Bill Evans, with melodic and unpredictable bass lines from LaFaro, and Motian, with his elastic sense of swing, broke the old 'solo plus accompaniment' structure and created a three-way dialogue that would influence generations to come. The first fruit of this partnership was 'Portrait in Jazz' (1960), an album that presented a trio concept as subtle as it was revolutionary. Evans would later form other memorable trios, but that first group remained an unparalleled milestone. The new 2025 release, 'Haunted Heart: The Legendary Riverside Studio Recordings', recovers the sessions from the two influential studio albums that Bill Evans recorded with Scott LaFaro and Paul Motian, one of the most admired formations in jazz history. The trio was born just a few months after Evans participated in Miles Davis's 'Kind of Blue' in 1959, and from the start, it proposed a new way of understanding interaction in a piano group. The innovation was not limited to the pianist's harmonic refinement—his rootless voicings, lyricism, and impressionistic touch—but to the constant conversation among the three musicians. Their versions of 'Witchcraft,' 'Come Rain or Come Shine,' and 'Someday My Prince Will Come' became definitive readings of the standard repertoire, already showing the almost telepathic level of interaction that would characterize the group. In 1961 came 'Explorations,' where the trio deepened this path with interpretations of immense poetic intensity, including a deeply romantic reading of 'Haunted Heart' and very personal reworkings of compositions linked to Miles Davis, such as 'Nardis' and 'Israel.' The new anthology rescues both albums and adds 26 alternative takes and outtakes, 17 of them previously unreleased. Beyond the fact that many of Evans's studio variations are often subtle, here there are unexpected moments, such as a version of 'Spring Is Here' with a longer improvised introduction, or the series of attempts at the ascending motif that opens 'Sweet and Lovely,' each one equally vertiginous and virtuosic. It is also revealing to see how much pre-design there was in the trio's interaction: listening to multiple takes of 'Witchcraft,' one can perceive how LaFaro developed similar counter-melodies with slight variations, evidence of the high level of collective cohesion they achieved. The death of LaFaro in a car accident in 1961 abruptly cut the formation's development short.
