Explorations

The time has come. We need to talk about Explorations.

I’m talking of course about the second of two studio albums Bill Evans made with Scott LaFaro and Paul Motian. Recorded in NYC, February 1961.

I’m gonna say some things you might not like. Some of them might be ugly things. (I have no idea why I’m attempting to quote Tony Soprano at a time like this. But your Uncle Richie was a rat.)

Umm, anyway, there’s a lot of lore around this one. Allegedly Bill begged to record in this studio because he liked the sound of the piano. (Implication being that he didn’t like the sound of the piano on Portrait In Jazz.)

The more prominent bit of lore, the one that everybody has heard, is that Bill was “suffering from headaches” on the day of recording, and that created some bad vibes. (Implication being that the young, brash, and apparently judgmental LaFaro was pissed that Evans was doing heroin.)  

My brother texted me the other day to say he’d been listening to this one all day and loving it. That got me thinking about the record, and thinking about it got me listening to it. Which leads us to right now.

Friday night. Beer: Mellotron by Hop Butcher. Fire: lit. Lights: mostly off.

The first thing I think of when I think of this record is “Nardis,” the near-mythological tune that Miles Davis wrote and (I guess) gave to Bill. If I’ve got my facts straight, Miles never recorded it.

The second thing I think of is “Elsa,” one of my favorite ballads ever. And then there’s “Israel.” So I count three very very good, very very significant Bill Evans tunes on this record. The rest of the tracks, if I’m being honest, kind of melt into one pretty but almost-too-subtle piano trio experience.

The “too-subtle” part comes down, in part, to recording and production, which is the other thing I think of when I think of this record. I find the sound—no, I find the experience of listening to this record—weirdly unsettling. It’s got this weird, muted, distant, subdued, narcotic (not in a good way) quality that I can never quite get past. One of my mantras lately when listening to records is to listen to the music, not the record, but this one makes that very hard.

The mix is, to my ears, well, odd. The drums are too quiet. LaFaro’s bass, allegedly a borrowed one cuz his good one was in the shop, sounds distant, and also EQ’d to sound too thick in the super low frequencies and not gritty enough in the low mids, kind of the way a lot of hip hop sounded in the early 90s before people figured out how to record and master it. One unfortunate effect is that if you’ve got modest speakers like I do, you can barely hear what the bass is doing.

I swear, you can hear the bad vibes in the room. You can hear that LaFaro is not really feeling it. You can hear that Motian is maybe kind of mailing it in. Even Evans, though he will always be Bill Evans, doesn’t do anything that really knocks my socks off.

Maybe Bill didn’t love the sound of the piano on Portrait, but at least he and the band sounded alive on that one.

It’s funny: Rudy Van Gelder famously recorded pianos kind of poorly, but sometimes I wonder if it was entirely deliberate. Not because he had something against pianos, but because if you make the piano a little less articulate than it might be, it leaves more room in the mix for the other instruments to shine. It leaves more room for the whole mix to shine, actually. Rudy treated piano like part of the rhythm section, for better and for worse. People might say Rudy’s pianos didn’t sound great, but no one says his records didn’t sound great.

I bring it up because one thought when hearing Explorations is, I sure wish The Notorious RVG could have recorded this one. And I wish LaFaro had had his real bass. And I wish Bill hadn’t “had a headache.”

This one should be a gem. Instead, for me at least, it’s a story of what could have been.

No matter, I’ve moved on to a little Bobby Hutch. Medina. Bizzaro Blue Note cover version.

It’s been a day. Nothing sounds quite right to me tonight. Maybe I’ll have another beer.