Sunday At The Village Vanguard

June 25, 1961, at the Village Vanguard in New York. Scott LaFaro — Bill Evans’s bassist, 25 years old — died in a car crash ten days after this recording, which makes it one of the last things he ever played. The recording was already extraordinary before that fact entered it; the knowledge just changes how you hear it, knowing that two musicians had invented a new way for bass and piano to converse and only one of them would remain.

Charnas places this record in a pianists’ sequence running from Art Tatum to Monk to Evans, and makes a separate argument about the micro-timing Evans and LaFaro were working with: the bass arguing with the piano rather than supporting it, displacing phrases slightly, sitting inside a pocket that isn’t the obvious one. That quality of rhythmic displacement connects to Dilla Time without a direct citation — the chain holds even without anyone consciously passing it along.