Media Alert: Pat Hall – Time Remembered: The Music of Bill Evans (Unseen Rain UR9960) Street Date August 5,

According to the liner notes by Chris Kelsey, “Pat Hall has done it. He’s substituted overt passion for Bill Evans’ quiet reserve, impulsive chance taking for the pianist’s crystalline perfection. In place of the classic piano trio instrumentation so closely associated with Evans, he’s used something nearly it’s polar opposite. Some jazz musicians inspire such slavish devotion that their oeuvre becomes inviolable, something not to be interpreted but rather worshipped, something so precious that any stylistic deviation is akin to heresy. Bill Evans is that type of musician: a supremely gifted artist, certainly, but someone whose creative contribution is occasionally threatened to be subsumed by the slavering reverence bestowed on him as a jazz icon. In a sense then, Pat Hall’s unconventional essaying of compositions by Evans can be seen as an act of almost quixotic bravery. Bill Evans’ compositions re-imagined for a band led by a trombonist – and with the keyboard chair occupied by a Hammond organist, no less! Were the fictional barrister Jackie Chiles an Evans-o-phile, he might call such an endeavor “seditious, pernicious, avaricious … inauspicious!” Pat is like the “Everybody” in the album title. He digs Bill Evans. Digs, but doesn’t worship, in the same way that it’s possible to love one’s parent but not want to live life the same way or make the exact same choices.’

The ensemble again is Pat Hall, trombone, Greg “Organ Monk” Lewis, organ, Marvin Sewell, guitar, and Mike Campenni, drums and the tracks are:
Gloria’s Step
Waltz For Debby
Spring is Here
Elsa
Know what I Mean?
Time Remembered
Peri’s Scope

You’re bound to remember time remembered. Grady Harp, June 14