Portrait in Jazz was Bill Evans’ third album as a leader and his first LP with the talented bassist Scott LaFaro. The Evans-LaFaro collaboration would reach a climax with their June 1961 club recordings at the Village Vanguard in New York. LaFaro would die in a car accident soon after (on July 6, 1961), at the age of 25. Most of the songs from the album are standards, with only a couple of original compositions included: “Peri’s Scope”, of which this is the first recording ever, and “Blue in Green”, co-composed by Evans and Miles Davis (it had been first taped in March of 1959 by the two musicians in a sextet format for the perennial LP Kind of Blue).
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