Bill Evans - Waltz for Debby

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Free Music Notes for Waltz for Debby

Free Music Review: Legendary and Utterly Timeless
Hit: 5 Stars

There's a 'complete' Village Vanguard 3-CD set available on the Japanese JVC Victor label. There are also two different CDs which offer selected tracks from the two original albums. In my opinion, the Italian 'Giants of Jazz' version titled 'Waltz for Debby/Village Vanguard' is a better selection than the Milestone label's `Live at the Village Vanguard', but it's difficult to get hold of and I don't know whether the re-mastering will be as good as on the originals. If you don't know either of the original albums and are cautious about investing in the "complete" edition, I would suggest that 'Waltz for Debby' is the one to buy first. (I should add that I know of three other Bill Evans CDs - two of them, confusingly, on the 'Giants of Jazz' label - which use 'Waltz for Debby' in the title. Don't mistake them for this one.)

The music itself finds Evans in his more introspective, glowingly lyrical form on the slow pieces: "My Foolish Heart", "Detour Ahead", "Some Other Time" and "I Loves You Porgy". The first and last of these are especially moving. Evans's delicacy of touch and tone and his willingness to leave space between his phrases (rather than filling the space with unnecessary decoration, as a fussier pianist would) help to give the music a kind of floating, other-worldly quality which Wordsworth's definition of poetry - `emotion recollected in tranquillity' - aptly describes. "My Romance" and Evans's "Waltz for Debby" are similarly romantic, tuneful themes, and although they are faster, more overtly swinging numbers, Evans's improvisations are still in a warmly melodic, 'singing' style. The final track is a fascinating re-working of Miles Davis's famous theme, "Milestones" and, although it's the fastest track on the album, Evans's gentle touch and unhurried phrasing at this tempo give the piece a striking blend of intensity and relaxation. But the album is very much a group performance. The close rapport and the sense of collective improvisation which the trio aimed for are very strong in these Vanguard sessions, and both La Faro and Motian play with remarkable subtlety and insight.

One of the immediately noticeable features of these Village Vanguard recordings, when you come upon them for the first time, is the constant 'club' background of chattering, laughing diners, tinkling glasses and cutlery, etc. At least once when you listen to the music you will probably wish that remastering technology could completely remove every extraneous noise and give us the music pure and unsullied. But for some fans (and for drummer Paul Motian, in a New Yorker article recalling the sessions forty years later) the background noise is part of the attraction of the music, locating it in a particular time and place - one Sunday afternoon and evening in 1961 in a New York jazz club - even if, in another sense, the music is utterly timeless.

(Adam Gopnik's New Yorker article can be found online at the Bill Evans Web Pages site.)

Waltz for Debby Poster

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