This enthralling session by the late Bill Evans (a crucial pianistic influence on stars from McCoy Tyner and Herbie Hancock to Chick Corea, Keith Jarrett and Brad Mehldau) was recorded five days after a famous performance at the 1968 Montreux jazz festival by Evans, bassist Eddie Gomez and drummer Jack DeJohnette. Verve’s Montreux live recording won a Grammy, but this studio session has been in the vaults ever since. DeJohnette, who spent only six months with Evans (Some Other Time thus becomes only the second album to document the partnership) and would go on to play on Miles Davis’s Bitches Brew the next year, was a more elementally forceful drummer than the pianist usually employed – but his fire and his robust tenderness affected Evans’s attitude to drums from then on. DeJohnette the cymbal texturalist is in evidence on classics such as On Green Dolphin Street and In a Sentimental Mood, and the drummer’s more muscular intensity pushes the leader into controlled abandon on How About You? The album is not only exquisite jazz playing, but a document of a step-change in the great Bill Evans’s trio conception.
