Jazz Articles about Scott LaFaro

About Scott LaFaro

Album Review

Bill Evans: Haunted Heart: The Legendary Riverside Studio Recordings (Remastered 2025)

Read "Haunted Heart: The Legendary Riverside Studio Recordings (Remastered 2025)" reviewed by C. Andrew Hovan

by C. Andrew Hovan
January 1, 2026

The past five years have been a banner period for recordings drawn from the vast canon of Bill Evans work, encompassing both previously issued material and newly discovered performances. Adding to the fact that one can easily hunt down previously issued expansive reissues of Evans' Riverside, Verve, and Fantasy catalogs, many unearthed tapes have finally seen the light of day through the efforts of Elemental Music and Resonance Records. And while it has been several decades since the JVC XRCD ...

Album Review

Bill Evans Trio: Haunted Heart: The Legendary Riverside Studio Recordings (Remastered 2025)

Read "Haunted Heart: The Legendary Riverside Studio Recordings (Remastered 2025)" reviewed by Mark Corroto

by Mark Corroto
December 8, 2025

On May 6, 1954, Roger Bannister ran the first sub-four-minute mile, a barrier many believed human beings could never break. Today, any elite miler can run that time, which makes Bannister's accomplishment harder for modern sports fans to fully appreciate. Something similar happens when listening to pianist Bill Evans' two Riverside studio sessions, Portrait in Jazz (1959) and Explorations (1961), recorded some 65 years ago. Because contemporary pianists like Brad Mehldau, Fred Hersch, Denny Zeitlin and Bill Charlap have absorbed ...

Album Review

Bill Evans: Explorations

Read "Explorations" reviewed by Richard J Salvucci

by Richard J Salvucci
January 20, 2025

It is not easy to review a masterpiece. The celebrated American intellectual historian Perry Miller was once reduced to muttering something like “What am I supposed to say about the damn thing?" The damn thing in question being Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter. Professor Miller, meet pianist Bill Evans. Trying to say something intelligent about Bill Evans after so much has been written and said in the now nearly fifty years after his death defines a Fool's Errand. So why ...

Album Review

Ornette Coleman: Free Jazz to Ornette! Revisited

Read "Free Jazz to Ornette! Revisited" reviewed by Alberto Bazzurro

by Alberto Bazzurro
October 14, 2024

Che cosa si può dire ancora di un'opera che ha stravolto il corso del jazz, uno di quegli snodi dopo i quali--qui fin dal titolo--nulla può essere più come prima? Punti di svolta decisivi e ineludibili che cambiano il corso di un'arte, pietre miliari come Les Demoiselles d'Avignon in pittura, l'Ulysses di Joyce in letteratura, o più specificatamente in poesia Un coup de dés di Mallarmé? Nulla, appunto, perché tutto dev'essere per forza di cose già stato detto e scritto, ...

Album Review

Ornette Coleman: Free Jazz To Ornette! Revisited

Read "Free Jazz To Ornette! Revisited" reviewed by John Eyles

by John Eyles
August 2, 2024

For ezz-thetics' revisited series' fourth Ornette Coleman album, the label has ventured back further than any of its previous Coleman albums, to New York City in December 1960 and January 1961. Recorded at A&R Studios on Wednesday December 21st 1960 from 8pm to 12.30am, the Free Jazz session produced two pieces, the thirty-seven minute “Free Jazz" itself, which was issued in September 1961 on an Atlantic album entitled Free Jazz: A Collective Improvisation By The Ornette Coleman Double Quartet, and ...

Album Review

Hampton Hawes: For Real!

Read "For Real!" reviewed by Richard J Salvucci

by Richard J Salvucci
May 21, 2024

There are, Scott Fitzgerald famously wrote, no second acts in American life. For pianist Hampton Hawes, born in 1928, there was scarcely a first. No sooner was he established as an up-and-coming talent than he was drafted into the Army. When he got out, he tried to pick up where he left off. A heroin habit he had acquired prior to military service led to a harsh incarceration because he refused to become an informer. Only a grant of clemency ...

Album Review

Bill Evans: The Legendary Trio At Birdland 1960 Revisited

Read "The Legendary Trio At Birdland 1960 Revisited" reviewed by Glenn Astarita

by Glenn Astarita
March 7, 2024

Bill Evans' The Legendary Trio at Birdland 1960 is a seminal recording that captures a fleeting moment of jazz brilliance, immortalizing the profound synergy of Evans with bassist Scott LaFaro and drummer Paul Motian. Recorded live at the iconic Birdland Jazz Club in New York City, this album is a vivid snapshot of a group at the peak of its creative powers, navigating the complexities of jazz standards and original compositions with unparalleled grace and fluidity. The trio's ...