Fantasy Jazz News - Bill Evans: The Complete Village Vanguard Recordings, 1961

By any measure, BILL EVANS’s Riverside albums Sunday at the Village Vanguard and Waltz for Debby are two of the most significant and beloved jazz recordings of all time. Both were recorded at the New York club on a single day--June 25, 1961--and featured the superlative Evans trio of bassist Scott LaFaro and drummer Paul Motian, which had met in the studio on two earlier occasions (December 1959, February ’61). The Vanguard dates were to be their last; LaFaro was killed in a car crash ten days later.

Bill Evans: The Complete Village Vanguard Recordings, 1961, a new 3-CD Riverside box due for release next week (9/13), presents the Vanguard material in the order it was recorded during five afternoon and evening sets. It includes, in its first U.S. release, take 1 of “Gloria’s Step,” the LaFaro composition with which the day’s work began (and which was slightly marred by a brief power outage).

Orrin Keepnews, the original producer, contributed new notes to the package in which he recalls the circumstances leading up to the recording as well as details of the day itself, and asserts that he “intend[s] to think back on this day as anticipating its own eventual immortality.”

The release date of the box--which was a top seller when initially issued in Japan in 2003 and in Europe the following year--coincides closely with the 25th anniversary of Bill Evans’s death: September 15, 1980. He was 51.

The Evans trio with Chuck Israels and Larry Bunker, formed the year after the Vanguard recordings, was captured by Riverside At Shelly’s Manne-Hole in Hollywood on May 30, 1963. It was the pianist’s final date for the label. A 20-bit remastered version of that album has just been released (8/30), along with four other Riverside titles:

THELONIOUS [MONK] Alone in San Francisco (1959), the second of two solo albums he made for Riverside; the CANNONBALL ADDERLEY Sextet In New York--specifically, the Village Vanguard in January 1962--with Nat Adderley, Yusef Lateef, Joe Zawinul, Sam Jones, and Louis Hayes; ABBEY LINCOLN’s Abbey Is Blue (1959), the singer’s third and most ambitious Riverside date, with Kenny Dorham, Wynton Kelly, and Max Roach, among others; and the KENNY DREW Trio, a 1956 session with Paul Chambers and Philly Joe Jones (featuring a cover photo by Roy De Carava).

The sixth 20-bit CD in this release is ART PEPPER’s exquisite strings album Winter Moon, made for Galaxy in 1980 with Stanley Cowell, Cecil McBee, and Carl Burnett.

The 6th annual New Yorker Festival, a “celebratory weekend of public discourse on arts and ideas,” will take place 9/23-25 at various venues around the town. SONNY ROLLINS will appear Sat. 9/24 at Ailey Studios (405 W. 55th Street) in conversation with Stanley Crouch, author of the Rollins profile that was published in the New Yorker 5/9. Tickets to the event, which begins at 7 pm, are $35 and available at Ticketmaster outlets.

Sonny Rollins doesn’t use a computer, but he’s bent to the times by commissioning his first-ever web site, which will launch tomorrow (9/7) on his 75th birthday.

The site, created by Bret Primack, will feature audio tributes (“Reflections”) by musicians, starting with Jimmy Heath and Clifton Anderson; a media gallery with audio clips of Sonny’s latest Milestone CD, Without a Song, and video excerpts from Robert Mugge’s film Saxophone Colossus; a link to retail partner ArtistDirect.com to purchase CDs and DVDs; and a guest book, selected inquiries from which Sonny will respond to on a monthly basis.

The site will be the exclusive web merchant for the Sonny Rollins Signature Collection--specially designed hats, caps, T-shirts, and posters that are also sold at Rollins concerts.

Musicians interested in taping a tribute to be included on the site may contact Bret Primack at [email protected].