Bill Evans Trio - Sunday At The Village Vanguard

"Bill Evans' recordings almost always received good to excellent sound, and the Analogue Productions reissues are no exception. While I don't own the original releases, the 45 rpm reissues clearly better, even after VTA adjustments, the later OJC reissues or the earlier 33 1/3 rpm Analogue Productions releases. The 45 rpm reissues are more musical and transparent; instruments have greater three-dimensionality and frequency extremes, especially lower octaves, exhibit greater resolution and impact. Get them before they're sold out!" Myles Astor, Positive-Feedback Online, Issue 34, www.positive-feeback.com

Sunday at the Village Vanguard is one of the most important piano trio albums in history and a desert-island choice among many musicians. It marks the final appearance of bassist Scott LaFaro with Evans and drummer Paul Motian. LaFaro demonstrated a concept of jazz bass playing here that shattered traditional limits to how interactive and contrapuntal a bass line could be without totally abandoning its supportive function. He also soloed with unparalleled imagination and technical facility. The album also showed how Evans had refined an approach to solo improvisation in which the pulse was not as obvious as it had been in swing and bop approaches. And his extraordinarily-high standards required that each improvised melodic idea be extensively developed, resulting in more continuity and pacing than was common to any previous modern style. The influence of what LaFaro and Evans laid out here was still being felt in the 1990s.