You don’t need to know the circumstances that surround this album — recorded in 1977 but not released until 1981, a year after Bill Evans’s death — to feel its sadness. Evans never accepted any advances in jazz in the second half of the 60s and into the 70s, but where for others this usually implied a stuffy staidness, in his minimal ensembles with bassist Eddie Gómez it led to an absolute purity of expression. Evans’s piano here is as expressive as at any time in his life, and the exquisite geometries between him, Gómez and drummer Eliot Zigmund are as perfect and ineffable as a starry sky. The songs express endless loss and heartbreak: Evans had lost friends and lovers to suicide and huge parts of his own life to addiction — the cover of “Theme From M*A*S*H (Suicide is Painless)” is as mordant as it is lovely. But he was also a philosopher with an eye to the eternal at all times — it was, after all, Evans who had introduced John Coltrane to the teachings of Krishnamurti — and there is always more, much more, beyond the mere melancholy here. It may have been the opposite of innovative in many ways, but as a deep dive into oceans of human feeling, this album is peerless.