Unsealed 006: Waltz for Debby

After a long recess, we're back, and this session we're doing it together with Unitra. We'll be listening to Bill Evans' Waltz for Debby.

Recorded live at the Village Vanguard on a single Sunday in June 1961 and released the following year, Waltz for Debby captures the Bill Evans Trio at the height of a rare, telepathic understanding. With Scott LaFaro's roaming, melodic bass and Paul Motian's brushed suggestions of time, the piano trio was quietly reinvented, no longer a soloist with accompaniment, but three voices in genuine conversation, threaded through with clinking glasses and the murmur of the room. Ten days after the recording, LaFaro died in a car accident, and the album became both a beginning and an elegy: lyrical, unhurried, and impossibly tender, its title waltz written for Evans' young niece.