Sunday afternoon in late June, it is hot. You come up the subway steps and head deeper into the Village. Ahead, you spot the Vanguard awning stretching across the sidewalk to the curb. You duck in and down, hand a five to Max at the bottom of the stairs.
The steps are steep, pipes assembled into handrails on each side. The walls are flaking red, like someone had dunked leaves into barn paint and pressed them onto the wall. A waste pipe runs down and metal conduits up the east wall.
The room is a wedge. The streetside east wall runs from the bottom of the stairs to the stage, not twenty five feet ahead.The stage forms the apex of the triangle, twenty inches high and no more than ten feet wide. There’s a curtain at the right side of the stage but there’s no room for anything other than a wall behind it.
A fellow sits in front at the right side of the stage, fiddling with several pieces of equipment, including a large tape recorder. Three microphones. One angled over the piano near right, one in front of the prone bass, the third on a stand in front of the center-left and rear-placed drum kit. A bald man stepped up, played a run on the piano, got a nod from the engineer and tapped cymbals, snare and bass drum with a single stick, thumbs up flashed and he moved on to lift the bass and pluck a few notes. He squatted down to confer with the engineer and finding approval, moved to the back of the room.
Wiping the sweat from under the brim of your pork pie hat, you crab-walk ahead and seat yourself in chair 6b. Aisle side of a two person table. Maybe fifteen feet from the stage front. The crowd fills in behind you, and off to the west and the north where seats 24a and b could get the full sound but a tenth the intimacy. You know that, having explored the topography of the Vanguard quite thoroughly. Capacity is 132.
Scott LaFaro, just turned twenty-five, walks out and picks up his bass, attaches the mic and bows a few notes as Paul Motian comes, adjusts his seat behind the drums, checks the position of the cymbals and delivers an abbreviated drum roll.
Bill Evans moves quickly through the tables and sits at the piano stool, then rises to spin it an inch higher. He looks like an over-age graduate student, horn-rimmed glasses, sport coat and dark tie. His pants ride up above his ankles. When finished warming up, he glances out at the audience for the first time, showing a shy smile with a missing front tooth. He mumbles something to his bandmates and tips his head to the engineer.
The engineer stands and speaks quickly to introduce the band and the plan to record the show for Riverside Records. The murmur of waitresses taking orders, greetings of clinking glasses and the comfortable laughter of the crowd are welcoming. There is no sense of anticipation, no apparent thought that this show they all chanced on would be momentous.
And so it began.
This was the setting for two of jazz's all time greatest LPs: Waltz for Debbie and Sunday at the Village Vanguard. These include the highlights of the afternoon and evening performances that summer day in 1961. And more recently, reissued recordings now contain the whole of that trio’s magical performance.
I think that the St. Paul Public Library’s Concord/Riverside 4 LP box set may be the best sounding music I have heard in my home. Yes, I will return it for other listeners, as I have placed an extravagant (for me) order for my own collection.
Reviewers have said that this group, these recordings, transformed the piano jazz trio from a piano plus backing players to a new thing - where the three musicians make equal contributions and lead each other and listeners into new territories. Agreed. Certainly Oscar Peterson’s and Thelonious Monk’s partners were sometimes more than sidemen but this group achieves a different, a superior order of group dynamism.
The shows’ headliner is Bill Evans. The informative and artful booklet includes a union contract for performance and recording and reveals that the total labor charge was $622 ($6500 today), with Evans receiving about half and Motian and LaFaro twenty five percent each.
Evans made a huge contribution to Miles Davis’s 1959 recording, Kind of Blue. Still the top-selling jazz album of all time. The kind of freedom and inventiveness Evans showed in Kind of Blue is also heard in these sets, which feature songs by each of the musicians and some standards.
Now listen. Yes, the headliner is Bill Evans. But, the star is Scott LaFaro. The bass player had been a pro for just six years, playing with Benny Goodman and more recently Ornette Coleman. At his very best now with Evans.
Yes, signal for another beer: You sit down expecting to be treated to the highly acclaimed and moving, often delicate and often surprising piano music of Evans. What you hear was that and a bass player exceeding his leader in inventiveness and delicacy, moving his strings into tones and subtleties that you sometimes hear from the cello in a classical string quartet. And the blues. He and Evans easily trade leadership within songs. Motian’s drums only occasionally break into solos but he is far more than a time-keeper.
Multiple takes of several songs are preserved on these records - not one is wasted to my ears. Rather than describing each song, which others have done, I glory in the overall performance and reproduction. Be forewarned that a couple seconds of silence (lost tape) interrupt the opener, Gloria’s Step (side 1, take one). Not your equipment.
The sound is superb. I’m lucky to borrow an LP set that seems hardly to have been played. A reviewer says that these are not made from the generally preferred original master tapes but from a digital copy. Whatever, the LPs reproduce a soundstage with a specific sense of the space taken up by the trio. The setup at the Vanguard is only two or three feet wider than my speakers’ placement; that likely helps. Can I now hear the difference as you heard it when LaFaro pivoted and faced away from you and towards the center of the audience? I think so. The piano is alive. The piano is on the right side, but sometimes the sound extends well into the center. I hear no hiss, no rumble. The cymbals are high, and the drums fit nicely in the middle until Motian’s solos take over the whole stage. And the bass, it is the most sophisticated I’ve heard. It's precision we experience.
Between songs, whiskey glasses clink and patrons laugh, the musicians discuss what comes next. I hear ice cubes swirling, cooling and tinkling against heavy low ball glasses. Is it bourbon or rye? Can’t quite tell. I am there, except for the smoke and the heat and the seat-numbing chairs. Would gladly have endured such discomforts.
Each instrument sounds in organic authenticity and Evans, Motian and LaFaro play with and against each other with power and delicacy. As Evans wrote in the Kind of Blue liner notes:
Group improvisation is a … challenge. Aside from the weighty technical problem of collective coherent thinking, there is the very human, even social need for sympathy from all members to bend for the common result.
On this afternoon and evening in New York, these men thought collectively, coherently and produced a sympathetic, uncommon result.
Scott LaFaro was a true revelation that day in June. He died in a car crash ten days later.
After hearing this music, I listened carefully to Bill Evans, Some Other Time, a 192k 24 bit c.d. from Resonance Records. Unreleased previously, Some Other Time was recorded in 1968 at the highly regarded MPS studio in Germany’s Schwartzwald and featured Evans, Jack DeJohnette (drums)(RIP, 2015) and Eddie Gomez (bass). Recorded in a very high fidelity setting and given Resonance’s careful remastering. It's really good.
However, both sonically and performance-wise, you need to go down into The Village Vanguard on a Sunday in June, 1961.
Dynavector 5x15, Thorens 126 Mk III, Audio by Van Alstyne Transcendence 10 SLR tube preamp w/ Vision phono preamp, AVA Synergy 240 solid state amp, Tannoy DC4000s, Onix Rocket sub. I heard jazz at the Village Vanguard in 1977 (??), 1992 (Geri Allen) and 2019 (Ron Carter).
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