On the steam-rolling ‘S.O.S.’ Johnny Griffin and Wes Montgomery share front-line duties and sparks fly. Chambers, who is captured here with great fidelity, takes the opening solo on ‘Cariba’ and is nothing less than captivating. Kelly, always a tasteful player, demonstrates his delicate touch while soloing or in support you could focus your total listening attention on him through the length of the album as he populates the tunes with colourful details. On this sizzling live date, guitar great Wes Montgomery is joined by the Wynton Kelly Trio (Wynton Kelly/piano, Paul Chambers/bass and Jimmy Cobb/drums) and the under-rated Johnny Griffin on sax who absolutely tears up this set. Of the many recordings Evans issued, the two Vanguard dates and Explorations are the ultimate expressions of his legendary trio. Here Motian’s brushwork is delicate, flighty and elegant, and LaFaro controls the dynamic of the tune with his light as a feather pizzicato work and makes Evans’ deeply emotional statements swing effortlessly. The trio’s most impressive interplay is in “My Romance,” after Evans’ opening moments introducing the changes. The rhythmic intensity that he displayed as a sideman is evident here in “Milestones,” with its muscular shifting time signature and those large, flatted ninths with the right hand. Evans chose the material here, and, possibly, in some unconscious way, revealed on these sessions – and the two following LaFaro’s death (Moonbeams and How My Heart Sings!) – a different side of his musical personality that had never been displayed on his earlier solo recordings or during his tenures with Miles Davis and George Russell: Evans was an intensely romantic player, flagrantly emotional, and that is revealed here in spades on tunes such as “My Foolish Heart” and “Detour Ahead.” There is a kind of impressionistic construction to his harmonic architecture that plays off the middle registers and goes deeper into its sonances in order to set into motion numerous melodic fragments simultaneously. While the Sunday at the Village Vanguard album focused on material where LaFaro soloed prominently, this is far more a portrait of the trio on those dates. Recorded at the Village Vanguard in 1961, shortly before Scott LaFaro’s death, Waltz for Debby is the second album issued from that historic session, and the final one from that legendary trio that also contained drummer Paul Motian.
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