Bill Evans - Undercurrent

The problem with piano and guitar together is that both instruments can play chords, and if both players voice the same harmony with different inversions or substitutions, the result is mud. Evans and Hall avoid this by treating the duo as a conversation in which only one player voices the harmony at a time while the other plays a line. On "Darn That Dream" Evans states the melody in block chords while Hall plays a counter-melody in single notes; then Hall takes the theme and Evans answers with a line that shadows the harmony without doubling it. The result is a texture that sounds fuller than it is because each note is doing two jobs—melodic and harmonic—and the space between the instruments lets the listener hear both.

The improvisations are built on small moves: a chord voiced a half-step higher than expected, a phrase that resolves a beat late, a line that starts in one player's hands and finishes in the other's. On "Skating in Central Park"—a John Lewis composition that both players had recorded on the Odds Against Tomorrow soundtrack—the two musicians pass a melodic idea back and forth, each adding a variation before handing it off, until the theme has been stretched into a new shape. The touch is light throughout; Evans uses the sustain pedal sparingly and Hall plays with a clean tone that avoids reverb or distortion. The performance is closer to classical chamber music than to the locked-hands bop piano that Evans had played earlier in his career with Miles Davis, and the restraint is the point.

The one weakness is the lack of a rhythm section. Without bass and drums to mark time and provide a foundation, Evans and Hall have to generate their own momentum, and on the slower pieces—"Dream Gypsy," "I Hear a Rhapsody"—the pulse becomes so elastic that the music floats rather than swings. This is intentional, and for listeners who value intimacy and harmonic subtlety over rhythmic drive it is a feature, not a flaw. But it does mean that the album works best as a late-night listen rather than as a record to put on for energy. The one uptempo track, "My Funny Valentine," proves that both players could swing hard when they chose to, but the choice here was to play mostly slow and to let the harmony do the work.

The sequencing is deliberate: one fast track to open, then five slower pieces that explore different moods within a narrow dynamic range. The problem is that the moods are not different enough. The opener sets up an expectation of variety that the rest of the album does not fulfill; after the first track, every piece is a ballad or a waltz played at a similar tempo with a similar touch.

The flow works for the first stretch—the brisk opener, the mid-tempo second track, the slower third piece—but by the time the listener reaches the middle section of side two, the pacing has flattened into a single mood. The album is short, just over thirty minutes on the original LP, but it feels longer because the back half does not shift gears.

The problem is not the performances, which remain focused and articulate throughout, but the lack of contrast. A second uptempo track, or a piece with more rhythmic bite, would have broken up the slow-motion glide and given the ballads more room to breathe. As it stands, the album is front-loaded: the first half has the variety, and the second half is an extended coda.

The interplay on the closing run is as strong as anything on the record, but it arrives after three similar tracks and the listener has to work to stay engaged. The album earns its length, barely, because the playing is good enough to reward close attention, but it does not make that attention easy.

Undercurrent is not the best Bill Evans album—that distinction belongs to the trio records with LaFaro or the later work with Eddie Gomez—but it is the most important transitional record in his catalog. It proved that Evans could lead a session again after LaFaro's death, and it established the guitar-piano duo as a format that could sustain an album without a rhythm section. The interplay with Hall is as good as Evans's playing gets in a duo setting, and the harmonic intelligence on display here is rare in any era. But the album is also a stopgap, a way station between the trio Evans lost and the trio he would build again. The pacing is too uniform, the tempos too similar, and the second half drags because the material does not shift enough to justify the extended focus.

This is an album for listeners who value chamber-music intimacy and harmonic subtlety over rhythmic drive. If you want Evans at his most interactive and inventive, start with the trio records. If you want to hear how he rebuilt his sound after the worst year of his career, start here. The tracks to play first are "My Funny Valentine" for the swing and "Darn That Dream" for the interplay. After this, hear Interplay from later in 1962 for Evans with a rhythm section again, or the 1966 follow-up with Hall, Intermodulation, to hear how the duo format evolved when both players had more confidence in it. Undercurrent is a quiet album that rewards patience, but it is not the record Evans was trying to make; it is the record he had to make to get back to the piano.