Conversations With Myself [Original recording remastered]

Amazon.com essential recording
That Bill Evans ventured into overdubbed pianos for this session was in 1963 a historic occasion. Overdubs were seldom in the age of Rudy Van Gelder- and Orrin Keepnews-produced sessions, which were sacrosanct in their on-the-spot nature. But by 1963 it was clear that very, very few people could play the way Evans did. Once he had himself to play along with, it was abundantly clear why he was so singular a musical mind. The melodies here fit together like two sets of fingers making a cradle, and Evans dances the lines, flows them irregularly, and entangles them so as to paint himself into constant binds. Then he escapes the binds, as artfully as he had done on Sunday at the Village Vanguard and Waltz for Debby with the legendary trio of himself, bassist Scott LaFaro, and drummer Paul Motian. This is rightly one of jazz piano's most enchanted recordings. --Andrew Bartlett

Conversations With Myself,Bill Evans,Polygram Records,Ballads,Jazz,Jazz Music,Modal Music,Pop,Post-Bop

Average customer rating: best overdubbing experiment Not for all Evans fans ... absolutely necessary...best in headphones contrapuntal experiment A bad idea, all things considered . . .

Conversations With Myself Bill Evans Manufacturer: Polygram Records ProductGroup: Music Binding: Audio CD Bebop General | Bebop | Jazz | Styles | Music Cool Jazz | Jazz | Styles | Music General | Jazz | Styles | Music Modern Postbebop | Jazz | Styles | Music Bebop & Post-Bop | Compilations | Jazz | Styles | Music Similar Items: Bill Evans Alone Moon Beams Explorations Everybody Digs Bill Evans The Complete Village Vanguard Recordings, 1961 ASIN: B0000047CV Release Date: 1997-05-20

Tracks:

1. 'Round Midnight
2. How About You?
3. Spartacus Love Theme
4. Blue Monk
5. Stella By Starlight
6. Hey, There
7. N.Y.C.'s No Lark
8. Just You, Just Me
9. Bemsha Swing
10. A Sleepin' Bee

Amazon.com essential recording

That Bill Evans ventured into overdubbed pianos for this session was in 1963 a historic occasion. Overdubs were seldom in the age of Rudy Van Gelder- and Orrin Keepnews-produced sessions, which were sacrosanct in their on-the-spot nature. But by 1963 it was clear that very, very few people could play the way Evans did. Once he had himself to play along with, it was abundantly clear why he was so singular a musical mind. The melodies here fit together like two sets of fingers making a cradle, and Evans dances the lines, flows them irregularly, and entangles them so as to paint himself into constant binds. Then he escapes the binds, as artfully as he had done on Sunday at the Village Vanguard and Waltz for Debby with the legendary trio of himself, bassist Scott LaFaro, and drummer Paul Motian. This is rightly one of jazz piano's most enchanted recordings. --Andrew Bartlett

Customer Reviews:

best overdubbing experiment.......2007-02-07

Evans' 1963 album for Verve was an overdub experiment featuring renditions of `Round Midnight' and `Stella by Starlight'. On "Conversations with Myself", Evans formed for himself his own trio. The experiment, Evans reasoned, would yield him an even closer affinity to the "other" players. Downbeat gave the album a five star review and the album also won Evans a Grammy. The album comes in digipak packaging and has been fully restored using a 20-bit transfer. Order yourself a copy and be treated to the creative genius of the prolific composer that was Bill Evans.

Not for all Evans fans ..........2004-10-18

I have been listening to Bill Evans since high school and have many of his albums in 33 rpm (revolutions per minute, remember?). He never ceases to amaze, delight, and inspire. "Conversations with Myself" is a definite departure for Evans. Mostly a trio player (with the exception of "Alone"), here he is presented in triplicate. Whether more is less is for each listener to decide. Evans, in the liner notes, seems to have thought that the most interesting question was was this a solo or trio performance?

It seems to be a little of each. Sometimes Piano #1 stops playing chords and plays amazing walking bass lines (How About You? and Blue Monk). These two cuts are brilliant, full of melodic phrases, driving rhythms, and dissonant harmonies. 'Round Midnight, the opener, is haunting ... it will never leave you (and unlike the Romantic Evans, his playing on this cut emulates Monk's choppy, rhythmic style). The last cut, Just You, Just Me, another song in the Monk repertoire, might be a little dense, with all three pianos playing at once, but it is so melodic and frantic ... well, personally when I listen to it, I hope it will never end. And the Love Theme from Spartacus ... it is impossible to describe the beauty of Bill's playing on this. As the album notes say he doesn't just play the essence of a love theme, he plays the essence of love. No argument here.

The other cuts are interesting, but the above-mentioned are my personal favorites, and well worth the price of the CD.

As I said, this Evans album may not be for everybody. Evans himself had questions about the validity of the gimmick of overdubbing. But as someone once said, "There are two kinds of music ... good music and bad music." This is GREAT music.

absolutely necessary...best in headphones.......2004-09-07

"Bill Evans had a lot of ideas and only ten fingers. What great complex things could he do with, say, thirty fingers?"

Well I'm glad you asked becuase your questioned is answered on this very Bill Evans album. He overdubs himself - not once, but twice - to create an astounding and confusing stereophonic experience with three Bills having nice conversations together.

"Well you know Bill played thick enough stuff with only one piano. Doesn't it get really muddy with three of them?"

Yeah maybe a little bit. But most of the time there's only two of them at once. One will be doing the chords and the low end and another will do the melody and some soloing and the third one will echo some ideas or run through really fast complex lies over everything else. Bill generally doesn't get in the way of his own playing, it's almost like he had a lot of things planned out already so that it fit together so well. There are even a lot of parts that sound like the random bursts of creativity that happen when everybody is playing at once, but here they are not playing at once.

"That can't be jazz it's too much like classical music."

Maybe you're right a little bit. It doesn't always swing that hard, and a lot of times it can resemble (in structure) something Bach would have done, but if you dig Bill Evans (and EVERYBODY digs Bill Evans) you would know that a very careful thought out approach is a big part of his playing, and this is just giving it a new setting.

Conversations with Myself is like a solo piano record on speed, or seeing triple, or something. It can get unsteady and confusing or whatever, but it's generally very lucid and who would want to be denied an oppurtunity to hear Bill Evans say so many things at once? That's why it's absolutely necessary, and the stereo separation is why you should use headphones.

contrapuntal experiment.......2004-09-02

It's fitting that Evans recorded this contrapuntal experiment on Glenn Gould's Steinway (Gould would later do something similar, overdubbing himself in a complex arrangement of Wagner's music). Evans wasn't the first, though, to try this: Lennie Tristano, a major influence on Evans, had overdubbed three pianos, each with a different time signature, in his recording "Turkish Mambo." But what makes this album an extraordinary listening experience rather than merely a gimmick is the range of expression, from the hard-swinging "How About You?" to the almost unbearably stark "N.Y.C.'s No Lark" (an elegy to the great pianist Sonny Clark, the title being an anagram based on his name) to the swirling, impressionistic interpretation of Alex North's "Spartacus Love Theme," which in my book ranks as one of the great achievements of Evans's career.

I see this album as one of Evans's more extreme attempts to recapture something like the telepathic rapport he enjoyed in his legendary trio with bassist Scott LaFaro and drummer Paul Motian. Evans spent much of his later career trying to fill the void left by LaFaro's untimely death in an auto accident. I think he saw LaFaro as a kind of "second self," and here he literally plays with two other selves. Yes, there's an artificial, made-in-the-studio quality that prevents this album from reaching the supreme heights of Sunday at the Village Vanguard or Waltz for Debby or Alone or the later Paris Concerts, but it's a bold, fascinating, and moving experiment nonetheless.

A bad idea, all things considered . . ........2001-12-12

Sometime in 1962-1963, apprising the guestlist at a particularly stellar White House dinner, John F. Kennedy pronounced it the finest assemblage of minds "with the possible exception of when Thomas Jefferson dined alone."

A tribute, in his words, to raw genius. But was it that particularly apt? One can only surmise . . .

Skip ahead, some one hundred and sixty years, as another genius "dines alone." For pianist/composer Bill Evans was a genius, in every sense of the word. He constructed chords as no one before him had ever thought to do; he ran those chords together in progressions which had never occurred to anyone before him; whether improvising on a "standard" such as "Stella By Starlight" or working off of original compositions like "N.Y.C.'s No Lark," he established an imprimatur that is impossible for succeeding pianists (myself included, and not anywhere near the fore) to ignore.

So why only two stars for this outing? Simple:

Evans -- and I suspect this is true of virtually all geniuses, whatever their forte (including Jefferson, by the way) -- was at his absolute best in collaboration, in the rough-and-tumble give-and-take of ideas which he bounced (or had bounced upon him) of those surrounding him; whether we're talking the all-time great trio of Evans-Motian-LaForte, or later groupings such as the studio session with Chet Baker, or an even later live gig with the reconfigured Evans trio and tenor saxist Stan Getz (in which Getz, at the last minute, called a tune which they hadn't rehearsed together), Bill Evans' genius shone most brightly in the give-and-take, no-holds-barred atmosphere of improvisation: perhaps it was something in his reclusive nature, a "fear" (whether founded or not) that he would be 'outdone' by those around him -- who can say? -- Evans thrived in these settings, depending upon an instinctive sense of where a fellow musician was headed, as well as his ability to adjust (witness his prodding of Cannonball Adderley in "Kind of Blue"''s 'Flamenco Sketches,' as he tries to lead Adderley into the comp's fourth mode and, ultimately realizing that Cannonball wasn't done with his explorations, settles back to build the tension resulting in the following mode) to propel his musical statements.

This sense -- not to mention the 'tension' -- is lacking here. Evans, overdubbing himself (and frequently overdubbing those initial overdubs), knows exactly where he's going (based upon where he's already been). The ultimate result is, more than anything else, a compositional homage to the "classical masters" he had previously studied (he had a particular fondness for the Russian "moderns," although most biographers tend to overlook the influence of Prokofiev) . . .

But it's nowhere near great jazz; and it's nowhere near Evans' best efforts.

Which, of course, begs the question: What great thoughts did Thomas Jefferson think when he dined alone?

Average customer rating: Classy Evans Still golden, despite sonic flaws please, no quibbles with this monument of genius... Mostly a pleasure, warts and all I wouldn't be that strict

Further Conversations with Myself Bill Evans Manufacturer: Polygram Records ProductGroup: Music Binding: Audio CD Bebop General | Bebop | Jazz | Styles | Music Cool Jazz | Jazz | Styles | Music General | Jazz | Styles | Music Modern Postbebop | Jazz | Styles | Music Bebop & Post-Bop | Compilations | Jazz | Styles | Music Similar Items: Conversations With Myself Bill Evans Alone We Will Meet Again Trio '64 Bill Evans at the Montreux Jazz Festival ASIN: B00002DDQK Release Date: 1999-11-02

Tracks:

1. Emily
2. Yesterdays
3. Santa Claus Is Comin' To Town
4. Funny Man
5. The Shadow Of Your Smile
6. Little Lulu
7. Quiet Now

Customer Reviews:

Classy Evans.......2006-03-03

This was Bill Evans's second solo outing where he overdubbed his playing with an additional track (previously he had used 2 tracks for a 3-piano effect). You get the feeling from comments Bill makes in the liner notes that he senses what he's doing is somewhat of a gimmick (he says his next effort will be a solo album), but it works well. As with all solo piano performances where the performer disengages himself from the curbing influences of a rhythm section, Bill can sometimes wander all over the place in these performances (the middle section of THE SHADOW OF YOUR SMILE is a good case in point). But usually Evans is quite focused. EMILY and SANTA CLAUS IS COMING TO TOWN receive excellent interpretations. Most impressive is LITTLE LULU, snappy and delightful, with a string of various endings as if Bill couldn't make up his mind what to conclude with. Evans fans should like this album with few reservations.

Still golden, despite sonic flaws.......2001-06-16

To hear the mind of Bill Evans playing against the mind of Bill Evans is always extraordinary. Many of his middle-period Verve recordings suffer from a "boxy" and often tinny piano sound, but getting deeper inside what he did with harmonic possibilities is always an adventure. This is one of the least successful engineered Verve recordings, and their reissue doesn't help much, but he's just so damn good, I've learned to live with it, and just immerse myself in those rich chords and flowing lines. Those who want to hear EXQUISITE-SOUNDING Evans overdubbing himself, with clarity and no tape noise, check out his Warner Bros' 1978 album "New Conversations"!

please, no quibbles with this monument of genius..........2000-11-06

How can the reviews below quibble, the little quibblers?! Supposed technical deficiencies in the recording have never marred my enjoyment and respect for this record because I WAS LISTENING TO THE MUSIC. So there. Ignore the obsessive engineer types and buy this incredible invention.

Mostly a pleasure, warts and all.......2000-02-20

The review criticizing the tech flaws of the original recording has a point, and Verve should have cleaned this reissue up if possible. But the music shines and Evans fans shouldn't be warned away. My old LP version of this was pressed improperly (out of round), so this acqusition finally lets me hear everything in tune. It's (mostly) a great pleasure.

I wouldn't be that strict.......1999-12-04

Yes, technical drawbacks are obvious, but after all - this is Bill Evans... I don't quite like the idea of this overdubbed records, but as a real Bill Evans fan I'd go for this record as well

Average customer rating:

Shadows of Ancient Dreams Manufacturer: Capstone ProductGroup: Music Binding: Audio CD General Modern | Modern, 20th, & 21st Century | Historical Periods | Classical | Styles | Music General | Classical | Styles | Music General | Chamber Music | Classical | Styles | Music General | Jazz | Styles | Music ASIN: B000001YV9 Release Date: 1997-03-18

Tracks:

1. Shadows Of Ancient Dreams
2. Conversations With Myself: About Max
3. Conversations With Myself: About Her
4. Conversations With Myself: About Midnight
5. Conversations With Myself: About Hildegard
6. Conversations With Myself: About Time
7. Canto (De Las Sombras)
8. Snake Charmer
9. Snake Charmer
10. Snake Charmer
11. Yasashii Kaze
12. Yasashii Kaze
13. Yasashii Kaze
14. Yasashii Kaze
15. Yasashii Kaze
16. Milk Teeth

Average customer rating:

Conversations With Myself Bill Evans Manufacturer: Verve ProductGroup: Music Binding: Audio CD Bebop General | Bebop | Jazz | Styles | Music Cool Jazz | Jazz | Styles | Music General | Jazz | Styles | Music Modern Postbebop | Jazz | Styles | Music Jazz | Imports | Stores | Music ASIN: B00008KKUQ Release Date: 2003-05-05

Tracks:

1. 'Round Midnight
2. How About You?
3. Spartacus Love Theme
4. Blue Monk
5. Stella by Starlight
6. Hey There
7. N.Y.C.'s No Lark
8. Just You, Just Me
9. Bemsha Swing
10. Sleepin' Bee

Average customer rating:

Milianalia - Free Conversations With Myself Jerzy Milian Manufacturer: Polskie Nagrania - Muza ProductGroup: Music Binding: Audio CD General | Jazz | Styles | Music ASIN: B000F7BO0I Release Date: 2006-03-01

Tracks:

1. Sheik of Urology [02:04]
2. Go Down Felix [08:21]
3. Moon Hustler [03:23]
4. Salam-Talam [05:25]
5. Needful Sounds [02:36]
6. Kamikadze - Divine Wind [10:49]
7. Mother-In-Law Pranks [01:08]
8. Blues Holzbein Waltz [04:23]

Album Description

70th birthday recording from the legend of European jazz vibes.

Label: Polskie Nagrania - Muza , 2006 Catalogue No: PNCD 1088 Format: CD Condition: GENUINE, BRAND NEW, MINT, FACTORY SEALED

Average customer rating:

Conversations With Myself Manufacturer: Verve ProductGroup: Music Binding: Audio CD Cool Jazz | Jazz | Styles | Music Modern Postbebop | Jazz | Styles | Music Verve | Verve Music Group | Specialty Stores | Music ASIN: B000EOGTQ6

Average customer rating:

Art of Duo: Conversations with Myself & Further Conversations With Myself Bill Evans Manufacturer: Universal ProductGroup: Music Binding: Audio CD Bebop General | Bebop | Jazz | Styles | Music Cool Jazz | Jazz | Styles | Music General | Jazz | Styles | Music Modern Postbebop | Jazz | Styles | Music ASIN: B0000C16MM Release Date: 2003-08-18

Tracks:

1. 'Round Midnight
2. How About You?
3. Spartacus Love Theme
4. Blue Monk
5. Stella by Starlight
6. Hey There
7. N.Y.C.'s No Lark
8. Just You, Just Me
9. Bemsha Swing
10. Sleepin' Bee

Tracks:

1. Emily
2. Yesterdays
3. Santa Claus Is Coming to Town
4. Funny Man
5. Shadow of Your Smile
6. Little Lulu
7. Quiet Now

Album Details

Double CD release, featuring these 2 great releases together.

Average customer rating:

Conversations with Myself Jenny Madison ProductGroup: Music Binding: Audio CD Pop Rock | Pop | Styles | Music ASIN: B000FTB1MC Release Date: 2006-01-17

Tracks:

1. Midnight
2. Leavin' out of Louisville
3. Life's Goes On
4. Never Be the Same
5. Paper Jesus
6. Sugar Creek
7. Graveshaker
8. Dark as the Devil
9. Crazy from Here
10. Nothing's Wrong

Average customer rating: best overdubbing experiment Not for all Evans fans ... absolutely necessary...best in headphones contrapuntal experiment A bad idea, all things considered . . .

Conversations With Myself Bill Evans Manufacturer: Polygram Records ProductGroup: Music Binding: Audio CD Bebop General | Bebop | Jazz | Styles | Music Cool Jazz | Jazz | Styles | Music General | Jazz | Styles | Music Modern Postbebop | Jazz | Styles | Music Similar Items: Bill Evans Alone Moon Beams Explorations Everybody Digs Bill Evans The Complete Village Vanguard Recordings, 1961 ASIN: B000008AV7 Release Date: 1990-10-25

Tracks:

1. 'Round Midnight
2. How About You?
3. Spartacus Love Theme
4. Blue Monk
5. Stella by Starlight
6. Hey There
7. N.Y.C.'s No Lark
8. Just You, Just Me
9. Bemsha Swing
10. Sleepin' Bee

Amazon.com essential recording

That Bill Evans ventured into overdubbed pianos for this session was in 1963 a historic occasion. Overdubs were seldom in the age of Rudy Van Gelder- and Orrin Keepnews-produced sessions, which were sacrosanct in their on-the-spot nature. But by 1963 it was clear that very, very few people could play the way Evans did. Once he had himself to play along with, it was abundantly clear why he was so singular a musical mind. The melodies here fit together like two sets of fingers making a cradle, and Evans dances the lines, flows them irregularly, and entangles them so as to paint himself into constant binds. Then he escapes the binds, as artfully as he had done on Sunday at the Village Vanguard and Waltz for Debby with the legendary trio of himself, bassist Scott LaFaro, and drummer Paul Motian. This is rightly one of jazz piano's most enchanted recordings. --Andrew Bartlett

Customer Reviews:

best overdubbing experiment.......2007-02-07

Evans' 1963 album for Verve was an overdub experiment featuring renditions of `Round Midnight' and `Stella by Starlight'. On "Conversations with Myself", Evans formed for himself his own trio. The experiment, Evans reasoned, would yield him an even closer affinity to the "other" players. Downbeat gave the album a five star review and the album also won Evans a Grammy. The album comes in digipak packaging and has been fully restored using a 20-bit transfer. Order yourself a copy and be treated to the creative genius of the prolific composer that was Bill Evans.

Not for all Evans fans ..........2004-10-18

I have been listening to Bill Evans since high school and have many of his albums in 33 rpm (revolutions per minute, remember?). He never ceases to amaze, delight, and inspire. "Conversations with Myself" is a definite departure for Evans. Mostly a trio player (with the exception of "Alone"), here he is presented in triplicate. Whether more is less is for each listener to decide. Evans, in the liner notes, seems to have thought that the most interesting question was was this a solo or trio performance?

It seems to be a little of each. Sometimes Piano #1 stops playing chords and plays amazing walking bass lines (How About You? and Blue Monk). These two cuts are brilliant, full of melodic phrases, driving rhythms, and dissonant harmonies. 'Round Midnight, the opener, is haunting ... it will never leave you (and unlike the Romantic Evans, his playing on this cut emulates Monk's choppy, rhythmic style). The last cut, Just You, Just Me, another song in the Monk repertoire, might be a little dense, with all three pianos playing at once, but it is so melodic and frantic ... well, personally when I listen to it, I hope it will never end. And the Love Theme from Spartacus ... it is impossible to describe the beauty of Bill's playing on this. As the album notes say he doesn't just play the essence of a love theme, he plays the essence of love. No argument here.

The other cuts are interesting, but the above-mentioned are my personal favorites, and well worth the price of the CD.

As I said, this Evans album may not be for everybody. Evans himself had questions about the validity of the gimmick of overdubbing. But as someone once said, "There are two kinds of music ... good music and bad music." This is GREAT music.

absolutely necessary...best in headphones.......2004-09-07

"Bill Evans had a lot of ideas and only ten fingers. What great complex things could he do with, say, thirty fingers?"

Well I'm glad you asked becuase your questioned is answered on this very Bill Evans album. He overdubs himself - not once, but twice - to create an astounding and confusing stereophonic experience with three Bills having nice conversations together.

"Well you know Bill played thick enough stuff with only one piano. Doesn't it get really muddy with three of them?"

Yeah maybe a little bit. But most of the time there's only two of them at once. One will be doing the chords and the low end and another will do the melody and some soloing and the third one will echo some ideas or run through really fast complex lies over everything else. Bill generally doesn't get in the way of his own playing, it's almost like he had a lot of things planned out already so that it fit together so well. There are even a lot of parts that sound like the random bursts of creativity that happen when everybody is playing at once, but here they are not playing at once.

"That can't be jazz it's too much like classical music."

Maybe you're right a little bit. It doesn't always swing that hard, and a lot of times it can resemble (in structure) something Bach would have done, but if you dig Bill Evans (and EVERYBODY digs Bill Evans) you would know that a very careful thought out approach is a big part of his playing, and this is just giving it a new setting.

Conversations with Myself is like a solo piano record on speed, or seeing triple, or something. It can get unsteady and confusing or whatever, but it's generally very lucid and who would want to be denied an oppurtunity to hear Bill Evans say so many things at once? That's why it's absolutely necessary, and the stereo separation is why you should use headphones.

contrapuntal experiment.......2004-09-02

It's fitting that Evans recorded this contrapuntal experiment on Glenn Gould's Steinway (Gould would later do something similar, overdubbing himself in a complex arrangement of Wagner's music). Evans wasn't the first, though, to try this: Lennie Tristano, a major influence on Evans, had overdubbed three pianos, each with a different time signature, in his recording "Turkish Mambo." But what makes this album an extraordinary listening experience rather than merely a gimmick is the range of expression, from the hard-swinging "How About You?" to the almost unbearably stark "N.Y.C.'s No Lark" (an elegy to the great pianist Sonny Clark, the title being an anagram based on his name) to the swirling, impressionistic interpretation of Alex North's "Spartacus Love Theme," which in my book ranks as one of the great achievements of Evans's career.

I see this album as one of Evans's more extreme attempts to recapture something like the telepathic rapport he enjoyed in his legendary trio with bassist Scott LaFaro and drummer Paul Motian. Evans spent much of his later career trying to fill the void left by LaFaro's untimely death in an auto accident. I think he saw LaFaro as a kind of "second self," and here he literally plays with two other selves. Yes, there's an artificial, made-in-the-studio quality that prevents this album from reaching the supreme heights of Sunday at the Village Vanguard or Waltz for Debby or Alone or the later Paris Concerts, but it's a bold, fascinating, and moving experiment nonetheless.

A bad idea, all things considered . . ........2001-12-12

Sometime in 1962-1963, apprising the guestlist at a particularly stellar White House dinner, John F. Kennedy pronounced it the finest assemblage of minds "with the possible exception of when Thomas Jefferson dined alone."

A tribute, in his words, to raw genius. But was it that particularly apt? One can only surmise . . .

Skip ahead, some one hundred and sixty years, as another genius "dines alone." For pianist/composer Bill Evans was a genius, in every sense of the word. He constructed chords as no one before him had ever thought to do; he ran those chords together in progressions which had never occurred to anyone before him; whether improvising on a "standard" such as "Stella By Starlight" or working off of original compositions like "N.Y.C.'s No Lark," he established an imprimatur that is impossible for succeeding pianists (myself included, and not anywhere near the fore) to ignore.

So why only two stars for this outing? Simple:

Evans -- and I suspect this is true of virtually all geniuses, whatever their forte (including Jefferson, by the way) -- was at his absolute best in collaboration, in the rough-and-tumble give-and-take of ideas which he bounced (or had bounced upon him) of those surrounding him; whether we're talking the all-time great trio of Evans-Motian-LaForte, or later groupings such as the studio session with Chet Baker, or an even later live gig with the reconfigured Evans trio and tenor saxist Stan Getz (in which Getz, at the last minute, called a tune which they hadn't rehearsed together), Bill Evans' genius shone most brightly in the give-and-take, no-holds-barred atmosphere of improvisation: perhaps it was something in his reclusive nature, a "fear" (whether founded or not) that he would be 'outdone' by those around him -- who can say? -- Evans thrived in these settings, depending upon an instinctive sense of where a fellow musician was headed, as well as his ability to adjust (witness his prodding of Cannonball Adderley in "Kind of Blue"''s 'Flamenco Sketches,' as he tries to lead Adderley into the comp's fourth mode and, ultimately realizing that Cannonball wasn't done with his explorations, settles back to build the tension resulting in the following mode) to propel his musical statements.

This sense -- not to mention the 'tension' -- is lacking here. Evans, overdubbing himself (and frequently overdubbing those initial overdubs), knows exactly where he's going (based upon where he's already been). The ultimate result is, more than anything else, a compositional homage to the "classical masters" he had previously studied (he had a particular fondness for the Russian "moderns," although most biographers tend to overlook the influence of Prokofiev) . . .

But it's nowhere near great jazz; and it's nowhere near Evans' best efforts.

Which, of course, begs the question: What great thoughts did Thomas Jefferson think when he dined alone?

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