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On Sunday, June 25, 1961, the Bill Evans Trio played the Village Vanguard in New York, and Riverside Records taped all five sets.
You can hear glasses and people talking through some of it.
Those tapes became Sunday at the Village Vanguard and Waltz for Debby, and that trio is still widely called the best Evans ever had. The bass player was Scott LaFaro. He was 25.
What Scott LaFaro isn’t doing
What people still talk about is what LaFaro isn’t doing. For long stretches he’s not walking at all. He’s playing lines against the piano, answering Bill Evans, leaving the beat alone for bars at a time and then landing right back on it. Paul Motian is floating on drums around both of them. Nobody in that trio is standing still holding down quarter notes, and nobody gets lost.
That was the idea of the band. Evans wanted to free up everybody’s role so all three of them took part equally. So LaFaro often takes the melody himself and duets with Evans instead of just backing him up.
Eleven days after that Sunday, on July 6, LaFaro was killed in a car accident in upstate New York.
When Riverside put out Sunday at the Village Vanguard, they subtitled it “Featuring Scott LaFaro.” The record opens and closes with two of his own tunes, “Gloria’s Step” and “Jade Visions.”
How LaFaro kept his place without walking
LaFaro could obviously walk. What made him different is that he didn’t need the quarter notes to know where he was.
The form lived in his head, so the time was something he could play with instead of something he had to hang onto.
Which brings me to you.
Maybe you’ve been at this 10, 15, 20 years. You know your scales. You’ve taken lessons. You’re the reliable one on every gig. And you still freeze when the solo comes around.
When your walking habit freezes your solo
The better you get at walking, the tougher this can get, because you’ve spent years training yourself to find your place through the quarter notes. It’s a great habit for a bass line and a terrible one for a solo.
More scales won’t touch it. LaFaro’s thing wasn’t knowing more scales than everybody else in the room.
If you’re only ever going to hold it down, that’s a fine career.
If you want the other thing, start from a bass line you already know and carve it down, one step at a time, keeping the form going while the notes drop away. That’s the first step in my post on how to solo on upright bass, and on electric the first thing I’d check is whether you’re stuck on the one.
Then put on Sunday at the Village Vanguard, keep the form in your head while LaFaro stops walking, and see if you’re still with him when he lands.
Go deeper
Jazz Soloing on Electric Bass: From the Beginning
A 5-lesson method that starts with your bass line and chisels it into a solo.
