The room › Artists › Bill Evans
Where to start with Bill Evans
Start with Skating In Central Park — Undercurrent, 1962. That is the track sitting closest to the centre of all 15 Bill Evans tracks in Zubissou Sounds — a listening room of 15,847 tracks placed one at a time by hand, not an algorithm.
This page is not a discography and not a ranking. It describes exactly one thing: the 15 Bill Evans tracks that one person put in one room, and where they sit relative to each other. The starting point above is chosen by a rule you can check — of the 15 tracks, it is the one nearest the average position on the four knobs the room runs on, and where two sit equally close the one on a named record wins. Nothing here calls any record better than any other.
The collection leans hard on one record: 10 of the 15 tracks come from Undercurrent alone.
The dates here run from 1960 to 2016. They are the dates attached to the releases in this room rather than recording dates, so the later ones are likely reissues — but 56 years is still more than one version of the artist.
Three ways in
The one track, if you only play one
Skating In Central Park — Undercurrent, 1962. Of the 15 Bill Evans tracks here, this one sits closest to the average of all of them across the four knobs the room runs on. It is the least surprising thing in the collection, which is exactly what an entry point should be.
If you want the melancholy end
I Loves You Porgy — At The Montreux Jazz Festival, 1968. The lowest mood reading of any Bill Evans track in the room (22 out of 100). This is as far towards melancholy as the collection goes.
If you want the euphoric end
When I Fall In Love — Portrait In Jazz, 1960. The highest mood reading here, at 60 out of 100 — a 38-point swing across the collection towards euphoric.
Where Bill Evans sits in the room
Zubissou Sounds does not have playlists or genres you click. It has knobs. Every track carries a position on each one, set by hand when the track was added, and you find music by setting the room to a state rather than by searching for a name. These are Bill Evans's average coordinates and the range they cover.
All four run 0–100. They are placed by a person, not derived from audio analysis or from any streaming service's feature data.
What is here, record by record
| Album | Year | Tracks |
|---|---|---|
| Undercurrent | 1962 | 10 |
| Bill Evans at the BBC | 1988 | 1 |
| Some Other Time: The Lost Session from the Black Forest | 2016 | 1 |
| Portrait In Jazz | 1960 | 1 |
| The Complete Village Vanguard Recordings, 1961 | — | 1 |
| At The Montreux Jazz Festival | 1968 | 1 |
Every Bill Evans track in the room
| Track | Album | Year |
|---|---|---|
| When I Fall In Love | Portrait In Jazz | 1960 |
| Darn That Dream | Undercurrent | 1962 |
| Dream Gypsy | Undercurrent | 1962 |
| I Hear A Rhapsody | Undercurrent | 1962 |
| I'm Gettin' Sentimental Over You | Undercurrent | 1962 |
| My Funny Valentine | Undercurrent | 1962 |
| My Funny Valentine - Alt. Take | Undercurrent | 1962 |
| Romain | Undercurrent | 1962 |
| Romain - Alt. Take | Undercurrent | 1962 |
| Skating In Central Park | Undercurrent | 1962 |
| Stairway To The Stars | Undercurrent | 1962 |
| I Loves You Porgy | At The Montreux Jazz Festival | 1968 |
| Who Can I Turn To? | Bill Evans at the BBC | 1988 |
| Some Other Time | Some Other Time: The Lost Session from the Black Forest | 2016 |
| My Foolish Heart | The Complete Village Vanguard Recordings, 1961 | — |
Near neighbours in this room
These are the artists whose average knob position sits nearest to Bill Evans's in this room. It is a coordinate match, not a claim that they sound alike.
- Where to start with Pierre-Laurent Aimard — jazz, 16 tracks
- Where to start with Keith Jarrett — jazz, 13 tracks
- Where to start with Sam Gendel, Sam Wilkes — jazz, 14 tracks
What the open databases say
MusicBrainz lists Bill Evans as a solo artist, from Plainfield, the United States and born in 1929. Its contributors tag the artist jazz, modal jazz and cool jazz. These are the open database's facts, not mine — you can check them against the MusicBrainz entry.
Questions
How many Bill Evans tracks are in Zubissou Sounds?
There are 15, across 6 albums. 14 of them carry a date, running from 1960 to 2016. That is the whole of what this room holds — it is one person's collection, not a discography.
Is this a best-of, or a ranking?
No. Nothing here is ranked and no track is called better than another. The starting point is picked by arithmetic — the track closest to the centre of all the others on four measured axes — and the rule is printed above so you can disagree with it.
Where do the knob numbers come from?
They are set by hand, one track at a time, by the person who added the track. They are not audio analysis and not a Spotify feature. Mood, energy, density and the head/body balance each run 0 to 100. All 15 of these tracks have been read individually — nothing on this page is running on a default.
Can I listen to these here?
Not yet from this page. Zubissou Sounds is in private beta — the room itself plays through Spotify, and 15 of these 15 tracks are matched to a Spotify ID and ready to play the moment you are in. The waitlist form is at the bottom of this page.