Hindsight: Enrico Pieranunzi, Marc Johnson and Joey Baron

Sometimes we're reduced to throwing down old bones and seeing what messages they deliver back. Maybe noticed at the time, but the recording of Hindsight, by the trio of maestro Enrico Pieranunzi, master bassist Marc Johnson and time-lord Joey Baron took place almost exactly sixty years after one of the most famous jazz piano sessions of all. When most admirers think of Bill Evans, their minds go first to the famous Village Vanguard sessions of June 1961, with Scott LaFaro and Paul Motian. Understandably so: jazz had rarely reached such peaks of harmonic invention and group interaction, and the specialness of the occasion was further heightened by the tragic death of LaFaro a matter of days later.

Inevitably somewhat eclipsed by the Vanguard dates was the first studio album Evans had made with his new trio. Portrait In Jazz is in some ways a better model for understanding Evans' lonely art, a deeply inward and meditative album that doesn't often sound like a public performance at all, but an intimate conversation. A year later, the same trio made Explorations, one of the few albums toward which Evans expressed complete satisfaction. And then came the Vanguard and the dreadful sequelae on U.S. Route 20 near Seneca, New York, on July 6 1961.

Though it might be considered flattering, it might also be dismissed as rudely redundant to introduce a new album by a great musical figure of today by reference to one of the past. Enrico Pieranunzi is very much with us, his very presence on the scene a confirmation that even apparent musical epochs like the Evans/LaFaro/Motian recordings of June 1961 don't draw any kind of line under a particular line of enquiry in music. Indeed, Pieranunzi more than anyone has demonstrated that harmonic improvisation in a trio setting of piano, bass and drums, far from being exhausted, is still only in the early stages of evolution. When one considers what has passed in piano trio jazz since 1959—Tatum had only just passed, Hines was somewhat recessed and absent, Garner had rewritten the sales demographic with Concert By The Sea—it's astonishing to find the form in such health: over that sixty years, to touch only on a couple of examples, Cecil Taylor had ripped expectations apart (though the orthodox trio was never his favourite form), Keith Jarrett has substantially rewritten what can be done with the American Songbook, and Esbjorn Svensson , The Bad Plus and others have shown that Tin Pan Alley has many more recent and unexplored turnings.

So, again, why labour the history and not the qualities of the record you're holding? Hindsight could hardly be more different from Evans's work, to leave aside the others. This is not a trio that turns inward but one that communicates, richly and generously, with every breath and turn of the music. The only familiar theme here is Cole Porter's "Everything I Love." You might, in the interests of research, compare Evans's version of it on How My Heart Sings! from 1962 or you might just put it aside for reference and concentrate on the original material that Pieranunzi presents here: the naggingly familiar but unnameable introductory theme to "Don't Forget The Poet," the more hooded and enigmatic "B.Y.O.H.," and the elegantly dancing line of the title track. Here is music that possesses the unique quality of convincing listeners that they must (whatever must means) have heard these melodies before, where every successive note is both a delightful surprise and a seeming inevitability. That is, perhaps, the sign of jazz at its finest. The "sound of surprise" cliché still stands up, but only when coupled with a sense of absolute rightness and structural integrity.

So here's what you can still do by throwing down a few old bones, tugging at strings and tapping on skins with sticks. The success of the music here has nothing to do with technique—it transcends that—and much to do with the much harder ability to plug directly into our ancestrally formed musical centres. It may be me, or maybe age, that baulks a little at being told that such-and-such an album is a historical peak. The temptation there is to climb it, plant a flag, and come down again to lesser foothills. That's maybe how "hindsight" usually comes in. The sign of a really great album, by a truly great group, and this is both of those things, is the sense of possibility it offers, the feeling that wonderful though this music is, and deeply in touch with the past, its greatest message is that there is more and possibly finer music to come from these men. No pressure.

Liner Notes copyright © 2025 CAM Jazz.

Hindsight can be purchased here.

Contact Brian Morton at All About Jazz.
Brian Morton is a Scottish writer, journalist and broadcaster, mainly specialising in jazz and modern literature. He is co-author of The Penguin Guide to Jazz Recordings.

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