Portrait In Jazz
The Bill Evans Trio · Riverside · 1960
Edition №6
Bill Evans is a performer I never tire of listening to. Half the pleasure is the discography itself: the with-strings records, the overdubbed solo experiments, the duets, the trios he kept rebuilding for twenty years. He was a talented and complicated man, and the records carry both sides.
Portrait In Jazz is the first full statement of the most consequential of those trios, and it kept a secret for sixty-six years. By the end of 1959 Evans had already played on Kind of Blue and was climbing the DownBeat polls, and he was still reluctant about his own career. He let two years pass between his first and second albums because, he insisted, he didn’t have anything particularly different to say. His producer, Orrin Keepnews, put it more plainly: for a while it looked as if just about the only person who didn’t dig Bill Evans was Bill Evans.
What changed was the band. Working opposite Benny Goodman at Basin Street East, Evans lost one trio and assembled another: Scott LaFaro, a bassist expanding what the instrument could do inside a band, and Paul Motian, a drummer who listened as much as he played. On December 28, 1959, about five weeks into the trio’s life by Evans’s own count, Keepnews brought the three of them into Reeves Sound Studios in New York, and they recorded the whole album in a day.
Here is the secret. That day the trio played Autumn Leaves over and over; Craft’s 2025 tape research counted at least thirteen takes. Two different performances reached the public, and for sixty-six years the object you bought decided which one you owned. Most listeners never knew there was a choice.
The reissues have multiplied since: original mono and stereo pressings, audiophile cuts from three boutique houses, a Japanese disc collectors chase, downloads off a later master. The differences start with which Autumn Leaves is actually in the grooves. The work is knowing what each object holds, and which one holds the recording best.
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The chain
Every version of this record descends from one day of tape. The chain splits at the very first step, because the mono and stereo albums did not carry the same Autumn Leaves. That fork is the buying decision.
I’m hoping the trio will grow in the direction of simultaneous improvisation rather than just one guy blowing followed by another guy blowing. If the bass player, for example, hears an idea that he wants to answer, why should he just keep playing a background?
— Bill Evans, original 1960 liner notes
Session. December 28, 1959 · Reeves Sound Studios, New York · one day, whole album Producer. Orrin Keepnews · Riverside Engineer. Jack Higgins · praised by name in Audio magazine’s 1960 review (”fine stereo from Jack Higgins of Reeves Sound Studios”) Release. 1960 · Riverside · mono and stereo editions The split. Stereo album master uses Autumn Leaves take 13; the mono album master uses take 9, a different performance, roughly half a minute shorter. Every other track is a shared master. Take numbers published for the first time by Craft’s 2025 tape research. Notable. Every surviving alternate take from the session exists in mono only. The published record does not yet say why; the stereo reel story is one of the open questions of the date.
Master generations.
1960: the original Riverside mono and stereo cuts. The original cutting engineer is unattributed, a structural gap across mid-century Riverside.
1987: David Luke remaster at Fantasy: the OJC line, in print ever since, and the first disc to put both Autumn Leaves takes on one object.
1998 and 2003: Alan Yoshida’s 20-bit K2 transfer from the original tapes at JVC in Japan, the disc collectors chase.
2000s: George Horn’s DSD master at Fantasy for the hybrid SACD; a separate audiophile digital lineage, and another carrier of both takes.
2000s: Kevin Gray and Steve Hoffman’s all-analog cut at AcousTech for Analogue Productions; the same master returns in the label’s 22-title Riverside box from 2017 onward.
2017: the Concord “Studio Masters” hi-res transfer, a later master with its engineer uncredited at every layer of the catalog.
2019: Mobile Fidelity’s One-Step, cut by Krieg Wunderlich with a DSD256 conversion ahead of the lathe.
2021 and 2022: the Electric Recording Company’s all-valve stereo and mono cuts by Guy Davie, three hundred copies each.
2025: Craft’s Haunted Heart box: Plangent Processes restoration, Paul Blakemore mastering, Kevin Gray lacquers, seventeen unreleased takes, and the first object to publish the take numbers. A digital restoration step ahead of the lacquer cut puts it outside the all-analog class, and it gathers the whole Classic Trio catalog rather than Portrait alone.
The musicianship
The interplay this record is famous for was immediately audible; the DownBeat review below is from September 1960. What the trio built in five weeks became the working grammar of the piano trio. The grammar had three authors.
Personnel.
Bill Evans · piano · one year off Kind of Blue, two-time DownBeat New Star, still doubting the whole enterprise
Scott LaFaro · bass · lowered bridge, guitar-like fluency, the band’s second lead voice
Paul Motian · drums · texture and conversation at the kit
The 1960 critics heard it as it happened: DownBeat gave the album five stars, and The Jazz Review’s Don Heckman described LaFaro playing with, against, and through the pulse. Every piano trio since has worked inside the space these three opened in a single December day.
The interplay among the three men is best illustrated on Leaves, wherein they carry on a three-way conversation, with bassist LaFaro leading the discussion.
— Don DeMichael, DownBeat, September 15, 1960 (five-star review)
The verdict
The right version of this record starts at $8.79.
The rubric. Best Overall runs per format. On vinyl, the reference is the Analogue Productions cut by Kevin Gray and Steve Hoffman, all-analog from the original tapes at AcousTech, available as out-of-print standalones and inside the label’s in-print Riverside box. On CD and digital, the reference is the JVC XRCD mastered by Alan Yoshida from the original tapes. The hi-res path is the 2017 Concord Studio Masters transfer. Near-peers: the Electric Recording Company’s all-valve stereo cut, Mobile Fidelity’s One-Step, and the Electric Recording Company mono, which carries the other Autumn Leaves.
Best overall on vinyl is the Analogue Productions Kevin Gray and Steve Hoffman cut, all-analog from the original tapes. The standalone pressings are out of print, with recent sales running about $45 to $2000; the same master is in print inside the Riverside Recordings box at $900, which works out to about $41 dollars per title.
Best overall on CD and digital is the JVC XRCD mastered by Alan Yoshida, out of print, with recent sales from about twenty-five to one hundred thirty dollars and most copies changing hands near fifty.
Best hi-res download is the 2017 Concord Studio Masters transfer, from $8.79 at Qobuz; the same master serves the CD-quality lossless tier.
The mono question is really the Autumn Leaves question. The Electric Recording Company mono carries the take 9 performance on vinyl. On disc, the 1998 XRCD, the hybrid SACD and the in-print OJC each hold both performances on one object. Craft’s 2025 Haunted Heart box is the first vinyl object to hold both takes at once, though across a 5-LP set of the whole Classic Trio catalog, not a single Portrait pressing. If hearing both matters to you, the CD path still gets you there for the least money.
Catches. The Analogue Productions master ships in two different objects: out-of-print standalone pressings at collector prices and an in-print 22-title box. Same sound, different pressing plant, weight and price; do not pay the standalone premium believing it buys a different master. Avoid the “Number One Essentials” pressing (unofficial) and the European 20th Century Masterworks DMM cut (digital-sourced chain sold in audiophile clothing).
The endnote
Evans rebuilt trios for the rest of his life, and every one of them worked inside the grammar this record wrote in a single day. I keep exploring the variety of his discography, and I keep coming back here, to the five-week-old band that played one song thirteen times and left us two of them. A talented and complicated man, a landmark recording, and a legacy that will endure longer than any single object that carries it. Pick the right object anyway.
Nearly every record you love carries a fork like this somewhere: a take, a master, a cut that decides what you actually hear. Most of them are still secrets. Finding them is the job here.
Up next. №7, July 28: The Two Goulds. One pianist, one piece of music, two recordings made twenty-six years apart, and the question of which Goldberg Variations belongs on your shelf.
Reference Checks, a Twelve Bar Studio production, is an evidence-led publication on the recording versions worth a serious listener’s time. The reviewer’s listening chain is calibration context, named in the About page and absent from every verdict. Full evidence chain for this post is in the Reference Checks research dossier. Research uses AI tooling; verification and editorial are human.