I didn’t realize how much I had come to love Bill Evans’s music until I found that I was listening to this CD on repeat almost daily. This is such a superb album that it could easily work its way onto my lifetime top 10.
How My Heart Sings! was recorded during three days of sessions that took place in May and June of 1962. They were the first sessions for Evans’s new trio, in which bassist Chuck Israels took the place of Scott Lofaro, who died in an auto accident in 1961. The great Paul Motian, who died in 2011, played drums in both versions of the trio, which is now acknowledged to have radically redefined the conception of how a jazz piano trio operated. The producer at these sessions, as for all of this batch of Riverside reissues, was Orrin Keepnews. He had the ensemble work on a planned selection of ballads and uptempo “swinging” numbers, then extracted the ballads for the album Moonbeams which was released first. The remainder went on this album.
All of the selections feature Evans’s unique approach to harmony that, combined with the mildly swinging rhythms provided by Motian’s sticks-n-brushes and Israels’ dynamic bass work, does indeed make the music “sing” – thus the choice of Earl Zindars’ song as the first track and the album title. It is such a joyous piece that it’s hard to believe that Evans was just barely emerging from nearly a year of depression and mourning for his friend Lofaro. And it plays the neat trick – which becomes something of a theme on this album – of putting a straight-time bridge in the middle of a waltz. Evans’s own composition at track six, “34 Skidoo,” echoes that trick in an even more sprightly tune whose title is a joking reference to a well-known catch-phrase of the Roaring ’20s. Israels plays a lengthy and melodic solo on the original album version; an alternate, Take 9, is one of three bonus tracks on this CD along with alternate takes of Dave Brubeck’s “In Your Own Sweet Way” and Cole Porter’s “Ev’rything I Love.” The bass solo on Take 9 is more cerebral and less casual, as is Evans’s playing.
Israels also vamps a nice intro to the Gershwin standard “Summertime,” which Evans and group reset as an upbeat blues, sterling interplay among all three throughout. Another standard, “I Should Care,” gets a sweetly wistful, swinging treatment. Evans’s gentle parody “Show-Type Tune” isn’t what I’d call a high point, but it brings a smile and shows a real sense of playfulness. And Evans’s playing on this one really swings and sings, a perfect example of his signature way of stretching and playing around the rhythm. Oh, and both takes here of “In Your Own Sweet Way” brilliantly demonstrate how much Evans swung and Brubeck – sometimes, at least – did not.
If you’re familiar with Evans mostly through his playing on Miles Davis’s Kind of Blue and on more pensive recordings like this album’s companion piece Moonbeams, you owe it to yourself to check out How My Heart Sings! Your heart will, too. Part of a set of 60th Anniversary reissues by Orrin Keepnews and Riverside.
(Riverside, 1962/2013)
