There is a specific quality of silence that exists just before Bill Evans plays the first note, and Midnight in Paris captures it on tape better than almost anything else in his catalog.
The recording comes from two nights at the Club Saint-Germain in Paris, June 1965 — late enough in the summer that the city had settled into itself, the tourist noise thinned out, the room probably half-filled with people who understood exactly what they were hearing. Evans was forty at the time, already carrying the weight of Scott LaFaro's death four years prior, already rebuilding his conception of what a piano trio could be. He had found his footing again with Chuck Israels on bass and Larry Bunker on drums, and this particular unit, caught live and relatively unguarded, sounds like three people who have stopped trying to impress each other.
What Bunker Does
Larry Bunker is the undersung reason this record works as well as it does. He had come up as a vibraphonist — played on everything from Peggy Lee sessions to West Coast cool jazz dates — and that background gives his drumming an almost melodic sensibility. He doesn't push. He suggests. On "If You Could See Me Now," he's barely there, brushes feathering the snare like he's trying not to wake someone in the next room, and it gives Evans all the space in the world to follow a thought wherever it leads.
Chuck Israels, for his part, plays lines that would have made LaFaro proud without trying to be LaFaro. That's not a small thing. The shadow of that ECM-before-ECM trio would follow Evans for the rest of his life, and bass players who got too clever or too quiet in the comparison were crushed by it. Israels just played the music. His tone here is warm and slightly woody, probably picked up well by whatever microphone setup the Club Saint-Germain allowed in those days — the kind of intimate, unclinical sound that live recordings in European clubs had in the sixties before everyone decided distance-miking was the only honest approach.
The Material
The repertoire is exactly what you want from Evans at midnight: "I Should Care," "Who Can I Turn To," "Round Midnight" played not like a centerpiece but like a familiar room he happens to walk through. There's a reading of "Detour Ahead" that should be taught in schools. He finds the melody like someone finding a photograph in an old coat — without drama, with a kind of quiet recognition that makes your chest tighten.
The piano sound itself rewards close listening. It has some of the characteristic bloom that European concert grands tend to have on these recordings — slightly more resonant in the midrange than an American Steinway of the same era, the hammers not quite as bright. Whether that's the instrument, the room, the recording chain, or some combination of all three, it suits Evans perfectly. His left hand voicings — those famous rootless structures that still get transcribed in jazz textbooks — sound almost orchestral when you hear them ring out in that acoustic.
Verve released this record in 1975, a full decade after the sessions, which means Evans was still alive to see it come out — but only just. He would be gone within five years, and the catalog raids would intensify after that. This one deserved better than ten years in a vault. It's not a footnote. It's a feature attraction.
Put this on when the house is quiet. Let the first chord of "If You Could See Me Now" fill the room before you do anything else.