More Bill Evans
This is a unique jazz album (in my experience, anyway) with very good sound. Piano with harmonica accompaniment is something I’ve never heard before, and most of the time it actually works. Both of these guys are top flight musicians, and their ability to communicate in order to create this wonderful improvisational jazz is a joy to experience.
Side Two
White Hot — nothing could touch it. The sound is especially lively and clear, with highly resolving sound that lets you hear all the nuances and harmonics of every instrument.
Exceptionally open and spacious. Love that studio!
Side One
Nearly as good in every way, perhaps falling short a bit in the realm of resolution, but clearly superior to almost every other copy we played.
30th Street Studio
CBS 30th Street Studio was considered by some in the music industry to be the best sounding room in its time and others consider it to have been the greatest recording studio in history. A large number of recordings were made there in all genres, including Miles Davis’ Kind of Blue (1959), Leonard Bernstein’s West Side Story (Original Broadway Cast recording, 1957), and Pink Floyd’s The Wall (1979).
Jazz trumpeter Miles Davis recorded almost exclusively at the 30th Street Studio during his years under contract to Columbia, including his album Kind of Blue (1959). Other noteworthy jazz musicians having recorded in this place: Duke Ellington, Dizzy Gillespie, Thelonious Monk, Dave Brubeck.
Having been a church for many years, it had been abandoned and empty for sometime, and in 1949 it was transformed into a recording studio by Columbia Records.
“There was one big room, and no other place in which to record”, wrote John Marks in an article in Stereophile magazine in 2002.
The recording studio had 100 foot high ceilings, a 100 foot floorspace for the recording area, and the control room was on the second floor being only 8 by 14 feet. Later, the control room was moved down to the ground floor.
“It was huge and the room sound was incredible,” recalls Jim Reeves, a sound technician who had worked in it. “I was inspired,” he continues “by the fact that, aside from the artistry, how clean the audio system was.”
Wikipedia
TRACK LISTING
Side One
I Do It for Your Love
Sno’ Peas
This Is All I Ask
Days of Wine and Roses
Side Two
Jesus’ Last Ballad
Tomato Kiss
The Other Side of Midnight
Blue in Green
Body and Soul
AMG Review
Pianist Bill Evans (who doubles on electric piano on this album for the final time in the recording studio) welcomes guest harmonica player Toots Thielemans and Larry Schneider (on tenor, soprano and alto flute) to an outing with bassist Marc Johnson (making his recording debut with Evans) and drummer Eliot Zigmund.
The material contains some surprises (including Paul Simon’s “I Do It for Your Love” and Michel Legrand’s “The Other Side of Tonight”) and only two jazz standards (“Body & Soul” and “Blue and Green”) with the latter being the only Evans composition.
Excellent if not essential music that Evans generally uplifts.