Bill Evans, Some Other Time: The Lost Sessions From The Black Forest (Resonance)
Producer Zev Feldman’s specialty is discovering previously unreleased music by major jazz artists. In
2013 when he visited Villengen, Germany, the home of the former MPS label, he hit the jackpot—recordings by pianist Bill Evans that had been kept under wraps since they were made in 1968. Evans, bassist Eddie Gomez and drummer Jack DeJohnette had recently triumphed at the Montreux Jazz Festival. In DeJohnette, Evans had a new drummer who was uniquely in tune with what album annotator Marc Myers calls the pianist’s “percussive poet†phase. By this time Gomez had been with Evans for two years. Compatibility verging on ESP is tangible in their duo performances, notably “It Could Happen to You.†But it’s the three-way conversations that pull the listener most deeply into the music. DeJohnette’s firm, understated percussive asides in this “new†album inspire some of Evans’s best playing.