October 11, 1972

The Bill Evans Trio—Evans on piano, Marty Morell on drums and Eddie Gomez on bass—performed a program of Evans’s compositions and jazz standards before a packed house in Skinner Hall. Briefly, the only white member of Miles Davis’s famous sextette before moving on to his own, usually smaller, groups, Evens returned to the Davis sextette for the legendary Kind of Blue (1959). Among the several albums released featuring the trio that performed at Vassar was The Bill Evans Album (1971), the winner of two Grammies.

“Bill Evans knows what he’s doing,” wrote Roger Trilling ’76 in The Miscellany News, “if he puts a trio together in a certain way, I’d rather understand it than criticize it. So…. In a sense, it was ensemble jazz at its best. There was no lead instrumental voice throughout the evening, but rather a sharing of melodic, harmonic, rhythmic and solo parts, with each of the instruments now fading up, now out, now two together.”