Thread by @davereaboi

This is a brilliant outtake of a blues from sessions for Bill Evans’ first LP. That record sold merely 800 copies in 1956, the first year of its release. Take 2 was finally released later on this album, which has a groovy cover.

Another outtake, this one a solo reading of “Some Other Time.”

Listening to it today, it just sounds gorgeous and glistening—but it’s incredible how outside the jazz piano mainstream this was in 1958.

For years, I’ve been meaning to write something on my attempts to listen to music in (for lack of better terminology) a “non-historicist” way—trying to approximate 1958 ears when listening to a recording from that year.

Unless you force yourself, I think all listening is mostly historicist, meaning you bring your 2019 ears to old music, almost forcing it to (unfairly) address expectations you have based on later music.

I think it’s so much more interesting to try and figure out, to the best you can, what a contemporary listener would’ve heard in an old recording.

Unfortunately, I’m not sure it’s something you can really teach; you’ve got to be very familiar with a ton of old records, and have given a lot of attention to them.

It’s even more difficult with people like Bill Evans, whose playing has come to define the vocabulary of jazz piano.

Sometimes the bigger influence a musician is on other players, the harder it is to truly appreciate their revolutionary innovations.