Track List: Gloria's Steps (Take 2)//My Ma's Gone Now//Solar//Alice in Wonderland (Take 2)//All of You (Take 2)//Jade Visions (Take 2)
This is actually quite an impressive album, although it may be more fun on an intellectual level than when it actually comes to listening to the thing. When we last heard from Bill Evans, he was tickling the old goanna on Miles Davis' Kind of Blue album, and doing a very good job of it too. Evans has a very flowery, pretty style, and it worked wonderfully in the context of Davis' slightly more... aggressive? musical approach. Left to his own devices, however, Evans allows this tendency to run free, and the result is an album which is extremely listenable, but which could easily be dismissed as intellectualist elevator music.
It's actually kind of funny, in it's way - despite the surface prettiness of the album, it makes a lot of demands on the listener. I suppose I like overtly jarring music because it forces me to examine what's going on almost against my will. Here, however, I'm perfectly capable of ignoring all the harmonic complexities and virtuoso playing and, ashamed as I am to admit it, this is in large part what I did.
Which is really a pity on my part, since this is actually a very good album. A live set, it was apparently structured around Evans' desire to showcase the bass-playing of Scott LaFaro, even opening and closing with LaFaro compositions filled-out by a few standards. This turned-out to be a good move on Evans' part, since LaFaro died just days after recording this, almost certainly the last thing he ever put to tape. LaFaro is truly a brilliant bassist, adept at everything from big, fat, loping rhythms to Jaco Pastorius-style avant-noodling. He anchors this set, but never really takes control. The most interesting thing about this album is the way that no-one really leads in these compositions - well, that's not strictly true, since Evans is usually anchoring the tracks with a main theme which gets reworked and repeated throughout the track to hold it all together. But, you know, the bass, drums and pianos merge perfectly into a sort of seething ocean of sound. Harmonically, it's very complex, following on from the whole "modal" notion of everyone moving within scales that work together and creation interest through forward momentum and harmonic tension more than big, flashy chord changes. The most obvious point of comparison would be the noodly bits on Kind of Blue, except that I actually think this manages to pull this off a little better at times, even if it isn't always as immediately likeable.
I don't know how I feel about this album. It's quite pretty, and very interesting if I pay attention to it, but nothing about it really grabs me... This is especially true if one takes into account the fact that most of the songs are extremely similar on a casual listen. Though they raise the tempo in "Alice in Wonderland", giving the album a nice, upbeat centrepoint.
Still, it may be brilliant but it doesn't really grab me, and so I am not going to give it a brilliant mark!
7.5/10
Download: Bill Evans Trio - My Man's Gone Mp3
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