#2
John Coltrane
Complete 1961 Village Vanguard

#3
Miles Davis
Live at The Plugged Nickel

#4
Charles Mingus
Live At Antibes

#5
Duke Ellington
Live at Newport

#6
Sonny Rollins
At The Village Vanguard

#7
John Coltrane
Live at Birdland

#8
Wes Montgomery & Wynton Kelly
Smokin' at the Half Note

#9
Erroll Garner
Concert By The Sea

#10
Gillespie, Parker, Powell, Mingus and Roach
The Quintet-Jazz at Massey Hall, Volume 1

Had Bud Powell and Bill Evans not existed, Jazz would have had to invent them. In piano performances, they represented muscle and finesse respectively. Using tennis as an analogy, the brilliantly technical Bud Powell was to the disciplined Bjorn Borg as the thoughtfully nuanced Evans was to the net play master John McEnroe. They were necessary presences in the music, both existing as a feather floating in the breath of culture.

After kicking around as a sideman for the likes of Tony Scott, Chet Baker, Cannonball Adderley, and Miles Davis (contributing to the fabulous Kind of Blue with the latter), Evans formed his first and perhaps greatest trio in late 1959 and released five LPs that were to define the art of the trio. Along with Bassist wunderkind Scott LaFaro and drummer Paul Motian, Evans perfected his democratic vision of trio cooperation, where all members performed with perfect empathy and telepathy. Three of these five LPs (now two compact discs) detailed this trio's performances one Sunday afternoon in mid-1961at New York City's fabled Village Vanguard. It is these performances, currently available as Sunday at The Village Vanguard and Waltz for Debbie that comprise the number one best jazz live recording in this present series.

Pure and thoughtful musicality permeates the 20 performances of 12 disparate songs. Evans, LaFaro, and Motian slide over and under one another in a sumptuously alchemic solution, resulting in a single homogenous musical thought expressed in one voice from three distinctive philosophies. Evans is quiet on "My Foolish Heart," angular on the two Miles Davis originals "Solar" and "Milestones" originals, and totally inward on Porgy and Bess ballads "My Man's Gone Now" and "I loves You, Porgy." Scott LaFaro's "Gloria's Step" and "Jade Visions" are crystalline in their brevity and starkness, pulling the trio to the heights of perfect empathetic cooperation.

All that remains is the hope that one day Fantasy, Inc. will find the lost sides of that early summer afternoon 40 years ago and release a complete recording as they have done for so many other artists, including Evans. We should honor the quiet genius in these songs.

Writer's Note: Having recently completed a survey of the Top Ten Best Live Rock Albums, I have learned a couple of valuable things. One is a list of this sort should be presented in descending order starting with number 10 and descending to number 1. Second, it is better to poll a group for their opinions and develop the list from an analytical (or pseudoanalytical) evaluation of the results. This is how the Top Ten Best Live Jazz Recordings were selected. I polled the writership of All About Jazz, combined the results and ranked the recordings. For recordings that tied in number of votes, I arbitrarily selected the order (I had to exert editorial control somewhere!).

Live Jazz is perhaps the most natural creative state in music. Performing jazz means a musician must create a work of art on the spot, composition in real time. In this series, I hope to highlight historic events where this invention has not been merely successful, but transcendent.