1961 · Album
Pieces of Jade
Recorded 1960–1961 (sessions); released 2009 · Resonance Records · Produced by Resonance Records production
Windows into a Life Cut Short
This recording exists as nothing less than a miracle in the annals of jazz history.
Scott LaFaro died in 1961 at twenty-five, just as his playing was reaching its peak. Pieces of Jade arrives as a collection of fragments — some planned, some accidental — that together form an unusual portrait of a musician we never got to hear fully mature. The album opens with five trio tracks from 1961 featuring LaFaro with pianist Don Friedman and drummer Pete La Roca. These are solid, swinging affairs where LaFaro's bass lines move with surprising fluidity beneath the piano; he's clearly thinking melodically, not just holding down changes. The sound is clean and close, which means you can actually hear what's happening underneath rather than just feeling the groove from a distance.
The centerpiece is a twenty-three-minute rehearsal tape from 1960 where LaFaro runs through material with pianist Bill Evans. This is the real reason the album matters. You're listening to two musicians working out ideas in real time — false starts, corrections, the conversation itself. Evans went on to make some of the most influential jazz records ever released, but here he's sparring with someone operating on equal footing, and that equality crackles through. The rehearsal tape is rough, informal, sometimes barely audible, but it captures something that the polished trio tracks cannot: the actual thinking of players in motion.
AllMusic reviewer Michael G. Nastos called the recording's existence "nothing less than a miracle, and an event in the annals of jazz." He's not overstating it. Without modern archival efforts, this would be lost. The album also includes a 1966 interview with Evans and a solo piano piece by Friedman from 1985 dedicated to LaFaro's memory. None of this is essential LaFaro, since he barely had time to make anything essential before he died. But it's valuable for what it reveals about his peers and the world he moved in, and for the raw evidence of his talent that the rehearsal tape provides.
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