Bill Evans’s Sunday, and the Last Conversation

June 25, 1961 fell on a Sunday. In the basement of the Village Vanguard, in Greenwich Village, Bill Evans and his trio played through several sets that day — afternoon into evening, one bleeding into the next. The room is a wedge, narrow as an attic turned sideways, and that same wedge shape would later get credited for the room’s acoustics, though nobody there that day was thinking about acoustics. A tape machine turned somewhere near the bar, with no ceremony attached to it. Nobody in the room knew they were listening to what would become one of the most studied recordings in jazz — it was just another Sunday shift.

The trio was three people: Evans at the piano, Scott LaFaro on double bass, Paul Motian on drums. Up to that point, the bass in a piano trio had been a clock — a walking pulse everything else stood on. LaFaro ignored the assignment. He played high up the neck, answering the piano in counterpoint, like a second speaker rather than someone holding the door open behind him. Listen to the tapes and you hear three instruments talking at once, nobody waiting their turn — to ears trained on the old arrangement, it must have sounded close to rude.

Ten days later, in the early hours of July 6, Scott LaFaro died in a car crash near Flint, New York. He was 25. A friend riding with him died too. The recording made a week and a half earlier turned, in that instant, into something it had not been on the Sunday it was made: no longer an ordinary night at the club, but the last conversation, one that would never be resumed.

After LaFaro’s death, Evans withdrew from public performance for several months. He later worked with other exceptional bassists, but this trio’s conversation could not sound the same. Not because the others played worse. A conversation depends on particular people, and one of them was gone.

The tapes from that single day were eventually split into two records: Sunday at the Village Vanguard, out later in 1961, and Waltz for Debby, which followed in early 1962. Producer Orrin Keepnews had more than enough material for two full albums, and reportedly built the first around the tracks where LaFaro’s playing came through clearest. Someone buying both records in a shop might not have noticed they were holding the same afternoon and evening, just split across two sleeves a year apart.

“Gloria’s Step.” “Jade Visions,” a LaFaro original he played that Sunday for the last time in his life. Both became repertoire generations of bass players later learned by ear — not because the notes are hard, but because the recording proved a bass could be an equal voice rather than a floor under someone else’s voice. After that, nobody could pretend not to have heard it.

The Village Vanguard is still there, same basement on Seventh Avenue, same wedge-shaped room, same acoustics. A trio plays there most weeks even now, and every bass player who dares answer the piano instead of just carrying it owes something to that one Sunday afternoon, whose ending nobody in the room could have guessed at the time.