In the summer of 1961, Bill Evans recorded what many consider the most beautiful piano trio album ever made. Eleven days later, his bassist Scott LaFaro was dead — killed in a car crash at 25. The recordings they had made together at the Village Vanguard, released as Sunday at the Village Vanguard and Waltz for Debby, remain two of the most intimate documents in jazz history.
Evans went silent for months.
When he finally returned, he rebuilt slowly. A new trio, new collaborators, the same restless pursuit of something he could never quite name. By 1965, with Chuck Israels on bass and Larry Bunker on drums, the Bill Evans Trio were in their stride — a working band that had found its own identity, distinct from the LaFaro years but no less searching.
That year, they came to Europe on tour and stopped off in London for a Jazz 625 session. Luckily for us, the footage is still available in full – as you you see below.
What Was Jazz 625?
Jazz 625 was a BBC Two television programme that ran between 1964 and 1966, and it was unlike almost anything else on television at the time.
The name came from the 625-line broadcast standard adopted by BBC Two — the technical specification that gave the new channel sharper picture quality than its predecessor. But the programme itself was far from technical. It was a straightforward, beautifully filmed celebration of jazz, produced at a moment when some of the music’s greatest practitioners were touring Europe regularly and largely going unfilmed.
The producer was Terry Henebery, and the format was simple: a major jazz artist, a studio or theatre setting, a camera crew that knew how to follow the music. No gimmicks, no celebrity interviews, no attempts to make jazz palatable for an audience that might not know it. Just the music, filmed with care.
The list of artists who appeared reads like a roll call of the golden era. Dave Brubeck, Thelonious Monk, Charles Mingus, Sonny Rollins, Coleman Hawkins, Roland Kirk, Muddy Waters — all captured on film at a time when such footage was vanishingly rare. For many of these performances, the Jazz 625 recording is the only professional film document that exists.
This is part of what makes the Bill Evans Trio’s 1965 appearance so significant. Evans was not a natural television subject — he was interior, private, physically folded into the piano in a way that didn’t lend itself to spectacle. But the Jazz 625 cameras understood that the intensity was in the details: the hands, the slight rocking motion, the way he and Israels listened to each other across the rhythm.
Watching it now, more than sixty years later, it feels like a window left open.
Bill Evans: The Pianist
William John Evans was born in Plainfield, New Jersey in 1929 and came to jazz through a classical training that never really left him. Where most jazz pianists of his generation were steeped in bebop — Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, the fast-moving harmonic language of the 1940s — Evans arrived with a different set of reference points: Bach, Ravel, Debussy, the impressionist tradition that valued colour and texture over velocity.
The result was a piano style unlike anything that had come before. He played with the sustain pedal in ways that blurred the edges of chords into something almost orchestral. He left the root notes to the bassist, freeing his left hand for voicings of extraordinary harmonic complexity. His melodic lines sang independently of the rhythm, sometimes hovering slightly behind the beat in a way that created an almost unbearable sense of suspension.
Miles Davis, who recruited Evans for his sextet in 1958, described his sound as “like crystal notes or sparkling water cascading down from some clear waterfall.” Evans appeared on Kind of Blue that year — the best-selling jazz album of all time — and wrote the album’s liner notes, comparing jazz improvisation to Japanese visual art.
By the time of the Jazz 625 recording, Evans had been leading his own trios for six years. He had won his first Grammy for Conversations with Myself in 1963. He was widely recognised as the most influential jazz pianist of his generation — a status that brought him little comfort, as he remained constitutionally incapable of feeling satisfied with his own playing.
“I’m not my biggest fan,” he said, late in his life. “If you come to my house, you won’t find portraits of me all over the world.”
The Setlist
What Evans chose to play on Jazz 625 in 1965 is a small portrait of his musical personality — the originals alongside the standards, the introspective alongside the lyrical.
Five — Evans uses his own composition to open and close the set, a structural choice that gives the performance a sense of architecture. It’s a rhythmically playful piece that establishes the trio’s rapport immediately.
Elsa — a rarely performed Evans original, gentle and searching. One of the quieter moments of the set.
Summertime — the Gershwin standard, here stripped back and reharmonised in Evans’ unmistakable way. What most pianists play as a showcase, Evans turns inward.
Come Rain or Come Shine — Harold Arlen’s great song, emotionally direct in a way that suits Evans perfectly. One of the set’s most affecting moments.
My Foolish Heart — perhaps Evans’ most associated song outside his own compositions. He recorded it many times across his career; this version, filmed in his mid-thirties, catches him at a particular moment of maturity and restraint.
Re: Person I Knew — an Evans original whose title is an anagram of Orrin Keepnews, his producer at Riverside Records. A small act of affection buried in the letters. The piece itself is one of his most meditative.
Israel — a Jerome Kern standard that shows Evans’ deep love of the Great American Songbook. Kern was, he once suggested, among the finest melodists America ever produced. This performance bears that out.
The full Jazz 625 shared above runs to just over thirty minutes — long enough to settle into, short enough to watch twice.
Looking for more? Check out our article on Bill’s iconic album You Must Believe in Spring.