Bill Evans: Turning Point, 1957

In early 1957, composer Gunther Schuller delivered a lecture at Brandeis University in which he described a new music approach that merged jazz improvisation and classical music. He referred to this hybrid as the Third Stream.

To drive home the point of the lecture, he commissioned original Third Stream works and staged the first on-campus Brandeis Jazz Festival in Waltham, Mass., on June 6 and 7 of 1957. It was part of the college’s Fourth Festival of the Creative Arts.

The initial performance was held outdoors on a cold, damp evening at the Ullman Amphitheater. The second was performed at 11 a.m. the next morning in a school gymnasium.

The musicians: Louis Mucci and Art Farmer (tp); Jimmy Knepper (tb); James Buffington (Frhrn); Hal McKusick and John Laporta (saxes); Robert Di Domenica (fl); Manuel Zegler (bassoon); Bill Evans (p); Teddy Charles (vib); Margaret Ross (harp); : Barry Galbraith (g); Joe Benjamin (b) and Teddy Sommer (d).

Pieces, as performed:

• All Set (Milton Babitt)

• Suspensions (Jimmy Giuffre)

• Revelations (Charles Mingus)

• All About Rosie (George Russell)

• Transformation (Gunther Schuller)

• On Green Mountain (Harold Shapero)

In addition, two existing works that influenced the Third Stream were performed—Duke Ellington’s Reminiscing in Tempo (1935), adapted by Schuller, and André Hodeir’s Eronel.

Sadly, neither concert was recorded. So on June 10, 18 and 20, many of the musicians who had been on stage recorded the music at a CBS studio in New York. The order of the tracks changed when the album, Gunther Schuller: Modern Jazz Concert (Six Compositions), was released in 1958.

Today, the term Third Stream has faded into the recesses of jazz history, along with the studio album itself. What remains is the stunning extended piano solo by Bill Evans on All About Rosie, recorded on June 10, 1957. Russell had named the work based on a motif taken from a black children’s song-game, Rosie, Little Rosie.

The LP was a professional turning point for Evans. After the pianist had arrived in New York in 1955, he worked prolifically as a sideman. He also recorded his first trio album, New Jazz Conceptions, for Riverside in September 1956. With the release in 1958 of Modern Jazz Concert and the track All About Rosie, Evans became an overnight sensation among musicians straddling the jazz and classical worlds.

With that solo, Evans proved that bridging jazz and classical was possible in the most graceful and swinging way. He had arrived as a major talent.

Within months, Evans would record for the first time with the Miles Davis Sextet, on May 26, 1958. What did he record? On Green Dolphin Street, which remains one of Evans’s finest recorded solos with Davis and an entry point for Davis in the late 1950s and for Evans.

Everybody Digs Bill Evans would be recorded in December 1958 and his first working trio album, Portrait in Jazz, with bassist Scott LaFaro and drummer Paul Motian, would be recorded in December 1959.

Here’s the full master take of All About Rosie…

Here’s Evans playing an alternate take of his solo on All About Rosie…

And here’s On Green Dolphin Street in May 1958…