1978 · Album
Crosscurrents
Recorded early 1977 · Fantasy (F 9568) · Produced by not specified in available sources
Cool Voices in the Evans Trio
Konitz and Marsh's cool-toned improvising makes this outing something special.
The first thing you hear on Crosscurrents (1978) is how sparse it feels — the piano, bass, and drums settle into a pocket, and then two saxophones enter like old friends walking into a room. There's no rush. Lee Konitz and Warne Marsh play alto and tenor respectively, and they've spent enough time together that they move around each other without collision. The whole date has that quality: composed, intelligent, never burning just for the sake of it.
This is Evans in his mid-period, working with his working trio of Eddie Gómez on bass and Eliot Zigmund on drums — the engine he'd been driving for a few years by this point. The addition of Konitz and Marsh could have felt like a guest star situation, but it doesn't. Instead, Evans and his rhythm section provide the architecture, and the two horns occupy the space with genuine conversational ease. These are players who valued clarity and melodic logic over pyrotechnics, which means the album sits in a certain register: cerebral, swinging but never frantic, always listening.
AllMusic critic Scott Yanow heard it as a genuine strength — a collaboration where the restraint itself was the point. This isn't Evans at his absolute peak or his most experimental, but it's a solid session by a pianist who understood how to let other voices breathe. For listeners who prize coherence and ensemble interaction over individual flash, it holds up.
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