Bill Evans/Jim Hall: Undercurrent (180g, blue vinyl, 2 bonus tracks) [20TH CENTURY MASTERWORKS]

Why you'll love it

This edition presses the album on 180g blue vinyl and adds two bonus tracks. DownBeat's Pete Welding called it some of the most beautiful, thoroughly ingratiating music it had been his pleasure to hear.

This edition

• 180g vinyl
• Blue vinyl
• 2 bonus tracks

About the album

Piano and guitar are both chord instruments, which usually means they step on each other's toes. Bill Evans and Jim Hall solved that in the spring of 1962 by listening harder than anyone else in the room, leaving space and making every note count.

It was Evans's first date as a leader after months away from the piano following the death of Scott LaFaro, and the music is quietly radiant. "My Funny Valentine," usually a moody ballad, becomes an up-tempo romp, the last piece they recorded that day. John Lewis's "Skating in Central Park," from his score for Odds Against Tomorrow, glides along, Hall's own "Romain" gets a lovely reading, and "Dream Gypsy," "I Hear a Rhapsody" and "Stairway to the Stars" drift by in hushed conversation. The bonus tracks here add two more standards, "Darn That Dream" and "I'm Getting Sentimental Over You." Toni Frissell's photograph of a woman floating underwater in Weeki Wachee Spring makes one of jazz's most beautiful covers.

Evans biographer Peter Pettinger called it a sublime meeting. It is also the politest record in the jazz section, and we've checked.

Also at Kops: more Bill Evans on vinyl · browse Classic Jazz

Listen

On 20th Century Masterworks, a reissue of the 1962 album.