Elemental Music Offers More Live, Unheard Bill Evans & Art Pepper: Pristine-Sounding Records For Completists

PURCHASE THESE IF ART PEPPER’S SUNSET YEARS COMPEL YOU — AND IF NO AMOUNT OF BILL EVANS IS ENOUGH

Zev Feldman’s devotion to Bill Evans borders on evangelism — and the flock is growing. While prepping 2023’s Treasures: Solo, Trio & Orchestra Recordings, the Resonance Records co-founder dropped into Crooked Beat Records in Alexandria, Virginia, only to learn the shop had pre-ordered 30 copies — an eye-popping tally for a niche archival set. “We’ll have 300 people around the block,” owner Bill Daly reported. “Your Bill Evans records — everybody wants them.” Despite the flood of recent archival releases by the brilliant, troubled, long-dead pianist — most of them courtesy of Feldman — everybody, in fact, still digs Bill Evans.

Art Pepper occupies a much slimmer slice of Feldman’s catalog. Until now, his lone Pepper title was Live at Fat Tuesday’s —recorded 1981 and issued in 2015 via Elemental Music. Pepper’s life was even more turbulent than Evans — his memoir Straight Life will make your blood run cold — and his influence narrower. But the mark he made was unmistakable. 1957’s improbably sublime Art Pepper Meets the Rhythm Section, cut in a single day with a damaged horn and a crippling habit, distills the West Coast scene’s lyrical, hard-swinging essence and remains essential to any serious jazz collection.

Which brings us to the two newest offerings from Elemental: Evans’ Further Ahead: Live in Finland 1964-1969, released on April 18, and Pepper’s An Afternoon in Norway: The Kongsberg Concert, due out May 9. If you’re a casual jazz fan, or merely dip into both artists, these might be a stretch to purchase — well-recorded, by huge names, and of interesting historical value, but curios nonetheless. If you reach Feldman levels of fandom, though — well, anything by these late greats is worth hearing at least once.

While both releases were captured in Northern Europe — Evans’ at three different locations in Finland, and Pepper’s at the Kongsberg Jazz Festival in Norway — they come from very different angles. Drawn from sets in 1964, 1965, and 1969, Further Ahead largely features Evans’ rhythm sections of bassist Chuck Israels and drummer Larry Bunker, and Eddie Gomez and Marty Morell. (Side B, captured at the Helsinki Jazz Festival, features Danish bassist Niels-Henning Ørsted Pedersen; drummer Alan Dawson; and on “My Melancholy Baby,” saxophonist and cool jazz architect Lee Konitz.)

An Afternoon in Norway, by contrast, solely features Pepper’s working band at the time — pianist Milcho Leviev, bassist Tony Dumas, and drummer Carl Burnett — and the music is drawn from one 1980 gig. While Further Ahead finds Evans rebuilding his trio after difficulties with substances — and grief over Scott LaFaro, the doomed bassist for his first working trio with drummer Paul Motian — An Afternoon in Norway finds Pepper on a final professional and creative upswing, barely two years before a 1982 stroke ended his life.

I listened to both Further Ahead and An Afternoon in Norway on Tracking Angle editor-in-chief Michael Fremer’s extravagant lower level (not basement) setup. Aside from that historical context, excellent sound quality elevates these packages.

Both hype stickers boast transference from the “original tape reels”; while digitization credits are clear for Pepper (the National Libary of Norway handled it), the Evans package is a bit murkier on those details. (It does note that the Finnish Broadcasting Company handled recording and production, with mixing and sound restoration by Marc Doutrepont.) The first-rate, always dependable engineer Matthew Lutthans mastered both at the Mastering Lab.

Variables in venue acoustics and recording technology be damned — the drums can be a tad toppy on the Evans record — both records largely won out from an audiophile standpoint. Fairly conventional fare for both artists, with some of the best minds on the sonics — a shared 7 for music, and a 9 for sound feels reasonable to me. Essential? Not really, unless you’re a collector or a deep head. Worthy of release? Absolutely.