Customer Reviews

The Best of Bill Evans on Verve

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The Best of Bill Evens on Verve covers many fine works from a master of the jazz piano. Before his untimely death precipitated by years of drug abuse, Bill Evans' lush playing style provided an accessible, beautiful, and technically perfect example of melodic composition. Included are tracks with Stan Getz, Jim Hall, and Jeremy Steig.

This is a compilation that covers Bill Evans in many different musical combinations and moods, and probably is the best single-disc overview of his 1960's work anyone could have come up with. It is my first Evans purchase, although I have known of him for 40 years. I delight in this. It rewards repeated listening. If you like jazz piano, it is definitely an "essential." What he does with the Tony Bennett classic "Who Can I Turn To?" is amazing and addictive.

This compilation is the best of the best...the fanfare for the box set, "The Complete Bill Evans on Verve" also available from Amazon. As well as his trio work, here you will find him playing by himself on "Spartacus-Love theme" from his album "Conversations with myself". Also a quartet with Stan Getz on tenor sax-"Grandfather's Waltz", and "Autumn Leaves" with Jeremy Steig on flute. Also a beautiful solo "A time for love". The booklet is also very informative, with a piece about Evan's development of the piano trio as an artistic unit and the particular direction in which he took it. And a short essay on each of his bassists, Scott LaFaro, Chuck Israels, Eddie Gomez and Marc Johnson. This album really is a must for anyone who loves jazz trios, in fact anyone who loves great music will love this.

Bill Evans is every pianists' favorite pianist. Miles Davis said his playing was "like crystal notes or sparkling water cascading down from some clear waterfall," and his playing really is that gorgeous. And with this Best Of, you get a wonderful selection of Evans' best on the Verve label which he recorded on for the majority of his career. Some of his individual Verve albums, unfortunately, can be a bit uneven (though a few are stunners), and this disc really gleans the very best from all of those albums. It also has a nice variety in terms of players and instruments. Though Evans is best known for his trio recordings, this album has everything from solo piano to Evans playing with Stan Getz. You won't be disappointed by any of the tracks on here. Highly recommended for anyone!

I'm not a frequent purchaser of compilations, but I am a diehard Bill Evans fan who sees real value in this compilation. Anyone who's immersed themselves in Evans' recordings for a number of years can guess what they'd expect to find on a "best of" compilation - a cut or two from the Sunday at the Village Vanguard recordings, something from Portrait, something from Explorations. However, those recordings are all absent here. What you get instead are all the right tunes to introduce someone to Bill Evans - like Beautiful Love, How Deep is The Ocean, and Who Can I Turn To - only taken from albums that not every Evans listener will be familiar with. The result is a disk that does its job as a sampler but also holds something for those who may own ten or more Evans albums already. For instance, Autumn Leaves, taken from the 1969 album "What's New", includes the introduction that did so much to set apart his early Autumn Leaves take on Portrait in Jazz, but is presented with a starkly different frenetic intensity, courtesy of a young, energetic Eddie Gomez, as well as a great contribution from flutist Jeremy Steig. All of the albums represented here are great albums - not obscure recordings since relegated to record company vaults - like many less worthwhile compilations. Yet, Verve also avoided all the recordings like Portrait in Jazz, which you can count on any Evans fan to have already worn thin. A very sage choice of tracks, and one compilation that I'm not sorry to have purchased.