The needle finds Scott LaFaro’s bass first. On “Gloria’s Step” — the take that opens the album — LaFaro enters with a melodic figure that is not accompaniment. It is a statement. The bass does not walk. It sings. It leads. It interrupts the piano with melodic ideas of its own and then resolves them before Evans can respond. Evans responds anyway, adjusting his voicings to accommodate a bass player who has decided, in the opening seconds of a live recording, to reinvent what a bass does in a piano trio.

The Afternoon

June 25, 1961. A Sunday. The Village Vanguard at 178 Seventh Avenue South in Greenwich Village. The Village Vanguard on Seventh Avenue South in Greenwich Village. Riverside Records co-founder and producer Orrin Keepnews, who had been recording Evans since New Jazz Conceptions in 1956, brought recording equipment to capture the Bill Evans Trio across two sets. The afternoon session produced Sunday at the Village Vanguard. The evening session produced its companion album, Waltz for Debby. Between them, the two records contain approximately ninety minutes of music that changed how the piano trio was conceived, played, and recorded.

The Vanguard held — and still holds — roughly 125 people. The room is a basement wedge, narrow and deep, with the stage tucked into the far end. The acoustics are imperfect in ways that benefit intimate music. Evans, LaFaro, and Paul Motian played into that room with the attention and dynamic sensitivity of musicians who were aware that every detail would be audible.

What Evans Changed

Before this trio, the jazz piano trio was a hierarchy: the pianist led, the bassist walked, the drummer kept time. Evans dissolved the hierarchy. His conception was conversational — three equal voices in continuous dialogue, each free to lead, accompany, or withdraw at any moment. The effect was chamber music with the rhythmic vitality of jazz and the spontaneity of improvisation.

Evans’s own playing on the Vanguard recordings is marked by a harmonic sophistication rooted in the Romantic and Impressionist classical traditions he had studied. His voicings — the specific way he stacked notes within a chord — were denser and more chromatic than any jazz pianist before him. The left hand did not comp in the rhythmic, percussive style of bebop. It voiced chords as a composer would, with attention to the movement of inner voices from one chord to the next.

What LaFaro Changed

Scott LaFaro was twenty-five years old. He had been playing with Evans for roughly two years, and in that time he had fundamentally altered the role of the bass in small-group jazz. His technique — fast, melodic, played high on the fingerboard — allowed him to function as a second lead voice rather than a timekeeper. On “My Man’s Gone Now,” LaFaro plays a countermelody to Evans’s statement of the Gershwin theme that is so independent and so beautiful it constitutes a parallel composition.

The liberation of the bass had consequences that extended far beyond this trio. Every subsequent bassist who played melodically in a small-group context — from Eddie Gomez to Charlie Haden to Larry Grenadier — was working in a space that LaFaro opened.

What Motian Did

Paul Motian’s contribution is the easiest to understate and the hardest to replace. He did not play time in any conventional sense. His brushwork and cymbal work created a texture — a shifting, shimmering surface beneath the piano and bass — that provided rhythmic orientation without rhythmic constraint. The trio could float because Motian’s playing established pulse without enforcing it.

On “Solar,” Motian’s ride cymbal is the thread that holds together a performance in which Evans and LaFaro are moving in and out of alignment. When the three lock in — and they do, periodically, with a precision that is breathtaking — the effect is not of three people playing together but of three separate musical ideas arriving at the same place simultaneously.

Ten Days

Scott LaFaro was killed in a car accident near Geneva, New York, on July 6, 1961, eleven days after the Vanguard recordings were made. He was twenty-five. Evans did not perform publicly for months afterward. When he eventually returned to the trio format, it was with different bassists and a subtly different conception — the conversational equality remained, but the specific frequency of Evans and LaFaro’s communication could not be replicated.

The Vanguard recordings became, retroactively, a document of something that could only have happened once. The music does not sound like a farewell — it sounds like a beginning, like three musicians discovering in real time what their collaboration could become. The tragedy is that the discovery was complete. There was nothing left to find, and no time left to find it.

The Rating

A 5.0 rating is reserved for recordings that have become permanent — music that no longer needs to be argued for because it has already won every argument. Sunday at the Village Vanguard is the standard against which every subsequent piano trio recording has been measured, and none has displaced it. The recording is sixty-five years old. It sounds like it was made this morning, for an audience of 125 people who were lucky enough to be in the room.