1978 · Album
The Legendary Scott Lafaro
Recorded 1959 · Riverside Records · Produced by Orrin Keepnews
Twenty-Five Years, A Lifetime of Sound
LaFaro sounds like he's having a conversation, not keeping time.
If you want to understand why bass players still talk about Scott LaFaro decades after his death, this is the record to start with. Recorded before he joined the Bill Evans Trio — the gig that made him famous — these sessions show LaFaro in a different light: a young musician already playing with a confidence and melodic fluency that most bassists never develop at all. He wasn't content to walk through changes and stay out of the way. He treated the bass like a front-line instrument, weaving his own lines around the melody rather than just anchoring the rhythm section.
What's striking about The Legendary Scott LaFaro (1959) is how conversational the whole thing feels. LaFaro isn't showing off — or at least, it doesn't sound that way. The interplay between him and the other players has a looseness that's rare for the era. His tone is clear and his intonation is precise, but there's nothing stiff about it. He bends phrases in ways that feel more vocal than instrumental, which is part of why his style was so hard for contemporaries to copy.
LaFaro died in a car accident at 25, which means everything he recorded fits inside a brutally short window. This album matters partly because it fills in some of that story — it's not just a footnote to the Evans records, it's evidence that he was already fully formed as a player before that collaboration happened. If you already love the Evans trio recordings, this gives you more LaFaro, which is reason enough. If you're new to him, it's a solid place to start.
