Bill Evans never quite resolved the tension between intimacy and grandeur, and that was part of what made him so compelling. The trio was his natural habitat — that peculiar conversational democracy he developed with Scott LaFaro, the refined equilibrium of listening he maintained through all the personnel changes that followed LaFaro’s death in 1961 — and whenever he moved into orchestral territory, you could hear him negotiating, sometimes uneasily, between his instinct for interior exploration and the sheer mass of forces arrayed around him. This new disc from Pentatone takes that tension as its subject, and the result is more fascinating than it has any right to be.
Three composers. Three different approaches to the same problem: how do you honor Evans without simply impersonating him?
Palle Mikkelborg’s Bill Evans Suite is the historical discovery here, and it earns its revival. Mikkelborg — Danish, born 1941, best known internationally for Aura, his luminous tribute to Miles Davis that eventually won Davis a Grammy — created this work for a 1969 Danish television project, a collaboration between Evans’s working trio (Eddie Gomez on bass, Marty Morell on drums), the Danish Radio Big Band, and players from the Royal Danish Orchestra. The session was recorded in Copenhagen in November of that year, broadcast, and then effectively vanished for more than fifty years. That kind of institutional amnesia is infuriating and sadly familiar. What got lost, it turns out, was worth finding.
Mikkelborg writes for Evans’s idiom with genuine understanding, not reverence. The arrangements breathe. He doesn’t pile orchestral mass onto the piano’s characteristic voicings — those open, rootless chords with the melody floating somewhere unexpected — but instead lets the ensemble extend and refract what the trio is already doing. There’s a Scandinavian restraint at work, a preference for texture over gesture, that suits Evans’s music beautifully. The one original movement, “Treasures,” written for the occasion and apparently liked well enough by Evans that he conducted it himself, has the quality of a gift that fits.
Thomas Clausen’s For Pi is the newest piece on the disc, composed in 2023, and the hardest to evaluate fairly. Writing in Evans’s style is a perilous enterprise — the idiom is so distinctive, so tied to a particular emotional frequency, that imitation tends to collapse into either parody or pastiche. Clausen largely avoids both. He knows the harmonic language from the inside, which is not surprising: he has spent decades as one of Denmark’s most thoughtful jazz pianists. But “knowing the language” and “having something to say in it” are different achievements, and For Pi is more convincing as craft than as necessity. There are passages where the music simply is what it is — elegant, well-made, slightly anonymous. Still, that’s not nothing.
The centerpiece, and the disc’s most remarkable accomplishment, is Claus Ogerman’s Symbiosis. Ogerman — German-born, trained in classical composition, who spent much of his career doing orchestral work for pop and jazz recordings of sometimes staggering sophistication — recorded this piece with Evans in 1974, and the resulting album is one of the more radiant and underappreciated documents in Evans’s discography. The problem: the orchestral parts were never preserved. Every subsequent attempt to perform Symbiosis live has been blocked by that absence.
Until now. The reconstruction is a genuine scholarly achievement, and its success here is not incidental. Jean Thorel conducts the Singapore Symphony Orchestra with what sounds like close attention to Ogerman’s characteristic string writing — those long, slow-moving harmonies that seem to hang in the air just slightly longer than physics should allow. Ogerman understood the orchestra as atmosphere rather than argument, and the Singapore strings seem to have absorbed that. Anders Malta’s trumpet adds a further layer of color in the Mikkelborg work, used sparingly, which is exactly right.
The live disc, made at the Esplanade Concert Hall in Singapore in January 2023, is spacious without being cavernous. At 96kHz/24-bit the FLAC transfer gives you the room’s decay, the subtle creak of the hall settling — details that remind you this is a rendition, not a construction.
Is there anything to argue with? A few moments in the Clausen where the trio’s touch feels slightly cautious, as if playing for the occasion rather than through it. And one wishes, perhaps irrationally, that someone had thought to include the original Evans-Ogerman Symbiosis recording in a companion booklet essay, for direct comparison. The disc comes with notes that are informative but not quite probing enough.
Still — this is serious, generous, and genuinely illuminating work. Symbiosis finally heard live, Mikkelborg’s long-lost suite restored: these aren’t minor recoveries. They’re part of the ongoing project of understanding what Evans actually was, beyond the mythology of beautiful sadness that tends to obscure him. Highly recommended.
