Billboard : 03/10/1962
Spotlight Album of the Week

This is one of the most satisfying of the Bill Evans Trio albums to date. It shows off the romantic side of Evans’ piano style, with warm and meaningful performances of standards and originals. It also spotlights the late bassist Scott LaFaro, who also has some excellent solos here. The drummer is Paul Motian. Set was waxed at the Village Vanguard at the same session that produced the trio’s previous album, Sunday at the Village Vanguard. Tunes include Evans’ own Waltz for Debby, My Foolish Heart and My Romance.

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High Fidelity
John S. Wilson : June, 1962

Evans is a pianist whose fragile, almost wistful style seemingly could be blown apart by the least disturbance. His six solos on this disc (recorded at the Village Vanguard before an audience that must have been eating voraciously, if one can judge by the crashing of chinaware in the background) are laid out in careful, deliberate fashion with the melody always strongly in evidence. Yet for all their quietness and lack of superficial flash, there is an underlying tension in these pieces that prevents one from either accepting them in a completely relaxed manner or from being really stimulated by them. Evans seems to feel closed in, and to be searching for an open, fresh approach while he plays himself into tight, tense situations.

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Saturday Review
Mait Edey : 04/14/1962

I’m of two minds about this record. On the one hand, it reflects Evans‘ ever-increasing preoccupation with a kind of dreamy, pastel impressionism, a use of harmony which is sophisticated but rather narrow in scope. The details can be fascinating, but the surface rarely changes. On the other hand, the musicianship is quite extraordinary, and Evans’ intentions are beautifully realized. The emphasis is on ballads at slow and medium tempos. They will supply some people with deceptively easy background music, but for serious listening are best taken in small, reflective doses. The depth of sympathy between Evans and the late Scott LaFaro (this will unfortunately be among the last of his records to be issued) is wonderful to hear.

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Springfield Republican
Gerald M. Healy : 04/01/1962

Bill Evans is perhaps one of the great piano players of the day because of his sincere, soulful manner of expression. He has a touch which few pianists have. A listener can very easily gather the impression that Evans is playing just for you.

Waltz for Debby is just that. It’s easy listening, recorded at the Village Vanguard with Paul Motian and the late Scott LaFaro on bass. It was taped just before LaFaro’s death last summer.

New meaning is given to My Foolish Heart, his own Waltz for Debby, Detour Ahead, My Romance, Some Other Time, and Milestones. Oftentimes throughout this recording Evans sounds very much like Teddy Wilson.

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Down Beat : 04/26/1962
Leonard G. Feather : 4 stars

The tender, gentle side of Evans, representing what is probably the most essential aspect of his fresh and endearing style, is predominantly represented here. Even the up tempos somehow achieve the ambiance of a ballad. This does not mean that Evans fails to swing but rather that his extraordinary grace informs everything he does.

As in previous albums, there are extended examinations of songs that, in lesser hands, might not seem worth such treatment. Yet, as the lucid and sensitive Joe Goldberg liner notes point out, there is much more to a track like My Foolish Heart than the superior cocktail or background music it might seem to be at a first superficial hearing.

Evans’ most valuable gift is his amazing harmonic sense, conveyed through subtle uses of inner voices, and concepts that are as interesting horizontally or vertically. This is especially notable in Detour Ahead and My Romance. The latter, like Debby, is a new version of a work played in Evans’ first LP, in 1956.

The Miles Davis Milestones is the most meaningful track from the rhythmic standpoint. The trio here – and, for that matter, at most points throughout the album – is a deftly integrated unit.

LaFaro is fantastic. His solos are among the LP’s most impressive moments. Yet despite the cohesion among the three men, one cannot help sensing that there are times when LaFaro is on his own; when, if he is listening to Evans, he at least doesn’t give that impression. Part of this results from his light sound, all highs, and often in the upper reaches of the instrument. It is almost as if he were a solo voice, a cellist, in effect, and a bass player could have been added to give bottom to the group.

The set was recorded, like one of Evans’ best previous albums, at the Village Vanguard. I don’t know what that meant to Evans – possibly he is one of those artists who needs the stimulation of a club crowd – but to me it only means that somebody who had an irritating cough that day should have stayed home.

Motian is his usual tasteful, discreet self throughout. In all, a superior if not quite superlative Evans effort.

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Liner Notes by Joe Goldberg

This is the fourth album to be released by the Bill Evans Trio composed of Evans, bassist Scott LaFaro, and drummer Paul Motian. The unit was one of the most inventive and consistently satisfying of the last few years, and it is a great loss that with LaFaro’s death (in the early summer of 1961) there can be no more from this specific group. But this is a peculiarly fitting set with which to conclude the series. It is the equal of any of their other albums, and has moments which are, I feel, superior to any of them. It is a performance before a live audience, which is a more accurate picture of any group’s work than a studio recording. And, finally, it contains selections that Evans had played and recorded before LaFaro joined him, so that it can serve as the most accurate index of the bassist’s great contribution to the trio.

This is a further collection of material recorded at the same in-person-session that resulted in the trio’s previously-issued LP, Sunday at the Village Vanguard. But it is in no sense a gathering of scraps from the cutting-room floor. For the earlier compilation, assembled shortly after LaFaro’s death, was not designed as a selection of the day’s “best” work, but instead tended — through Evans’ choice — to feature LaFaro’s solos and compositions. Nor does that mean that there is not some brilliant work by the bassist on the present record. All it means, if anything, is that this album is perhaps more representative of the overall repertoire of the group than was the preceding one, assembled with a special purpose in mind.

I find this a fascinating album in several respects. One of the most intriguing certainly is the way in which it demonstrates how Evans, who came to prominence largely through solos played or recorded with such men as Miles Davis and George Russell, abandons, to a great extent, the muscular rhythmic excellence of such performances when he is leading his own trio, and gives expression to the more romantic side of his nature. He reveals himself as an Impressionist; and the man who wrote the brief and lovely Epilogue (included in the album Everybody Digs Bill Evans) must have been influenced by the English pastoral composers. In some respects, Evans shares identity with the Modern Jazz Quartet: both groups could probably play all night long, and a drunken listener would never know that he had heard anything more than quiet, pleasant cocktail music.

A word about LaFaro: at his death, he was one of the supreme jazz bassists. Those very few men who have done anything to change the conception of the bass have seemed to consider it as some other instrument. The Blanton–Ellington duets (which are in some ways the spiritual progenitors of these recordings) achieved much of their effect through Blanton’s bowed passages, which sounded like violin or cello work. The work of LaFaro (which at one time stemmed quite directly from Charles Mingus) often sounds as though he were playing a large guitar; one solo he has recorded is astonishingly like Django Reinhardt. Like Mingus, LaFaro’s ideas could only be played by a virtuoso; also like Mingus, the virtuosity is never more than a tool to convey the idea. But they are exclusively virtuoso lines, requiring complete technical mastery to execute. Aside from the guitar conception, there is a much more basic advance which LaFaro (and other bassists such as Wilbur Ware and Charlie Haden) are helping to initiate: prior to them, most bassists were so steeped in their roles as timekeepers that, during their solos, they would simply continue to keep time, only with a more. interesting choice of notes. LaFaro had completely freed himself from that constriction, and it undoubtedly took a sensitive, unobtrusive drummer like Paul Motian to help him do it.

About the material: two of these pieces, Waltz for Debby and My Romance, were recorded in 1956, on Evans’ first LP, New Jazz Conceptions. In that incarnation, though, they were short unaccompanied piano sketches, lasting only a little more than a minute each. It is interesting indeed that both have remained in Bill’s personal repertoire all this time, developing into these full-bodied versions.

My Foolish Heart is another of those neglected ballads which Evans revives from time to time. I must take exception to those who say that in doing so he’ is re-working “trivia and banality,” for I find that the tunes he chooses to play often have lovely, if sentimental, melodic lines. Detour Ahead was written by musicians Lou Carter, Herb Ellis, and John Frigo, who called themselves the Soft Winds, and was first and most poignantly sung by Billie Holiday.

The altered harmonic pattern with which Bill and Scott begin Leonard Bernstein‘s Some Other Time will be instantly familiar to many Evans followers. He first planned to record this tune in 1958, for the “Everybody Digs . . .” album, which contains another Bernstein song from “On The Town”, Lucky To Be Me. But at that time he became so involved with one figure he created for it that he expanded that into a free improvisation — Peace Piece — which has become perhaps his best known work. Here, three years later, is the germ of that idea, and there is, I think, a general similarity in improvisational approach, although it should be noted that Peace Piece was not an “original” based on the Bernstein chords.

The final track is Miles Davis‘ Milestones. Those who recall the original recording by the composer, with its use of scales, its crisp, staccato attack, and the sharp, accenting Philly Joe Jones rim shots, will know that it is one of the most influential recordings of the last few years. That record was made before Evans had ever played with Miles, and the way Bill plays the tune — legato, and with a different sense of time — can to a degree be considered a capsule definition of the differences in approach between the two men. But it also points up the fact that theirs are by no means opposed approaches. Bill unquestionably gained much from his period with Davis. And those elements that stand as uniquely Evans’ in this version of Milestones might well be the sort of things Miles referred to when he once said: “I sure learned a lot from Bill Evans.”