I remember a spring day when I was 18 years old. Having barely moved out of home and into a strange city, just dipping my toes into a life completely of my own, I found myself wandering past the local library. Libraries had always calmed me. When I was young, I loved hanging out at my local one, either reading between the dusty shelves of books or exploring the early internet on the library’s one computer with an internet connection. So I decided to go in.
This particular library had quite a large collection of CDs, which I lazily flipped through. I stopped at one in particular. A cover showing a man sitting at a piano in a suit, with pomade-glazed hair and dark horn-rimmed glasses*. Although I hadn’t heard of him or jazz in general before that, this man fit my intuitive idea of what a jazz pianist would look like back in the day. You know, the ones sitting in smoke-filled bars with a cigarette in the corner of their mouth and a glass of whisky on the piano.
I took that CD and a few others from the same artist, went to the counter, checked them out, and headed straight home. Back at my small dorm room, I put the CD in my old Technics stereo, which I had dragged along from home. What came out of the speakers was the softest, most emotional and poignant version of Danny Boy I had ever heard or have heard since. (Back then, I had actually never heard any version of Danny Boy before.) It was, in a word, transformative.
I eagerly listened through all of the CDs I brought home and was enthralled by this musical discovery. It sounded like all the ideas I’d ever had about cool musicians playing cool music – although today, I have no idea why 18-year-old me associated soft emotional piano music, horn-rimmed glasses, dusty bars or any of it, with being cool.
When I put the last of the CDs in the stereo and pressed play, something hit differently. Even knowing nothing about music and especially jazz, I could hear something else was going on. The vibe, harmonies, and interplay were like nothing I had ever heard before. I played that album again and again, especially the first track, Gloria’s Step, and disappeared into a dream world, where I was the one sitting at the piano, playing those notes, creating this music (with girls in the audience spellbound by my skills and me being wildly indifferent to them, which of course only made me seem cooler).
The album was Sunday at the Village Vanguard by the Bill Evans Trio, and is celebrated as one of the best jazz piano trio recordings of all time. The interaction between Evans, LaFaro, and Motian is legendary, and their approach to trio playing was revolutionary. Unlike traditional jazz trios where the rhythm section merely supported the pianist, these three musicians created a musical conversation, each with an equal voice and space within the music, weaving in and out of each other’s lines effortlessly, it seemed. I didn’t know any of this at the time, but I definitely felt something different when listening to it. It woke a sense of anemoia in me, and time and time again after that day I found myself cursing the fact that I was born into a time where this music no longer seemed to exist. This album started my lifelong infatuation with jazz music, and has stayed in stable rotation on every music player I have ever owned since. It never gets old.
Luckily, not long after hearing it for the first time, I discovered that this kind of jazz was indeed still alive and well and played in many corners of the world. It’s an ever-expanding treasure trove of discoveries, and I don’t think my life would have turned out the way it has if I hadn’t brought this album home with me from the library that day.
If you haven’t heard it already, you should give it a listen. It’s the perfect album for an intimate night in with a drink and a few good friends, but works equally well on Sunday mornings with coffee and the early sun beaming through the curtains.
*This album was Time Remembered, an early Best-Of album of his recordings.
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