a social form shown in sound, and it holds. Its limit is its subject: it bears on how music is made more than on how people live. The range it governs is real but moderate, show tunes, a jazz line and two originals, very slow to fast, one mood of inward attention, and narrowness is not the same as coherence.
Movement IV
Side two opens on a waltz. “Alice in Wonderland” is Sammy Fain and Bob Hilliard’s song from the Disney film of 1951, played in three, and it lifts as a waltz lifts, the bass solo singing high on the instrument. The title and the tune summon the child’s dream, and the record goes no further with it. It is one of the four pieces on the record that reach height, and its height is of the record’s one kind, beauty held quiet.
Cole Porter’s “All of You” follows, at medium tempo and past eight minutes, the two longest performances of the record set side by side. Here the subtractive test finds slack. The middle of “All of You” is the trio at work rather than the trio arriving, and the two long medium tempos together are where the sequence shows that it was assembled. The record was chosen from five sets of one day. Another performance from those sets could stand in for this one and the record would still be what it is.
The day made two records. Waltz for Debby (1962) took the more Evans-centred material; this one kept the bassist. Neither is the day itself, and the unit is the release: six tracks in the order Riverside issued them, not the five sets, which The Complete Village Vanguard Recordings, 1961 (2005) later put in order on three discs with false starts and alternate takes. That edition is evidence of how the trio thought across an afternoon and an evening, and of how the selection was made. It does not change what the release is.
Movement V
The record closes on its shortest track, LaFaro’s “Jade Visions”, under four minutes and complete. It is slow and it ends suspended rather than ended. With “Gloria’s Step” it makes the frame: the record begins and ends on the bassist’s music, and the dirge stands second, early, setting the tone. The frame was chosen after his death. It is the producer’s, not a law the music made for itself, and the sequence is credited for the frame and held down by it.
The record is known as an elegy, and the music does not know it. The death followed the recording; what is heard is a trio at its height on a Sunday afternoon and evening, with no farewell in it. The release frames the record as tribute, and that frame belongs to the sequence. The myth of the record belongs to its circumstance, and the record is judged on what its six performances build: the company of equals, a lament without words, a waltz.
What it built has lasted. LaFaro’s lines here are transcribed and studied as founding texts of modern jazz bass; the modern piano trio descends from this trio, in Keith Jarrett’s Standards trio, the trios of Herbie Hancock and Chick Corea in their way, Paul Bley’s and Brad Mehldau’s; Paul Motian’s coloured time became a school. The record has stayed in print for sixty-five years. Its limits are those of its form and its making: few orders of the world, a selection that could have gone otherwise, and a reach shared with the trio’s other records. Three voices, one room, one day: the company of equals heard whole.
Act III · The Twelve
The subtractive test bites harder here than on a record composed as a sequence. The album was chosen from five sets of one day, and its companion, Waltz for Debby, drawn from the same day, shows that the choice might have gone otherwise: another performance could stand in for “All of You” and the record would still be what it is. Inside the performances little is idle. “My Man’s Gone Now” holds a single slow descent for six minutes and nothing could go from it; “Jade Visions” is under four minutes and complete. The slack is on side two, where “All of You” runs past eight minutes and its middle is the trio at work rather than arriving. The choice has a principle, the bassist’s record, and the six pieces answer to it.
Score: 8.1 / 10
What the record brings into the open is a way of being three: that a rhythm section can stop serving and start speaking, and that three people improvising can each lead and each follow without the music losing its line. On “Solar” bass and piano exchange phrases inside the chorus, not after it; on “Gloria’s Step” the bass states melody while the piano answers with chords. That is a social form disclosed in sound, and it holds on every track. “My Man’s Gone Now” adds a disclosure of grief without consolation, the lament kept slow and never resolved into a ballad’s warmth. Held from the top: the first disclosure bears on how music is made more than on how people live, and the second is a mood more than a meaning.
Score: 8.2 / 10
The height is frequent and of one kind, beauty held quiet. “My Man’s Gone Now” is the summit: dark voicings over the bass’s slow insistence, a dirge that grows heavier without growing louder. “Gloria’s Step” rises in its theme, the line given a held breath. “Alice in Wonderland” lifts in its waltz, the bass solo singing high on the instrument, and “Jade Visions” closes the record suspended rather than ended. “Solar” and “All of You” swing and exhilarate without rising; they are the record’s ground. Four of six pieces reach height, the strongest of them twice. Held below the 9.1 of Kind of Blue: the range of elevation is narrow, intimate rather than grand, and the club’s murmur sometimes lowers the ceiling of the quietest passages.
Score: 8.7 / 10
A wordless record must build its myth in sound or not at all, and here little is built. “My Man’s Gone Now” carries an old pattern, the widow’s lament, from its opera; the trio plays it with no words, and the pattern is evoked by the tune and the title rather than constructed by the performance, though the dirge is real. The three-voiced conversation has an archetypal shape, the company of equals whose voices answer one another, and it is more fully realised here than in the trio’s studio work, but it remains a figure of music-making. “Alice in Wonderland” summons the child’s dream by its title and its waltz and goes no further. The elegy the record is known as belongs to its release, not to what the music builds.
Score: 7.6 / 10
The turn is from the piano trio as pianist with accompaniment, as Oscar Peterson and Erroll Garner had it, and in another way Ahmad Jamal, to three equal voices: the bass free of the walking line, entering the melody and the harmony, the drums colouring time rather than marking it. On this record the turn goes furthest. Scott LaFaro’s lines on “Solar” and “Gloria’s Step” are counterpoint, not support. The stake was real: a working trio that had not sold well, recorded in a club before small audiences, released a record on its bassist’s terms. Held from the top: the swerve was first made on Portrait in Jazz (1959) and Explorations (1961); this record perfects it rather than makes it, and the turns of Ornette Coleman and John Coltrane in the same years cost more.
Score: 8.3 / 10
Change the form and the record stops knowing what it knows. The knowledge is in the texture: three lines at once, none subordinate. Put the bass back on four beats to the bar and “Solar” becomes an ordinary minor blues; take away the room and the record loses its proof that this was done live and once, before a talking audience, without the studio’s second try. The sequence, counted here once, carries a frame: LaFaro’s “Gloria’s Step” opens and his “Jade Visions” closes, so that the record begins and ends on the bassist’s music, and the dirge stands second, early, setting the tone. Held from the top: the sequence is an assembly after the fact, side two sets its two long medium tempos side by side, and the frame is the producer’s rather than the work’s own law.
Score: 8.6 / 10
Evidence, and sixty-five years of it. LaFaro’s lines on this record are transcribed and studied as founding texts of modern jazz bass, and every bassist since who solos in the upper register or plays counterpoint against a pianist returns to them. Pianists study Evans’s voicings here, above all on “My Man’s Gone Now”. The record of the day keeps yielding: The Complete Village Vanguard Recordings, 1961 (2005) put the five sets in order, with false starts and alternate takes, and showed how the trio thought across an afternoon and an evening, and listeners still argue over the selection and its sequence. The depth is chiefly formal, the interplay heard more finely on each return; the semantic yield is smaller, and that holds the figure below the 9.0 of Kind of Blue.
Score: 8.6 / 10
The intrinsic force is a real reorganisation of the small group’s internal law: the piano trio as three soloists who accompany one another, heard most fully here, in public, at its height. The credit is discounted three ways: the reach belongs to the trio and its four records together, not to this album alone; Waltz for Debby, from the same day, is the more heard of the two; and jazz in 1961 was moved harder by Coleman and Coltrane. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the modern piano trio descends from it, in Keith Jarrett’s Standards trio, the trios of Herbie Hancock and Chick Corea in their way, Paul Bley’s and Brad Mehldau’s and most since; bassists after LaFaro, Eddie Gomez and a generation of players, took his freedom as given; and Paul Motian’s coloured time became a school.
Score: 8.5 / 10
Survival is weighed on form, presence and fabric, over sixty-five years. The form survives whole as issued: the record has stayed in print in mono and stereo, and reissues keep the original sequence. Presence is continuous among musicians and jazz listeners, in teaching, in reissue, in the standard accounts of the music. It is narrower than that of Kind of Blue, at 9.0 over sixty-seven years, which many hear who hear no other jazz, and narrower than that of its own companion. The fabric is a club recording with the room in it: the sound is clear and the bass well caught for its date, and the audience noise is the record’s documentary truth, not decay. The figure stands at the foot of what records of its years have earned.
Score: 8.8 / 10
Command of the recorded medium, load-bearing throughout. Evans’s touch and voicing are of the first rank: the chords left open for the bass, the weight of “My Man’s Gone Now” held without forcing. LaFaro’s command of the instrument is extraordinary for 1961, fast and in tune in the upper register, and it serves the line, not display. Motian keeps time while seeming not to. The three listen at a speed that is itself craft. The balance lets the bass be heard as a voice, which the record’s purpose requires. Held below the 9.7 of the Goldberg Variations and the 9.5 of Winterreise, where every bar is composed: here only two short pieces are the trio’s own, the long performances have passages of searching. It stands level with the 9.0 of Low.
Score: 9.0 / 10
One law governs the record: three equal voices, the time felt and not marked, lyric restraint even at speed. Take the two most distant elements. “Solar” is a fast minor line on which bass and piano run in counterpoint; “My Man’s Gone Now” is a dirge nearly at rest. Both obey: in the dirge the bass is a second voice in the lament, not a pulse, and in “Solar” the piano leaves room as it does in the ballad. The waltz, the Porter song and LaFaro’s two oblique originals keep to the same law. The range is real but moderate: show tunes, a jazz line, two originals, tempos from very slow to fast, and one mood of inward attention throughout. Narrowness is not coherence, and the range keeps the figure below the 8.9 of Kind of Blue.
Score: 8.6 / 10
Judged on what the record holds. Consciousness is held, in the inward attention of the ballads. The small society is held: three equals, no leader in the sound, the individual and the group integrated in every performance, which is the record’s achievement. The public world is present as a room, the club audible behind the music, an order of reality a studio record could not hold. Grief is held in the dirge, and the child’s dream glimpsed in the waltz, but only by title and tune. What holds the axis lowest is absence: the family, labour, the state, history, the sacred and the natural order do not appear, and the blues tradition is fainter here than on Kind of Blue. A wordless forty-two minutes holds what it holds, and the figure describes the form.
Score: 6.9 / 10
Act IV · The Reckoning
8.3 / 10 · Final Average
Placement: Tier IV · Canonical
Strongest Dimensions
The Made at 9.0, then The Imperishable at 8.8 and The Sublime at 8.7. Three players at the top of their instruments in real time, with a balance that lets the bass be heard as a voice; a record in print whole for sixty-five years; and height on four of six pieces, beauty held quiet. Below them, The Living Form, The Bottomless Well and The Inner Law at 8.6: three lines at once and none subordinate, an interplay heard more finely on each return, and one law from the dirge to the fast minor line.
Limiting Dimension
The Encompassed at 6.9: consciousness, the small society of equals and the room are held, grief and the child’s dream glimpsed, and the family, labour, the state, history, the sacred and the natural order are absent. Below the rest, The Archetypal Deep at 7.6: the company of equals is built in sound, and the widow’s lament and the child’s dream are evoked by borrowed tunes and titles. The Inevitable at 8.1 follows, for a selection from five sets that could have gone otherwise, and The Unconcealment at 8.2, for a disclosure that bears more on how music is made than on how people live.
The Necessity Cap clears at 8.1 against a threshold of 7.5. The Coherence Floor clears with room: The Living Form at 8.6, The Made at 9.0, The Inner Law at 8.6, each against 7.0. The Epochal Gate is unmet: The Imperishable at 8.8 clears the bar of 8.5, and Pressure on Tradition meets it exactly at 8.5, but The Swerve at 8.3, The Unconcealment at 8.2 and The Archetypal Deep at 7.6 fall short. The Universal Minimum is met: no axis but The Encompassed falls below 7.6, against 7.5, and The Encompassed, which is exempted, clears its own floor of 6.0 at 6.9. Four of the five summit conditions are met. The summit is withheld by the Epochal Gate, and by the aggregate, 8.3, short of the 9.0 the summit requires.
Basis · the LP as first released by Riverside in 1961, produced by Orrin Keepnews: six tracks in their original order, three on side one (“Gloria’s Step”, “My Man’s Gone Now”, “Solar”) and three on side two (“Alice in Wonderland”, “All of You”, “Jade Visions”), about forty-two minutes on track times approximate to within a few seconds. Recorded live at the Village Vanguard, New York, on Sunday 25 June 1961, across the afternoon and evening sets. Judged from knowledge of the recording, its documented making and its reception; no recording, score or transcription was in hand. Waltz for Debby (1962), drawn from the same day, and The Complete Village Vanguard Recordings, 1961 (2005) are evidence for depth and survival, not the object; the alternate takes added to later editions are not the unit. There are no words; nothing is quoted but the titles. Not given, being unverified here: the month of release, the engineer, the catalogue numbers, the disputed authorship of “Solar”, the show from which “All of You” comes, the bar forms of the six pieces, how far Motian plays with brushes, the take numbers of the issued performances, the sets they came from, and any edits.