Legendary Bill Evans Trio (Uk)

Five albums in a three-disc Box Set featuring the legendary Bill Evans. Bill Evans co-wrote 'Kind Of Blue' with Miles Davis and is regarded by many as the most influential jazz pianist of his generation. The trio he formed in 1959 with the brilliant, ill-fated young bassist Scott LaFaro and drummer Paul Motion is surely as fine as any in jazz history. This three-disc box set edition comprises almost everything this Evans trio recorded; The two miraculous studio albums, 'Portrait In Jazz' and 'Explorations'; the intimate live sets recorded in New York in the summer of 1961, 'Sunday Night At The Village Vanguard' and 'Waltz For Debby'. These masterpieces are complimented by the Birdland sessions - an earlier musical document of the trio in an authentic club setting - with disc three completed by the their first recordings together, with the jazz clarinettist Tony Scott; for the album 'Sung Heroes', his homages to Billie Holiday and the trumpeter "Hot Lips" Page. The Canadian journalist Gene Lees was a close friend of Evans: "Bill wanted it to be a three- way colloquy, rather than pianist-accompanied-by-rhythm-section. And it was. LaFaro, still in his early twenties, had developed bass playing to a new level of facility. He had a gorgeous tone and unflagging melodicism. Motian, Armenian by background, had since childhood been steeped in a music of complex time figures and was able to feed his companions patterns of polyrhythm that delighted them both.