Completely essential

Long promised and not without problems of gestation, Verve's just-released 18-CD celebration of the great pianist has to be one of the collections of the year. The statistics alone are exciting. The set covers all 19 of Evans's LPs for Verve, with five on CD for the first time, plus two bonus LP sessions; there are 98 previously unissued complete takes, 61 of them live. And some of the reissued items are among the rarest of all Evans albums, including a gorgeous 1964 session when his trio, completed by Chuck Israels and Larry Bunker, backed the marvellous Swedish singer, Monica Zetterlund. Arguably, some of Evans's finest trios - for instance, with La Faro/Motian early on, or Johnson/La Barbera before he died in 1980 - never recorded for Verve, but any Evans trio, even on a relatively standard day, was so much better than anyone else's that the Verve set is almost all prime quality. Covering the years 1962-70, with a 1957 item on which Evans was a sideman, it offers a feast of trio playing as well as some mixed glimpses of the pianist in orchestral settings, plus the fine duet with guitarist Jim Hall, the once-controversial solo piano overdubs and rare quartet dates with flautist Jeremy Steig and guitarist Sam Brown. The downside? An unsuccessful date with Stan Getz, some of the Leonard material, one or two minor sound problems, the idiosyncratic packaging. But this collection is, nevertheless, one of the jazz reissues of this or any other year. Essential.