By Allen Michie

Two highly recommended sets available on vinyl in limited editions on Record Store Day, November 24. CD issues will follow shortly afterward.

Never a Dull Moment! – Live from Coast to Coast 1966-1967 – Les McCann (Resonance)
Tales: Live in Copenhagen (1964) – Bill Evans (Elemental)

One way to see the history of modern jazz would be to use the lens of the piano trio. The combination of piano, bass, and drums contains the minimum elements necessary for maximum expression. Leaving aside, for the moment, the many other combinations of three possible instruments (particularly the perfect jazz combination of Hammond organ, electric guitar, and drums), the piano trio has become part of an enduring tradition charged with raising the bar of jazz creativity. If there’s a new movement in jazz, a new rhythm to fuse to swing, or a new approach to form, someone is working on it in a piano trio.

It’s impossible to say when piano trios started. Trios of various combinations, including a horn or guitar, go back to the late 1920s with Bix Beiderbecke, Clarence Profit, and Jelly Roll Morton, before the upright bass became a regular instrument in jazz. The Nat Cole trio with guitar and drums started in 1940 and achieved instant popularity, helping to establish the trio format as a mainstay of the jazz club circuit (fewer instruments in small clubs meant more tables for paying customers, no doubt). Art Tatum’s guitar trio followed in 1943, and many others came soon afterwards.

But for the piano-bass-drums layout, which dominates the format to the present day, we can thank Erroll Garner. He landed the ultimate trio internship, subbing for Tatum in his trio at the Three Deuces in 1944. Garner’s left hand was so distinctively dominating that he didn’t feel the need to have a chording guitarist, so he substituted John Levy on bass to work in tandem with his drummer George De Hart. They released their hit “Back Home Again in Indiana” in September 1945. It’s a quick hop to 1947 with Bud Powell, Max Roach, and Curley Russell, and from there it’s a straight line to so many, many other pianists flourishing in trios: Duke Ellington, Oscar Peterson, Bill Evans, Tommy Flanagan, Chick Corea, McCoy Tyner, Gene Harris, Keith Jarrett, Brad Mehldau, and probably two or three playing in your city tonight.

It’s fitting, therefore, that Erroll Garner is a launching point for considering Les McCann’s Never a Dull Moment! – Live from Coast to Coast 1966-1967. McCann shows Garner’s influence, but he uses it as a way into his own distinctive gospel-influenced style.

McCann records used to be everywhere. He released 15 albums in four years from 1960 to 1964 with Pacific Jazz, then seven more over the next three years with Limelight Records. He’s still alive and well at 88, but his releases have understandably slowed lately. The last new material and reissues are both from 2018. The never-before-released sessions on Never a Dull Moment! therefore come as a welcome surprise, one endorsed by McCann himself in the liner notes. The album is a bracing reminder of his importance to the genre. It’s also loads of fun.

Pianist Les McCann in action. Photo: Lakeshore Public Media

McCann, at the height of his popularity, brought his trio to the Penthouse club in Seattle, and the first two discs in this three-disc set capture his performances on Jan. 27, Feb. 3, and Feb. 10, 1966. Stanley Gilbert is on bass, and Paul Humphrey is on drums (with Tony Bazley substituting on Feb. 10). The third disc was recorded at New York’s Village Vanguard on July 16, 1967, with Leroy Vinnegar on bass and Frank Severino on drums. The two different trios sound similar, although Severino is more dominant on drums than Humphrey or Bazley, even though the drums are recorded a bit more distantly than they were in Seattle. By giving us complete performances, the release shows how McCann knows how to put together a set. He speaks briefly now and then, but he leads from the piano, pacing the proceedings like he paces the narrative flow of one of his solos. There are blues, ballads, Latin rhythms, up-tempo swingers, and gospel rousers. McCann blows through them all with the kind of easy confidence earned through thousands of hours on the bandstand.

If you’re mostly familiar with McCann from his R&B leanings, such as 1969’s hit live album with saxophonist Eddie Harris, Swiss Movement, or his work with Roberta Flack on her debut album, you might be surprised how straightforwardly jazzy much of this set is. People don’t often think of bebop chops when they think of McCann, but he sure has them, and they’re on full display throughout Never a Dull Moment!. There are elegant jazz ballads, too, played free of bombast and schmaltz (well, maybe except for “Goin’ Out of My Head,” but hey, it was 1967).

“This Could Be the Start of Something Big” sounds more like Oscar Peterson than Ramsey Lewis (with whom McCann is often, not unfairly, compared). There’s the fast tempo, the hard swing, blazing bop runs, hammered single notes, tremolos, and pretty much the whole Peterson bag of tricks. “Da Da” is another up-tempo racer, with a simple two-note riffing melody in the mode of Ellington’s “C Jam Blues.” A highlight is “Doin’ That Thing,” composed by the bassist Vinnegar, which begins with a slower vamp that recalls Miles Davis’s “Milestones.” There are low drums, no snare, giving the still-swinging rhythm the kind of African feel that Yusef Lateef had recently brought to the Cannonball Adderley Quintet. McCann slips in a quote from “Wade in the Water,” and it works perfectly.

My favorite of the barn-burners is “I Am in Love” from the Vanguard session. McCann sounds like Garner at times, complete with the two-handed synchronous passage, the grunts and groans, building riffs, and generally swinging as if it’s the last song he’ll ever play. Drummer Severino is on his tail with well-timed accents at every step. After a quiet interlude, McCann charges back in; he’s firing on all cylinders and it’s glorious. There are other tracks in McCann’s signature style, the rousing gospel-influenced Hard Bop of Ramsey Lewis, Joe Zawinul, Joe Sample, Horace Silver, and Gene Harris (in various parts of their diverse careers). “The Shampoo” is vintage gospel soul jazz, complete with tambourine, the kind of thing McCann recorded with Lou Rawls on his essential Stormy Monday album in 1962. It’s easy to imagine Cannonball and Nat Adderley wailing over “I Can Dig It.” It’s a short and direct line from here to Gene Harris’s piano in the Three Sounds Trio or the Ray Brown Trio (which is a high compliment).

The mastering and sound production is excellent. As always, Resonance Records rewards your investment with excellent packaging and design. Even the liner notes on this one are entertaining, with brief effusive tributes to McCann from Roberta Flack, Quincy Jones, Bonnie Raitt, Monty Alexander, Emmet Cohen, and many others, plus a contextual essay by A. Scott Galloway and a note from McCann himself. Second only perhaps to Swiss Movement, this is the Les McCann album to get: it’s one of the best to hear the full range of his soulful talents at the keyboard.

A decidedly different (but not opposite) approach from the same period is Bill Evans’s Tales: Live in Copenhagen (1964). Both Evans and McCann are pianists deeply invested in their present moments of jazz, but they look forward to two different futures for the music.

Tales contains sets recorded in the studio for Danish radio on August 10, 1964, and a set before a live audience recorded for Copenhagen’s TV-City on August 25. The album is a prequel to the equally splendid Treasures: Solo, Trio and Orchestra Recordings from Denmark (1965-1969), released for the last Record Store Day in April of this year, also from Elemental Music. As a bonus track, this set includes a performance of “’Round Midnight” with Eddie Gomez on bass and Marty Morell on drums, from November 1969, that was left off the Treasures set. It seems to be included here only because it was recorded in Denmark — it’s with a different trio, and it’s recorded five years later — but no one will complain about having one more exquisite Bill Evans track, no matter where it appears.

Evans played with diverse trios off and on for the 29 years of his productive career, but everything he did inevitably seems to be compared to the three years (1959-61) he spent with Scott LaFaro on bass and Paul Motian on drums. Obviously, that was one of the greatest piano trios in the history of jazz. It set a new standard for group interplay that was not surpassed until the long-standing trio of Keith Jarrett, Gary Peacock, and Jack DeJohnette. Appreciation of Evans’s later trios should in no way be impeded by unnecessary comparisons with the famous LaFaro/Motian trio. Evans, like all other jazz musicians, liked to switch up his sound with different personnel to hear the new places his music could go. Ask Duke Ellington about this. Or Miles Davis.

The intimidating task and exhilarating opportunity fell to bassist Chuck Israels, the first person Evans hired to replace LaFaro. Drummer Paul Motian wasn’t as comfortable playing with Israels as he was with LaFaro, and he soon left (there were also personal reasons unrelated to the trio). Evans replaced him with Larry Bunker. Tales documents this trio’s first foreign tour, and they’re the earliest known recordings of Evans in Europe.

The trio had been together for a year at this point, long enough to have established a dependable group dynamic, but short enough to still be in exploration mode and sounding fresh every night. If the trio with LaFaro and Motian must be your point of comparison, then this group swings harder. For all his deserved reputation as one of the finest ballad players in jazz on any instrument, Evans nevertheless spent the mid- and late-’60s moving more toward the popular strand of straight-ahead swing. Perhaps he was not immune to Erroll Garner’s and Oscar Peterson’s influence after all. Three years after these Danish sessions, in 1967, he would record at the Village Vanguard with a trio of Eddie Gomez and Philly Joe Jones, one of the hardest swinging rhythm sections in the business. Bunker, the drummer on Tales, is closer to Philly Joe than to Paul Motian.

Bunker is here to swing from the first track, “Waltz for Debby.” Just listen to his well-recorded crisp ping on the ride cymbal. On the “Waltz for Debby” from the 1961 LaFaro/Motian sessions at the Village Vanguard, LaFaro lets the drums handle the rhythm, freeing him to play off the beats and syncopate throughout. In his solo, LaFaro plays clusters of fast phrases (a Coltrane influence for the bassist?), never minding the string buzz. On the Tales version of “Waltz for Debby,” the tempo is faster and Bunker’s harder swing on brushes pulls Israels into walking a straight 4/4 behind the piano rather than wandering around the fretboard with accents. Israels’s tone is more centered, deeper, and rounder than LaFaro’s. His solo is more conventionally melodic. As Israels himself puts it in an excellent and revealing interview included in the liner notes:

Scott (LaFaro) was more of a virtuoso on the bass than I was. And I think his relationship with Bill was more competitive than mine…. My approach was simply to fit in. Most of that was pretty easy because Scott’s approach and mine were fairly similar. We both played with a more varied rhythmic approach than had been the standard on the bass until then, although we weren’t the only ones doing that…. Even though Scotty’s approach and mine were similar, Scotty had a busier sense of dialogue with Bill than I had. I was perfectly comfortable — more than comfortable — to do what I was doing.

There are also plenty of chances for Bunker to shine on the drums. He’s especially great on brushes, as on “How My Heart Sings,” or his feature on “Sweet and Lovely,” where he keeps things popping, as if to remind the sometimes melancholic piano and bass to keep their spirits up! There are two recordings of the closing theme “Five,” both up-tempo swingers that would probably please the Dave Brubeck fans in the audience, the rhythmic dissections on the piano set up against the steady swing of the drums.

As for Evans himself, what more can be said? He’s an absolute pillar of inventive, sensitive, intelligent, and imaginative playing on every track, every session, every year. He plays with deep focus and concentration so that not a solo phrase or part of an accompaniment behind others goes by without his harmonic and/or rhythmic fingerprint. If you’re looking for a representative entry way into Evans’s genius, listen to “My Foolish Heart,” a fine example of his famous flexibility of touch and his instantly recognizable sound.

Bill Evans in 1964. Photo: Jan Persson (CTSIMAGES)

What strikes me about this album, even more so than on the 1961 Vanguard sessions, is Evans’s masterful control of dynamics. The piano is a mechanical instrument of hammers and strings, but Evans has mastered the most delicate shifts of volume. He gets a beautiful, dark sound from the piano on “My Foolish Heart,” as if he’s mining for the resonance of the notes somewhere deep in the wood of the piano. The rhythm section rises and falls right with him as he shows how governing dynamics can be wedded to harmonic variation and lyrical expression.

On “’Round Midnight,” Evans smooths out composer Thelonious Monk’s percussive touch and angular intervals. In one phrase in the opening melody, Evans plays a loud hard note as if to acknowledge Monk, then follows with a descending phrase that gets quieter with every note as if to say “my version.” Evans solos for a bit in block chords. Not the way he usually does, but like McCann or Garner, reminding us of how he’s also part of the larger and lasting legacy of the piano trio.

Allen Michie works in higher education administration in Austin, Texas. He’s the moderator of the Jazztodon.com instance on Mastodon and the Miles Davis Discussion Group on Facebook. You can read an archive of his essays and reviews allenmichie.medium.com.