#listeningnotes

There's a moment two-thirds through "My Foolish Heart" — on Bill Evans' Waltz for Debby, recorded live at the Village Vanguard in June 1961 — where Evans drops the melody almost entirely and lets the left hand walk in open fifths beneath a thin, single-note right-hand line. It lasts maybe four bars. Then the melody returns, slightly displaced, as though it had been considering something and decided to come back.

I put this record on last night around eleven, through speakers rather than headphones, which I don't do often. The room noise from the Vanguard — glasses, low talk, someone's chair — sits differently when it fills space rather than sits behind your ears. It stops being ambience and becomes a room you're in, or once were in. The Melbourne rain was doing something similar outside: present but not insistent.

The trio here — Scott LaFaro on bass, Paul Motian on drums — isn't accompaniment in any conventional sense. LaFaro runs countermelodies that are sometimes more insistent than Evans', and Motian plays so lightly that the rhythm feels implied rather than stated. This isn't a record that wants to swing hard or impress with velocity. It wants to think out loud, and it does.

The moment I keep returning to is three minutes into the first improvisation — a low cluster in the left hand that Jarrett holds, pedal down, while the right begins tracing something that sounds less like melody than like searching. The Köln Concert, recorded live at the Cologne Opera House in January 1975, is a record I have heard perhaps forty times, but I put it on last night through headphones rather than speakers for the first time in years, and it became a different thing.

On speakers, the room fills — you hear the audience, the piano's overtones spreading into the hall. Through headphones, what comes forward is how thinly Jarrett was threading the needle that night. The piano was reportedly in poor condition, the action stiff, the lower register dull; he has spoken about this. What he does in response is stay largely in the middle and upper registers, constructing arcs that sometimes break into gospel-adjacent repetitions, sometimes into something close to minimalist pulse.

I read this as resourcefulness rather than concession. The gospel phrases — and there are many — arrive not as quotation but as load-bearing structure: something repeated until it resolves, or until it earns the right to move. The form is improvisation, but it works by accumulation the way theme-and-variation works, each return slightly altered by what the music has done in between.

The film opens on two people at a bar, a third beside them, and someone — we don't know who yet — watching from across the room, trying to read the dynamic. Celine Song holds the shot longer than comfort recommends, letting the viewer do the interpretive work before she tells us anything. Past Lives (2023) earns that patience across its whole length.

Shabier Kirchner's cinematography works in grey-blue New York interiors and pale Seoul afternoons. The palette doesn't dramatize; it observes at a middle distance. I watched this on a Sunday evening, second time through, blinds half-drawn and the light fading outside — which turned out to be the right conditions. The film rewards a certain quietness rather than cinematic largeness. It doesn't reach for grandeur and doesn't need to.

Song's structural device — three time periods, roughly twenty-four years compressed into two hours — is familiar enough from literary fiction. What she does with it is keep the ellipses visible. The jumps aren't smoothed; we feel the gap as duration. Greta Lee carries most of that weight across the decades with a stillness that reads as held breath rather than blankness. It sounds to me as if Song is more interested in how longing changes shape than in whether it ever resolves.

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.