Bill Evans Trio - Turn Out the Stars: The Final Village Vanguard Recordings (Box Set) (1996)

It's accidentally poetic that pianist Bill Evans made his most unforgettable live session at Max Gordon's Village Vanguard in 1961 (for that, try Sunday at the Village Vanguard and Waltz for Debby) and recorded his second-best live set at the same venue in 1980, just three months shy of his death. Here's the document of the last stand, gathered on six CDs and glowing with a creative discovery that shines from Evans, drummer Joe LaBarbera, and bassist Marc Johnson. This trio had been together for less than two years, and in that time, they'd found an alchemy that Evans, at least, thought was in part lacking since the early 1960s. To be fair, Evans marshaled one of jazz's finest piano trios into the Vanguard in 1961 for the recording of Sunday at the Village Vanguard, and the tragic death of then-bassist Scott LaFaro devastated the pianist. He then played with lots of drummers but only one main bassist, Eddie Gomez. And he acknowledged Gomez's expertise, finding fault more generally with the coasting he seemed to allow on so many sessions. With the new trio, however, Evans looked to close out the 1970s with renewed creative vigor. He did so, as these sets demonstrate lavishly. Evans was deeply spun in emotional turmoil, nursing an ultimately lethal cocaine habit and also playing with crystal-clear depth. His improvisations sound as unstoppable as any of the early 1960s fare, with melody bursting from one hand and harmonically circuitous complexity pouring from the other. Johnson and LaBarbera stay on for the whole ride, from the passionate embrace of ballads to the fevered trot through standards that Evans knew backwards and forwards. What's most remarkable about this box set, though, is the sum of it all. Here you have Evans, who was notoriously microphone shy, unfolding lengthy sets--which appear on CD unedited and expansive. --Andrew Bartlett