But all’s well that ends well, at least for today’s Bill Evans fans. For reasons not quite clear, the recordings had never been issued before Resonance’s sleuthing. Or at least that’s the way the story went until 2016, when Resonance Records released Some Other Time: The Lost Session from the Black Forest, a two-disc set derived from impromptu recordings made by the trio in a German studio just five days after that celebrated Montreux concert. (DeJohnette would end up playing on Davis’s Bitches Brew, an album almost as epochal for the late sixties as Kind of Blue was for the late fifties.) But it seemed like a missed opportunity, as the Evans trio with DeJohnette and Gomez, having been together for just six months, was only able to make that one live recording, nothing in the studio. After all, the pianist had made his own name as the trumpeter’s kindred-spirit collaborator on Kind of Blue, the LP that would turn on more people to jazz than any in music history. Evans could scarcely blame the drummer for leaving him to join the era’s most iconic jazz bandleader. That is, Davis lured DeJohnette away to his own group.
A European tour by Evans, Gomez, and DeJohnette in the summer of ’68 would yield an ebullient live album, At the Montreux Jazz Festival, that garnered the pianist his second Grammy.
Evans had also developed rapport with a virtuoso young bassist, Eddie Gomez, and they eventually added an up-and-coming force of a drummer, Jack DeJohnette, for a new trio - one that seemed to hold a dynamic promise that the pianist’s groups hadn’t quite shown since his famously inspired trio with drummer Paul Motian and short-lived bassist Scott LaFaro in 1959–61. He had collaborated fruitfully with such peers as Jim Hall, gained a devoted new manager, signed with the high-profile Verve label, and won his first Grammy Award. There had been tragedy and depression and demons to bear, but the jazz pianist had made his way forward over the previous few years.
0 kommentar(er)
