This extraordinary recital, in which Thibaudet brings his technical mastery and fine musicianship to music which has only lately been the subject of intense study by the best jazz musicians of the current generation, brings a convincing argument for the aesthetic validity of the interpreter’s role in music. As the detailed and intelligent booklet-notes by Jed Distler point out, Bill Evans’s compositions often utilize a harmonic and rhythmic language in part derived from French and English composers such as Ravel, Debussy and Delius. His phraseology and the general intellectual argument of the music therefore makes a recital such as this an imaginative, risky but not foolhardy project.
What is extraordinary is the way in which Thibaudet has reached a perfect understanding of the rhythmic subtleties of Evans’s phrasings and cadences, while perfectly preserving the architecture of the composer’s structures. This is not just a case of playing the transcriptions, brilliantly realized by Jed Distler, Art Murphy, Jim Aitken and Bob Bauer, but of infusing them with the breath of artistic life in judging so precisely the pace, dynamics and emotional fluctuations implied by the written music. Evans himself was the most subtle of pianists, possessing an incredible sensitivity of touch and a handsome technique, but Thibaudet matches him here in tonal control and excels him in execution. This is perhaps being unfair to Evans, who was often playing difficult passages in the heat of the improvised moment, but it is still a revelation to hear Thibaudet, for example, in the improvised section of Turn Out The Stars, transcribed from the premiere of the work, first heard as one section of a suite played live in memory of Evans’s father at New York Town Hall in 1966. Thibaudet smooths out the hesitancies of Evans’s own playing and brings a wonderful balance and certainty to the work without robbing it of any of its emotional depth.
Other pieces are less remarkable, and the inclusion of Duke Ellington’s Reflections in D (a theme not strongly associated with Evans but very close to Ellington) instead of other Evans classics such as Blue in Green or N.Y.C.’s No Lark, or a treatment of Scott LeFaro’s Jade Visions, seems an odd decision. That N.Y.C.’s No Lark, a formidable challenge, could have been successfully negotiated is proven by Thibaudet’s success with the exacting complexities and hidden beauties of Love theme from “Spartacus”, a transcription from the ground-breaking 1963 Evans album “Conversations With Myself” where the pianist used multitrack facilities to build up no less than three simultaneous piano tracks on a range of themes, some his own, some from the pens of others. Thibaudet himself, both here and on Song For Helen, adds an overdubbed piano track to reproduce the intricacies of Evans’s musical thought. And while Jed Distler’s transcription of Spartacus dispenses with the improvisation (which is cast in ‘jazz time’) and half of the almost dizzyingly heady three-way interweaving of the final theme restatement, Thibaudet’s rendering of the one Liszt-like melodic arabesque Distler allows is breathtaking.
This disc is no idle fancy, no indulgent nod towards an art-form perceived as essentially frivolous, but a genuine reappraisal of serious music which can only illuminate the integrity of all concerned. I await a second volume of these adventures with keen anticipation.'