The Complete Village Vanguard Recordings, 1961, a three-CD box set released in 2005, marks the first time the entire Bill Evans Trio's complete sets at the Village Vanguard on June 25, 1961, have been released in their entirety (outside of the 12-disc set containing Evans' complete Riverside recordings). It also marks the first U.S. release of the first take of "Gloria's Step," which is incomplete due to a power failure.
In a classic essay titled "That Sunday" originally published in The New Yorker, Adam Gopnik wrote of this music:[5]
It is easy to cite worshipful jazz-critic passages about [these recordings], concerning intonation and modal passages and singing tones .... It is difficult to explain the force the music does have, since it is not particularly forceful. People who don’t respond to it are puzzled that anyone hears anything in it at all. They say that it sounds like “background music,” or like cocktail music. Philip Larkin, acerbic but sound, said that it had a Pierrot-in-the-moonlight quality, and how you feel about it, perhaps, depends on how you feel about Pierrot in moonlight. As the jazz critic Ira Gitler pointed out in the original liner notes, Evans was at the time an aficionado of Zen Buddhism, and the music he made was meditative and tuneful, between Suzuki and Snow White.
If you are vulnerable to this music, however, you are completely vulnerable to it. Bill Evans has no casual fans. After that afternoon, his name became synonymous with a heartbreak quality that is not like anything else in music. It is not little-boy-lost or blue, like Miles Davis, but transparent and wistful. Evans’s solos on “Alice in Wonderland” and “My Foolish Heart” and, especially, “Porgy” have a mother-of-pearl tone, singing and skipping, as though they were being played on the celesta or xylophone. They are as close to pure emotion, produced without impediments ... as exists in music. His music hints at the secret truth that New York is sad before it is busy, and that it is a kind of inverted garden, with all the flowers blooming down in the basements.
