Bill Evans, Jim Hall - Undercurrent
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CD Details
Artist: Bill Evans, Jim HallEdition: Music CD
Format: Original recording reissued, Original recording remastered
CD Release Date: 2002-07-16
Music Label: Blue Note Records
Soundtracks:
- My Funny Valentine
- I Hear A Rhapsody
- Dream Gypsy
- Romain
- Skating In Central Park
- Darn That Dream
- Stairway To The Stars
- I'm Getting Sentimental Over You
- My Funny Valentine (alternate take)
- Romain (alternate take)
Music reviews of Undercurrent
Music Review: Inventing (and perfecting) a Jazz Format
Rating: 5 Stars
While there is some precedent in early blues records for the piano/guitar format(Scrapper Blackwell and Leroy Carr come to mind), Bill Evans and Jim Hall are THE innovators for this instrumentation in jazz - their achievements on "Undercurrent" and "Intermodulation" established the standard by which subsequent piano/guitar sessions, including those of Joe Pass and Oscar Peterson ("a Salle Pleyel"); Joe Pass and Jimmy Rowles ("Checkmate"); Bill Frisell and Fred Hersch ("Songs We Know"); John Abercrombie and Andy LaVerne ("Timeless", "A Nice Idea", "Nosmo King"); and, in some tangential way, Cecil Taylor and Derek Bailey (On FMP's 1988 11 CD Cecil Taylor in Berlin release), are judged.
In their duet recordings, Evans and Hall first grappled successfully with some very tough issues that arise in piano/guitar duets - in this context, it can be very difficult to keep the instruments from stepping on each other's lines, but Evans and Hall each manage to carve out independent roles for themselves that each contribute to a very cohesive whole. To my ear, Evans is at the top of his game during these sessions, while Hall was only beginning to develop into the master that he is today (This is not to denigrate Hall's acheivement, but to point out that a great player then became substantially more accomplished over the next 40 years). From that perspective, these are Evans' sessions - his voicings, solos and accompaniments in these sessions outshine Hall's, and I can almost feel Evans accommodating some of Hall's less successful strategies. Still, the sum of their contributions is a beautiful, subtle mosaic of wonderful, meditative versions of standards.
It is instructive to compare the Evans/Hall sessions to some of the others mentioned above. Joe Pass and Jimmy Rowles come closest to duplicating the chemistry of the Evans/Hall sessions, except that Pass dominates "Checkmate" in the way that Evans dominates "Undercurrent". Pass and Peterson are almost too accomplished as soloists to cooperate on duets - their duets, which come after each plays a number of solo pieces, sound more like simultaneous solos that cooperative undertakings (although I can hear them smiling while they're playing). Frisell and Hersch create - what? sound tapestries? - that are not quite as experimental as the songs that Frisell was making with other bands at the time, but not quite as interesting, either - almost as if they were hampered by sticking to standards rather than playing in the genres they are most familiar with.
The most interesting comparison is to the Abercrombie/LaVerne recordings "Timeless" and "A Nice Idea". These sessions include a substantial number of the tunes that Evans and Hall recorded, but they are executed by musicians who are much later in their careers than Evans and especially Hall were at the time of the "Undercurrent" and "Intermodulation" sessions. Abercrombie applies a very modern harmonic system to the tunes, using scales and substitutions that were simply not used in the early 60's. While Hall used a standard Gibson hollowbody guitar that produced at easily recognizable tone, Abercrombie uses custom built guitars and sophisticated electronics to create a very distinctive, although much more synthetic, tone. On many of the Evans/Hall songs, Hall uses full chord strumming to accompany Evans - Abercrombie walks bass lines while simultaneously playing fills and chords to create a more textured context for LaVerne's solos. LaVerne, on the other hand, plays in a style that is very reminiscent of Evans throughout these discs - that's hardly a criticism, except that where Evans, Hall and Abercrombie are reaching new heights in the form, LaVerne is maintaining a very high quality status quo.
How to rate these albums? "Undercurrent" and "Intermodulation" get five stars for getting there first and remaining beautiful after all these years. "Checkmate", "a Salle Pleyel" and "Songs We Know" are wonderful, but do not acheive the level of innovation of the Evans/Hall sessions. And Abercrombie and LaVerne have, to my ear, pushed the envelope of mainstream piano/guitar duets even further, and get five stars for doing so.
As to Cecil Taylor and Derek Bailey - well, that's not really a standards disc, is it?
Description of Undercurrent
Duet albums were rare in 1962 and encounters of this quality are still rare. Bill Evans and Jim Hall, two modern jazz giants, were in peak creative form at the time, Evans leading his own trio and Hall working with Sonny Rollins's quartet at the time.These two masters challenge and complement each other brilliantly on a series of standards and jazz originals. Newly remixed and remastered in 24 bit, this new edition of Undercurrent, which contains two more tunes (tracks 7 & 8) and two alternate takes (tracks 9 & 10) added to the original United Artists album, sound exceptional.
If Bill Evans brought a kind of muted, ingeniously subtle body of innovations to jazz piano, then perhaps his only parallel in the realm of jazz guitar is Jim Hall. But for all their advances on their instruments, neither Evans nor Hall ever made themselves sound forbidding. And when they joined forces for this session, they sounded fantastically in-step and interwoven, with piano and jazz falling together into a pool of streaming improvisation on mostly slow-tempo pieces. Evans's sense of time and chord placement gets continual book-ends from Hall, who places his diaphanous strums in just the right places to not brook Evans's creative flow but rather to join in it and play almost alchemically. These are calm pieces, maybe too calm considering the constant turbulence in Evans's life. But the pair hit such a high mark with this recording that it reaches the intellect and the emotions at precisely the same instant. Quite a feat. --Andrew Bartlett
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