Billboard : 12/08/1962
Spotlight Album of the Week

Cannonball steps out of his usual sextet format for this date. Bill Evans is on piano and Connie Kay and Percy Heath from the Modern Jazz Quartet are on drums and bass. The material is distinctly melodic with Evans’ Waltz for Debby and Goodbye by Gordon Jenkins giving some clue. The playing by all the participants is first rate, with Venice by MJQ leader John Lewis an outstanding item.

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Hartford Courant
Jim Barrows : 01/20/1963

Adderley uses a rather tight embouchure on this small combo bit of jazz. It’s a particularly shining album for Bill Evans‘ trio, with Bill’s most fantastic piano work on Goodbye. Ball uses a light tone, quite appropriate with Evans’ group, for a pleasant Nancy and Who Cares?.

Expected a more jarring combination. This was a nice surprise. It plays extremely well even on reduced volume.

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High Fidelity
John S. Wilson : June, 1963

Adderley, on alto saxophone, joins forces here with pianist Bill Evans and half of the Modern Jazz Quartet – Percy Heath, bass, and Connie Kay, drums. Evans is the main beneficiary of this arrangement: he escapes the almost somnolent situations that often occur within his own trio. He is working with a strongly propulsive rhythm section and with a saxophonist who needs variety in tempos and moods to lend a semblance of change to his generally unaltering saxophone tone. And variety is created here – from sinewy and swinging settings to the reflective type of thing that Evans likes to do with his own group. Adderley’s glibness tends to detract from his playing at up-tempos, but when he can catch a mood, as he does on the Benny Goodman theme Goodbye, he is unusually effective. And Heath and Kay provide an incomparably flowing foundation.

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Rapid City Journal
George T. Simon : 12/23/1962

…On one of these, Cannonball Adderley blends his pungent alto sax with the delicate, yet propulsive piano of Bill Evans on a Riverside album called Know What I Mean.

The especially intriguing aspect of this record is not merely the affinity that Adderley, who at some times sounds like a modern Pete Brown, and Evans have for each other’s playing, but the remarkable rapport they establish with one-half of the Modern Jazz Quartet, bassist Percy Heath and drummer Connie Kay. These two, usually restricted by delicate, precise style that permeates most of the MJQ’s efforts, turn out to be a couple of romping musicians, with Kay bearing out another contention Bellson made, that a light, controlled, swinging drum touch can be far more effective than the confusing, hard-sounding barrage employed by so many of today’s young nonthinkers.

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Down Beat : 01/31/1963
John S. Wilson : 3.5 stars
Reviewed along with Bill Evans – Moonbeams (3.5 stars)

Evans’ brooding, mulling approach to his piano solos marks him as one of the rare romanticists in latter-day jazz. Playing with his trio, he seems able to shut himself off from the world around him and to move into a twilit haven where he can drift along in what seems to be a semicomatose state as he fingers his way through long, contemplative passages. His tendency to play almost everything in the all-ballad Moonbeams album at a very slow tempo, however, tends to communicate this comatoseness to the listener. Occasionally he builds moments of spell-breaking tension, supplemented by a rising show of power by Israels (he does it on Stairway and Early).

A broader view of Evans is offered on the Adderley disc, for here he is thrown into a greater variety of tempos and the counterbalancing voice of Adderley’s alto is present to break the pall of sound that Evans can spread with his own trio.

Heath and Kay also make themselves strongly felt in this set by providing a foundation that has such a strong rhythmic flow that Evans is driven to displays of greater vitality than he shows on his trio disc.

Much of Adderley’s playing is glib and facile but along with some flat, uninflected solos are passages in which he projects a sense of involvement that he obtains both in the darkly moody Goodbye and in bright perky fashion on Toy.

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Liner Notes by Joe Goldberg

Depending on the nature of the person involved, success either dictates more and more compulsive activity, or else it permits relaxation. With Cannonball Adderley, the latter certainly appears to be the case; and this album can, among other things, serve as a testimonial to the truth of this impression.

Adderley is undeniably a successful, widely-acclaimed artist, and it may seem to some that his success came quickly. But it is more in the nature of what one nightclub comic once referred to bitterly as “my overnight success alter fifteen years.” To recap briefly, Cannonball came up to New York in the mid-’50s with a thorough background as a player and teacher in Florida, and soon found himself lauded, recorded, and a working bandleader. Being an altoist. he also found himself burdened with the tag “the new Bird” (jazz writers being second only to sportswriters in attaching to players designations that might not do them any good). Subsequently (and, he now feels, inevitably) his band foundered; thereafter he joined Miles Davis, and people really began to sit up and take notice. He left Miles to re-form his own group, which of course did establish Adderley as a full-fledged success. And that brings us to the present. For, once established, Cannon has remained that way, and has continued to pick up poll awards and capacity crowds almost as regularly as Willie Mays picks off long fly balls.

In a peculiar way, the present album is a result of that success. For it is something that Adderley might well not have dared attempt in the past, and that he might not have been able to convince a record company to do. It happens that I find this his most satisfying LP, but that is a purely subjective evaluation and might not even be acceptable as proof that musicians should be allowed to make the kind of records they really want to.

The nature of this album should be immediately apparent from Adderley’s choice of associates. Cannonball feels, and many agree, that pianist Bill Evans is unexcelled when moody delicacy is called for; Miles Davis, who once had both men in his band, agreed to such an extent that his repertoire changed appreciably during Evans’ tenure. And the presence of Evans need not limit moods or tempos, for as Cannonball is well aware, the pianist tends to display more pulsing strength behind a horn than with his own trio.

Cannonball’s own group evidences the importance he places on rhythm, and he has been equally astute in his choices for this date. Of course these two men have long played together constantly, but that is far from the only reason, or even the main one, for the inclusion of bassist Percy Heath and drummer Connie Kay. With the Modern Jazz Quartet, they are regularly called upon to play the most subtle and difficult music. As one consequence of this, they can provide the most powerful rhythm pulses at an often infinitesimal level of volume. Add to all this the element of spontaneity that inevitably comes with their playing unfamiliar music in a fresh setting, and you have an almost perfect situation.

The union exposes unexpected facets of all four men, but primarily it reveals a a different and possibly unfamiliar side of Julian Adderley. It would he unkind to affix a new label to him after he has finally rid himself of that old Parker-linked one, but it is difficult to resist calling him “the new Benny Carter“: there is a basically Carter-esque approach to ballads, but one that is fully cognizant of all that has taken place since Carter first made his great reputation. It sings, it is light, it is airy – and it is still very much Cannonball.

Then, of course, there is the material. Two pieces, chosen by Evans, are selections he is especially familiar with and fond of playing. One is his own Waltz for Debby, which first appeared some years ago in a brief solo version on Bill’s initial Riverside album, New Jazz Conceptions and most recently reappeared as the title tune of an LP recorded by his trio at the Village Vanguard. Here it undergoes further alteration with the addition of Cannonball’s summery horn. The other piece, Elsa, by Evans’ friend Earl Zindars, is surely one of the most pensively lovely of all jazz waltzes. It was also previously recorded by Bill (in the album Explorations) and here, by the absence of one note, Evans shows how his feeling about the number has now changed.

Clifford Jordan’s Toy is a by-product of Adderley’s sometime capacity as an A&R man, having appeared on an album by Jordan that he produced for Riverside. Cannon plays it with one astonishing nod in the direction of Ornette Coleman, as well as a brief reference to John Lewis’ Golden Striker. The latter was part of the score for the film “No Sun in Venice,” which also included Venice, a number that is atypical of Lewis in that it is very close to the popular song form. Adderley plays it here with an unusual and affecting sotto voce dancing quality.

Possibly the poignant sadness of Gordon Jenkins’ Goodbye (originally Benny Goodman’s sign-off theme) has led most jazzmen to shy away from it, but that same quality serves quite well in an album such as this one, where emotion is clearly not something to be feared. Jazz versions of Nancy (for a long time almost the exclusive property of Frank Sinatra) are similarly rare, but its pensiveness is perfectly suited to the talents of Adderley and Evans, as they eloquently demonstrate.

Who Cares? is the most overt rocker of the set, and on Evans’ solo evokes a startling reminiscence of the light dancing quality that was one of the chief delights of the Miles Davis band in its Garland–Chambers–Philly Joe period. Know What I Mean? was created in the recording studio by Evans, at Adderley’s special request. Its modal style suggests the days when he and Bill were with Miles, and its title derives from a phrase Cannon is fond of using. The question is one for which you should have an affirmative answer long before reaching its closing spot on the LP.

Not all of these selections are ballads, by any means, but the whole album is filled with the aura of relaxation we began by mentioning. Ordinarily, this would get to be referred to rather tritely as an “after-hours” mood, but in this instance it can he recognized as simply a matter of four highly skilled artists away from their usual tasks and delighting in one another’s musical company. Nothing more really need he said about the results of their meeting than that the feeling of delight comes through.