Since we started the week with some jazz piano, why not end the week with some jazz piano. Of course, I would be hard-pressed to say Bud Powell and Bill Evans sound alike beyond the fact they both play piano. Their styles are very different, practically a generation apart.
Bill Evans (along with John Coltrane) really took off following his time with Miles Davis, which culminated in the legendary Kind of Blue. In the wake of that album he assembled his own trio, which recorded two albums in the studio and two live albums, of which this is one. As I have said a bazillion times, I am not a music critic, so all I will say is that the combination of Evans's ethereal style with the almost-lead style approach of bassist Scott LaFaro just works. In fact, this album makes a point of giving LaFaro much more of the spotlight than the bassist usually receives. Interestingly, LaFaro in this same year appeared on Ornette Coleman's Free Jazz, contributing bass for one of the double-quartets. Talk about opposite scenes!
As always I'm curious about where people end up following these recordings. Evans and LaFaro are well-chronicled, with one dying suddenly (LaFaro, in a car crash, just a few days after this was recorded) and the other very slowly (Evans, who struggled with drugs most of his life, the other legacy he carried out of his work with Miles Davis). Drummer Paul Motian was a bit of a mystery to me, so I did some research and learned that he fell in with the whole ECM scene in the 1970's and recently passed away in 2011, officially closing the book on the Bill Evans Trio.
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