Has there ever been a jazz record so perfectly poised and contemplative as this? Or one that’s so accessible yet so fathomlessly deep? It’s a gentle record, one you can safely put on at dinner with just about anyone. But the minute you listen closely you don’t need to know about the remarkably intense musical and personal life that led up to the live performance which would be released as Live at the Village Vanguard and this LP, not about the tragedy that followed, to realise that it’s technically extraordinary and contains devastatingly powerful expressions of the most complicated and difficult aspects of being human in the 20th century. Pianist Evans, bassist Scott LaFaro, and drummer Paul Motian are utterly enmeshed throughout: it’s a conversation, but it feels like a single mind. There’s no transcendence, no metaphysics, because it’s exactly about bodies and thoughts happening in a single, real place and moment. Intellect, emotion and physical movement have rarely felt so unified.