Waltz for Debby

Waltz for Debby does not begin with its title composition. My Foolish Heart introduces the trio first, and the eventual closing performance is Milestones. That sequence matters: an album often approached through its tenderness also makes room for a different kind of momentum. Bill Evans, Scott LaFaro and Paul Motian are not confined to the atmosphere established by the first track.

The performances were recorded at New York’s Village Vanguard on June 25, 1961; the original album appeared in 1962. Its six selections complement Sunday at the Village Vanguard, but the two original programmes together do not contain the day’s five complete sets. Here the six-track 2023 Craft remaster preserves the original album’s choices, rather than appending the alternate performances found on expanded editions.

One original among other writers’ songs

The title piece is Evans’s own composition, already recorded on New Jazz Conceptions in 1956 and dedicated to his niece. The other five pieces come from other writers. Victor Young, Richard Rodgers, Leonard Bernstein and Miles Davis supply different kinds of material, yet the same trio gives the selection a coherent identity. An individual musical language need not depend on filling an album entirely with original compositions.

A familiar melody can open outward

The title performance approaches seven minutes, while Detour Ahead and My Romance both exceed that length. A modest title or a recognizable tune does not prescribe the scale of an improvisation. Remembering the melody provides a reference against which the piano’s extensions and the bass’s different directions can register. The rhythm instruments are participants in that expansion, not simply a quiet frame around a piano miniature.

Preserving the last turn

Some Other Time precedes Milestones, so the programme does not close by endlessly maintaining its opening mood. Hearing that final turn before adding alternate takes makes the album’s own shape clearer. Likewise, incidental club noise cannot establish what particular audience members thought about the music. The more useful evidence is the sequence of performances itself: six choices that reveal several forms of movement within the same three-person group.