Sunday at the Village Vanguard

1961  ·  Live Album

Three musicians in a small New York room on a Sunday, listening to each other so closely that you start listening too.

Sunday at the Village Vanguard was recorded on June 25, 1961, at the Village Vanguard in New York, by the Bill Evans Trio: Bill Evans on piano, Scott LaFaro on bass and Paul Motian on drums. It is a live record, and the room is part of it, the murmur and the glasses and the hush that falls when the playing turns inward. What you hear is a trio thinking together in real time. Nobody leads for long, and nobody follows.

The bass is the revelation. LaFaro does not keep time at the back of the stage; he answers the piano, phrase for phrase, while Motian moves underneath with quiet, shifting accents. LaFaro died in July 1961, less than a month after that Sunday, and knowing it gives the record a tenderness it never asks for. Play it late, at club volume, with someone beside you. It sounds like a night that knew it was precious. Some records are best heard alone, but this one is best shared, because it is about three people listening, and it teaches the two of you to do the same.

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VERDICT  ·  A live trio record of rare closeness, recorded in a small New York room in 1961; play it late, at club volume, and listen to the bass.

POUR  ·  A dry martini, stirred.

Pairs with: The Village Vanguard at Home

The same small-room hush runs through The Köln Concert, and Bill Evans is at the piano two years earlier on Miles Davis’s Kind of Blue. Play that one next.