The version I have is on the West Wind label. It has vinyl surface noise. Cover is a photo of latter day bearded Bill on a lawn chair.
When I first listened to bill evans I thought he might be too "old fashion" for me (it ain't monk) but I soon picked up on the restraint and subtlety of his explorations and eased right into him....
His melodic sense is not as modern and jagged as monks but the rhythmic interplay of the Evans rhythm sections is way more modern and futuristic than monks bands.
Both Marc Johnson and Joe LaBarbera claimed that they didn’t know they were recorded at KK, while Todd Barkan said that Evans kew it and Barkan gave a couple of cassette tapes that were dubbed from the R2R tapes to Evans. And the masters were eventually authorized when the US boxes (The Last Waltz and Consecration) came out. I wonder Marc and Joe didn’t realize the many microphones around the instruments at Keystone Korner??
Many people say that quite a lot of dissonant Just curious. Does the Verve box use the old 1980s masterings? Does the Fantasy box use the OJC masterings?
The Verve Box states that Suha Gur did the mastering. The original release of the Evans Verve box was delayed considerably. I used to be on the phone with Richard Seidel (the producer) at the time. He told me that the reason for the delay was that the steel cases were not weathering (rusting) as the designer had intended. So the run was pulled, the contents were removed from the steel cases and the cases were sprayed with an acid wash to make them weather faster. The result was a disaster, with many customers complaining of red dust (rust) coming off on their hands. The bad press really hurt sales. This was one of the early box sets where commercial designers started taking over the design of CD box sets from more practical "collector-based" designs (like a slipcase or large 12X12 box with book). That was a bad trend. The book design also was not user-friendly (such as light grey font on beige paper). Despite all this, you should have it. However, the more budget priced Italian Verve edition (in a red clamshell cardboard case) uses the same mastering, but deletes the book.
Lorraine Gordon, Keeper of the Village Vanguard Flame, Dies at 95 By Tim Weiner June 9, 2018 Lorraine Gordon, who took over the Village Vanguard, New York’s oldest and most venerated jazz nightclub, in 1989 and remained its no-nonsense proprietor for the rest of her life, died on Saturday in Manhattan. She was 95. The cause was complications of a stroke, said Jed Eisenman, the longtime manager of the club. “Wherever I happened to be,” Ms. Gordon said in a 2007 interview with The New York Times, “music was always with me.” Ms. Gordon was married for 40 years to the Vanguard’s founder and owner, Max Gordon. But she had been a jazz fan long before she met him. She fell in love with jazz as a teenager in the 1930s, listening to it on WNYC radio. The music pierced her soul, she said, “like a spike in my heart.” It was the start of a lifelong romance. “I was lucky,” she said. “I was attracted to something wonderful which appealed to me.” She made her first trip to the Vanguard in 1940, when she was 17 years old and a member of the Hot Club of Newark, a society of jazz enthusiasts. Not long thereafter, she met her first husband, a fellow music lover: Alfred Lion, the founder of Blue Note Records, a leading jazz label, where she would work selling the music during and after World War II. Nine years after that first visit to the Vanguard, having divorced Mr. Lion but still in love with jazz, she married Mr. Gordon. More than seven decades later, long after Mr. Gordon’s death in 1989, she was still running the club — booking performers, counting the receipts, taking no guff and keeping the flame. “When I have to make a decision,” she joked, “I ask, ‘What would Max do?’ Then I do the opposite.” The Vanguard remained essentially unchanged throughout the decades after Mr. Gordon opened it at 178 Seventh Avenue South in Greenwich Village in 1935: a wedge of a room, one flight down from the sidewalk, seating 123 people. The club has always had immaculate acoustics; more than 100 records recorded live at the Vanguard by musicians like John Coltrane, Bill Evans, Sonny Rollins and Wynton Marsalis attest to that. A good table put a customer practically face to face with a great musician. There were very few bad tables. Ms. Gordon, often nursing a glass of vodka, presided over the scene with a personal brand of tough love. She played her role like the wisecracking star of a black-and-white movie, and she helped make the Vanguard an unfailing fountain of late-night music. But she was also a hard-driving manager; she had to be. “We open at 3,” she once said, describing the daily grind. “Deliveries come in, the phones are ringing, the roof is leaking, there’s something always going wrong, and then musicians come to rehearse. Every Tuesday night there’s a new group, so every six nights there’s a changeover. Sound checks have to be done. Instruments have to be brought in or taken out.” She put in six hours of work before the first of the night’s two sets. The first usually began at 9 o’clock sharp, the second at 11. (In later years the start times were changed to 8:30 and 10:30.) “I’m a stickler for being on time,” Ms. Gordon said. “And the show goes on — on time.” Under her direction, the show went on and on. The Vanguard celebrated its 80th anniversary in 2015. Lorraine Gordon was born Lorraine Stein in Newark on Oct. 15, 1922, at the dawn of recorded jazz and blues. The middle-class daughter of a homemaker and a businessman, she grew up in and around Newark and began traveling to New York to hear music as soon as she was able. (Her older brother, Phillip, who died in 2009, was also a jazz fanatic; he painted the mural on the Vanguard’s back wall.) As a teenager, she was listening to Blue Note records — which featured some of the greatest jazz musicians of the day — before she met the label’s owner, Mr. Lion, in 1940. They hit it off immediately. “He presented me with two volumes of all the records he had made until that time,” she recalled. “That was a great present.” They married not long after Mr. Lion was drafted, early in World War II — or, as she put it, “Blue Note Records and I got married.” Once he got out of the Army, she worked full time for the label: packing records, mailing them out, handling public relations. At the time the Blue Note label was chartreuse and blue, and the couple painted their first apartment those same colors. In the summer of 1948 she was trying to promote a Blue Note musician — the pianist Thelonious Monk, then little known — when she met Max Gordon quite by accident on Fire Island. “I accosted Max Gordon,” she remembered. “I’m all business. I told him about Thelonious Monk. He was very interested. He said, ‘I just happen to have an opening in September.’” They struck a deal. Monk was “in and out in one week,” she said. “But Max and I were not in and out in one week, somehow. Whatever the connections were, they took hold.” The two were married in 1949 and had two daughters, Rebecca and Deborah. They survive her, as does a grandson. Deborah Gordon will take over the Vanguard, Mr. Eisenman said. The Vanguard had originally been a place for poetry and comedy as well as music. But the advent of television, where comedians and variety acts flourished in the 1950s, meant “the end of nightclub acts of that genre at the time,” Ms. Gordon said. “And that’s when Max decided to stick with jazz.” In the early 1960s Ms. Gordon became a political activist, protesting against nuclear testing and, later, the war in Vietnam. In 1965 she made an unauthorized trip to Hanoi as a member of the group Women Strike for Peace. She carved out a life for herself apart from the club, working at the Brooklyn Museum as a merchandising manager. In 1989, when Mr. Gordon died, there was no question that the show would go on — and that it was up to Ms. Gordon to make it go on. “No one had to ask me,” she said. “There was nowhere else to go but me.” The Vanguard closed the evening of Mr. Gordon’s death, but “I opened the club the next night,” she recalled in 2007. “I took reservations on the phone; there was a band still playing that Max had booked in advance, fortunately.” She learned the trade as she went along, “from one day to the next,” she said. “I began, well ... running the Village Vanguard,” Ms. Gordon wrote in her 2006 memoir, “Alive at the Village Vanguard: My Life in and Out of Jazz Time.” Ms. Gordon’s contributions to jazz were recognized by the National Endowment for the Arts, which announced in 2012 that she was the winner of a Jazz Masters award. The awards ceremony was held in New York in January 2013, but she was too ill to attend. Until just a few weeks earlier, though, she had still been at the Vanguard almost every night. She usually stayed through the first set, sometimes into the second set, sometimes all night. She felt she had no choice but to go on; the music was always her great passion. “To keep the music alive,” she said, “is the most important thing there is in my life.”
Just a heads up for any UK dwellers who want the Bill Evans 2 CD set on Alfa of Consecration, there's a guy on ebay flogging it for £9.49 which is about half of what you'll ever find it for elsewhere, I'm tempted to buy it as a backup copy.
Some say the show was taped on September 8th, while other says it was three weeks before (in August) his death. Isn't there a definite clue?
This morning, a garage sale turned up this in excellent condition for 50 cents. I am a Bill Evans devotee, so this is nice
No, this one came later, 1960. Bill's first LP record was with Jerry Wald. He did many guest soloist spots with a variety of Band leaders before he settled into doing his own thing after 1960
Recorded June 1968 - 50 years ago !! Any comments regarding Bill Evans collaborations with Jack DeJohnette ?!
Regarding DeJohnette with Evans, I've got the Hilversum & Black Forest releases from Resonance. On BF, the drums are extremely quiet to almost non-existent in the mix. Hilversum has more audible drum playing and I dig it. DeJohnette plays with a lot of class & touch and I really dig it. And I'm not slagging BF at all. I actually really like it, but if one goes into it with high hopes of a lot of JD then you'll be disappointed. I don't know if it's been linked in this thread, but here's an interview with DeJohnette from 2017 in Down Beat (of note he prefers the Hilversum recording as well): Jack DeJohnette Recalls Stint in Bill Evans’ Trio
Anybody know for certain when the album Waltz For Debby was released? Some places has 1961 and others uses 1962 as the release date.
Maybe look for the first review in Downbeat Magazine. If you were born in 1961 or 1962, I could imagine wanting to know. Release dates were not tightly controlled back then. I once had the complete run of Downbeat up to 1971, but gave it to a fellow in Germany
True, but I am curious as to why you wish to know. I can also understand if you are intrigued by the coincidence between this release and specific current political and cultural events. That stuff interests me. Or maybe if you lost your virginity on the date of release (that gets personal), or maybe if it was the day you broke some windows in the school (I am not confessing anything)
If you are trying to figure out when Bill Evans was actually paid his fair royalties, that never happened. Riverside cooked the books and did not pay musicians fairly. Not even close.
