Bill Evans - A Jazz Hour With Bill Evans - Autumn Leaves (1969)

01	Autumn Leaves					play
02	Turn Out The Stars
03	Quiet Now
04	Nardis
05	Very Early
06	A Sleepin' Bee					play
07	What Are You Doing Th
08	T.T.T. (Twelve Tone Tune)
09	Sugar Plum
10	Emily
11	Some Other Time

Musicians:
Bill Evans (piano)
Eddie Gomez (bass)
Marty Morel (drums).

Date & Location: unknown (possibly Amsterdam or Paris, between 1969 and 1972)

There's some mystery about the source of this 'bootleg' recording. The CD packaging, which is short on relevant information, gives no producer or engineer credit. Nor does it specify the location of the concert from which the tracks come. It's credited to the Evans-Gomez-Morrell trio of 1969 but I came across the suggestion, on a Bill Evans web site, that the date is more likely to be a few years later. I have several of the tracks on a French "Le Jazz" CD (titled 'Quiet Now') which gives Amsterdam as the concert venue, but another suggestion on the web site is that the remaining tracks might come from a different concert. Probably all this only matters to Evans specialists; to my ears the quality of the playing and the recording is consistent enough for all the pieces to be credibly from a single concert, and if they are not, your enjoyment of the music is unlikely to be affected.

Is it worth buying? I would say emphatically: yes - mainly for four reasons. 1. It captures the trio in good form, full of spirit and vitality in the faster pieces, but with Evans also typically concentrated and lyrical in the slower pieces. 2. In about 60 minutes playing time there's a good range and variety of material, with warm, tuneful mid-tempo pieces ("Emily", "Sugar Plum", "A Sleeping Bee" and "Very Early") striking a nice balance between the lively faster numbers ("Autumn Leaves", "Nardis" and "Twelve Tone Tune") and the slower ballads. 3. The ballads are especially well done. There are poised and well-shaped readings of the Evans favourites, "Some Other Time", "Turn out the Stars", and "Quiet Now" and a particularly eloquent "What are You Doing the Rest of Your Life?" which for me is one of his very best ballad performances - it's a lovely example of how he could make the piano sing, and he sustains the piece through its changes of moods and feelings as if on a single breath. Every Bill Evans fan should hear this track. 4. For a live, "bootleg" album it is notably well recorded, the trio being captured with good fidelity and balance. It sounds as if Evans had a particularly good piano for the concert, and maybe it was partly this that inspired him to such committed playing. The piano sound is especially well served by the recording, with a greater range and fullness of tone than Evans often received even on some of his better-known albums: his mid-to-low registers are nicely resonant and the occasional high register flourishes come across without distortion.

If you're not put off by the fact that most of the material is familiar Evans repertoire I would warmly recommend it as worth a place in any Bill Evans collection, and it could appeal to the more casual buyer too. --- MikeG (England), amazon.com

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