The opening of "My Foolish Heart" on Waltz for Debby — Bill Evans, live at the Village Vanguard, June 1961 — still stops me on every listen. Evans doesn't announce the melody so much as locate it, feeling for something in a familiar but darkened room. Then the tune settles, unhurried, already at ease with itself.

I put the record on last Sunday around four, when Melbourne's autumn light had gone that flat, quietly withdrawing grey. Headphones rather than speakers: I wanted the Vanguard's room sound closer than my own walls. On headphones, Scott LaFaro's bass reads less as accompaniment and more as a second conversation running alongside Evans' own — responsive, often anticipating. Paul Motian's brushwork nearly vanishes, which is perhaps as it should be.

The record isn't trying to be a landmark, and I resist the weight critics keep placing on it — the tragedy of LaFaro's death eleven days after the session, the sense of something frozen at the edge of loss. Taken on its own terms, it is a working trio playing well in a small room, and you can hear that ease throughout.

What it achieves formally is in how it handles quiet. The trio stays in the middle register of dynamics, rarely building toward a climax. On the title track, Evans' voicings are open enough that silence enters them; the room's ambient sound — a clink of glasses, a murmur near the close of "Autumn Leaves" — becomes texture rather than intrusion.

Where it didn't quite reach me this Sunday was in the later tracks, where the interpretations feel settled and certain. "Some Other Time" is beautiful but contained; I read it as Evans playing within rather than toward. On a re-listen I kept wanting that tentativeness of the opening to return. It didn't, not in the same form. A record doesn't owe you a second revelation.

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