Bill Evans: The Legendary Trio At Birdland 1960 Revisited

Thank you, Boris Rose. The obsessive New York jazz maverick set out to record every musician of note who performed in the city's clubs from the mid 1940s through the mid 1970s. He must have come close to succeeding. His vast accumulated horde of tapes—today presumed more or less safe, stacked floor to ceiling in a sizeable Bronx basement under the guardianship of his daughter Elaine—is a treasure beyond mere monetary value. Annotated but uncatalogued, there are many hundreds, perhaps thousands, of tape boxes, and shelves full of acetates, too. Somewhere among them, if they have not been lost, are the Bill Evans / Scott LaFaro / Paul Motian recordings on this disc, plus maybe upwards of another forty minutes of material (more about those below). Ten years ago, Elaine offered the collection to the Library Of Congress for a rumoured $1m but the price was considered too high. The house, as Charlie Parker said to Dean Benedetti when presented with a bar bill at Billy Berg's, is cheap.

Many of Rose's recordings, such as these treasures from Symphony Sid Torin's live broadcasts on station WADO, were made with a reel-to-reel tape recorder, off the radio in Rose's East 10th Street apartment. Others were made in the clubs themselves, on a bulky pre-miniaturisation machine, its concealment no easy task. From 1946 onwards, Rose, who had a disc cutter at home, made a living selling acetates and, later, privately pressed LPs, to fellow collectors, from his apartment and through the mail. Specialist record stores stocked his albums. Rose released the material on this disc on two LPs, A Rare Original and Hooray For Bill Evans Trio, in the mid 1970s.

Obtaining artist permissions was not part of Rose's business model. Joe LaBarbera, the drummer in Evans' final trio, has said that Evans was outraged when he came across one of Rose's LPs in a European record store in 1979 or 1980. On one level, we empathise—on another, we are indebted to Rose.

This Birdland material—here in its known entirety and, at long last, having received the state-of-the-art sound restoration it deserves—represents a substantial portion of the paradigm shifting Evans/LaFaro/Motian trio's discography. Apart from fourteen minutes accompanying Tony Scott on two tracks of the clarinetist's Sung Heroes (Sunnyside, 1986), which do not really count, less than six hours of recordings (including the Birdlands) are one-hundred-per-cent known to exist. Sadly, the only Dean Benedetti figure in Evans' orbit appears to have been an amateur pianist named Mike Harris, who taped many hours of Evans' performances at the Village Vanguard, with Evans and club owner Max Gordon's knowledge. But Harris only got going after LaFaro had passed.

This Revisited disc chronicles the trio in transition. Formed in autumn 1959, the group recorded its debut album in December. Following a coast-to-coast tour, it opened at Birdland in March 1960, when the first five tracks here were recorded on two separate dates. By the time of the April and May recordings the trio was touching on the interactive magic heard on ezz-thetics' At The Village Vanguard 1961 Revisited, released in 2023.

It is possible that previously unreleased Evans/LaFaro/Motian live recordings may yet emerge from under the apocryphal late grandmother's bed, or more likely from the cellar in the Bronx. Simple arithmetic suggests that Rose must have recorded more material than he was able to include on just two LPs. At Birdland, the trio was not the headliner—they played their set sometime between midnight and 1:00am on each of the Saturday a.m. sessions Rose taped, sandwiched by sets from the headlining artist. If the trio only played for half an hour on each occasion (a conservative estimate), that adds up to two hours of material, too much for two LPs. Somewhere in that Bronx basement, another forty-plus minutes may still be found.

The Birdland audience makes its presence felt; they can be heard in the background, having a good time. Most of them were there to hear the main attraction. In 1960, the club was the New York base for Count Basie's band when it was not on tour (Birdland was co-owned by the gangster-cum-businessman Morris Levy, who also controlled Roulette Records, for whom Basie recorded at the time). It is known that Basie's band was resident for the two March sessions here, and it may also have headlined in April and May.

But by 1960, Evans had become inured to inattentive club audiences. He was also used to insensitive staff. Recalling his first engagement at the Village Vanguard, in 1955, playing opposite the Modern Jazz Quartet, Evans told his British friend Brian Hennessey: "It's a triangular club and the bandstand is in the apex of the triangle and there are a few seats that are sort of behind the bandstand. And while I was playing one night, the maître d' brought a party of four up while I was playing—I stopped, he said excuse me—and he led them between me and the keyboard to that table."

By the time he told the story, Evans could see the humor in it. Maybe in 2023 he would see the upside of Boris Rose's activities as well.

Liner Notes copyright © 2024 Chris May.

The Legendary Trio At Birdland 1960 Revisited can be purchased here.

Contact Chris May at All About Jazz.
Chris May is a senior editor of All About Jazz. He was previously the editor of the pioneering magazine Black Music & Jazz Review, and more recently editor of the style / culture / history magazine Jocks & Nerds.

Comments