Piano- Bill Evans
Bass-Chuck Israels
Drums- Larry Bunker

My Foolish Heart
Israel

Piano- Bill Evans
Alto Sax- Lee Konitz
Bass-Niels-Henning Ørsted Pedersen
Drums- Alan Dawson

Detour Ahead
My Melancholy Baby

Piano- Bill Evans
Bass-Eddie Gomez
Drums- Marty Morrell

Emily
Alfie
Someday My Prince Will Come

Piano- Bill Evans
Bass-Eddie Gomez
Drums- Marty Morrell

If You Could See Me Now
’Round Midnight
Someday My Prince Will Come
Sleepin’ Bee
You’re Gonna Hear From Me
Re: Person I Knew

Piano- Bill Evans
Bass-Eddie Gomez
Drums- Eliot Zigmund

Sareen Jurer
Blue Serge
Up With The Lark
But Beautiful
Twelve Tone Tune Two

24-page booklet

Liner Notes by Robert Doerschuk
Foreword by Maxine Evans
New Interview with Chuck Israels
Cover photo by Jan Persson
Booklet photos by Jan Persson, Lee Tanner, David Redfern, Ray Avery
Memorabilia collage
Total time: 99 minutes

Sample of Foreword:

It’s funny the things you remember when you look back at your childhood. As far as I was concerned our life was normal growing up. I knew from early on that my Dad was a musician and my Mom was a housewife. They traveled together a lot before my brother Evan was born. I got postcards from all over the world. (I stayed with my grandparents while they were away.)

There was always music in the house, but not from the radio. Going to the Village Vanguard to hear my Dad play into the early hours of the morning seemed normal for me even though I was probably only eight years old and I just knew that I was going to get a Shirley Temple. Other things were normal to me as well—going to the track (Dad loved the trotters), baseball games, and having several musicians jamming at our house. I remember going to the Mike Douglas Show in Pennsylvania. We rode there from New York in a limo with Tony Bennett. Normal stuff for an 11-year-old. Dad always came to my school choir recitals. When we drove places he used to test me by playing classical music on the car radio and asking me to pick out the individual instruments. I still try and pick out instruments when I hear classical music.

—Maxine Evans

Sample Liner Notes by Robert Doerschuk:

Enough time has passed since the death of Bill Evans that most of us who have been touched by his music have never had the privilege of watching him perform. This is not to say that experiencing him solely through recordings cannot change the modern listener’s life. Sound is, of course, the essential component to this art, and one can argue further that adding the visual component can compromise as much as complement its appreciation.

It doesn’t follow, though, that images distract inevitably from the challenge and pleasure of developing a deeper insight into performance. This is particularly true, I believe, in classical music and jazz, though for somewhat different reasons. Examples abound, online and on disc, of classical masters in communion with a written composition. The most memorable of these aren’t about fireworks; technique, in the hands of a great instrumentalist, isn’t the focus of a performance but rather a tool to employ in achieving something more ephemeral and enduring. (As broadcast on television shortly after its recording in 1986, a reading of Schumann’s “Träumerei” by Vladimir Horowitz, played as an encore at his Moscow recital, makes this especially clear.)

Jazz is about communion as well, although its target is not the composition so much as the player’s efforts to find insights into it. Important as the tune can be, the essence of jazz is how that theme is treated. This approach is taken in much of classical composition, too; in jazz improvisation, though, the clock is ticking and the drama ensues as musicians test their abilities to do in real time what composers can do at their leisure. It is, arguably, more centered on the self than in classical music, where the best players are those who most successfully interpret the composer’s intentions. But in that sense, it is more analogous to life and the decisions we make on the spot to get through our days as best we can.
Evans is an ideal subject to examine with this in mind. From the first impressions he made in New York during the mid-1950s as a young player, he displayed an unusual musical literacy. He read music fluently, at the level of a concert virtuoso, and he was already integrating elements of Debussy, Milhaud, Stravinsky and other modern composers into his working vocabulary. He took a gig in 1956 with an ensemble led by the innovative composer George Russell and made his recording debut as a leader that same year with New Jazz Conceptions. The lineup on that album was as prophetic as the title in that it presented Evans in his favorite setting—a trio. His ascendance was completed in 1958 when Miles Davis invited him to join the group that would cut the historic Kind Of Blue session.

...

Sweden, 1964
Those same hands, more slender, fill the opening shot, its fingers straight and stretched on the keyboard. The camera pulls back, and we see the young pianist, looking down and slightly to the right. As “My Foolish Heart” begins, his head dips lower, his face expressionless or obscured by shadow. Similarly, Chuck Israels leans into his bass, while Larry Bunker sits more erect, whisking his brushes against the snare, suggesting texture more than spelling out the meter.

The music is hushed. Each participant seems to play in a private sphere, yet they are clearly and acutely aware of what the others are doing.

The piece ends, the group sits quietly, and then Evans conducts a silent measure with his left hand. On cue, they jump into the Johnny Carisi tune “Israel.” But even at this quicker clip, the minor modality and the tenor of their playing draw from deep wells of emotion. Evans takes the first chorus, maintaining his hooked posture, but now the camera finds his face and exposes a different kind of concentration, with a grimace that suggests the pain of using the rhythm to push his explorations forward. The camera does an extraordinary job of recording the fluidity in the playing of both Israels and Bunker during an extended section of trading eight-bar solos, with Evans sitting out.

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