SOUND WITHIN Trio to Bring Bill Evans Tribute to Jamestown, RI
Bassist Rufus Reid and drummer Joe La Barbera, both former Bill Evans trio members, join the performance.
Pianist Randy Ingram is set to bring his tribute to jazz pianist Bill Evans to the Jamestown Arts Center in Jamestown, RI, as part of a Northeast tour marking the release of his recording SOUND WITHIN: A Celebration of Bill Evans on Chill Tone Records. Ingram will be joined onstage by two former members of the Bill Evans trio, bassist Rufus Reid and drummer Joe La Barbera. The Jamestown performance, presented by Puddingstone Music, is one of four album release concerts scheduled across New York, Rhode Island, Connecticut, and Pennsylvania.
Released July 10, 2026 via Chill Tone Records, the album also features original compositions penned by Ingram in reflection on Evans' profound impact on the music.
Nearly a half century after his death in September 1980, Bill Evans continues to loom large over the jazz piano tradition. It requires a musician with the confidence and strongly defined identity of pianist Randy Ingram to honor Evans while maintaining their own distinctive voice. While he's known from the beginning of his career that he would one day repay that indelible influence with a project celebrating this legendary forebear, he was determined to wait until the right moment to offer praise and gratitude from one singular artist to another.
'The thing that's most important to me about Bill Evans is not a style,' Ingram says. 'It's not the way that he plays, or the devices that he uses. It's the sound of the piano, and that's something that comes from deep inside. So I made sure to hone in on my own sound for this album.'
Evans famously led some of the most influential and revered piano trios in the history of jazz, beginning with his first, the iconic trio with Scott LaFaro and Paul Motian, and continuing with bassists Chuck Israels and Eddie Gómez and drummers Jack DeJohnette and Marty Morell. So in assembling his own trio to explore the music of his hero Ingram tapped directly into the source. Sound Within features drummer Joe La Barbera, who played in Evans' final trio with bassist Marc Johnson. La Barbera became a mentor to Ingram during the pianist's formative years in Southern California, making his involvement a celebration of two integral relationships, generations apart.
The trio is rounded out by the bass master and composer Rufus Reid. While not as intimately associated with Evans as La Barbera, Reid served a brief but crucial stint in the pianist's trio during 1978, performing engagements at New York's Village Vanguard and the Jazz Workshop in Boston. As he shared with Ingram, he opted to continue working with Dexter Gordon and J.J. Johnson, but took away an important lesson from the experience. Nervous about following in Eddie Gómez's footsteps, he was reassured by Evans that he'd been enlisted for his own individual voice, not to imitate someone else's.
That spirit also informs Ingram's approach to Evans's music, which he makes his own by simply expressing the music with a remarkable emotional clarity. 'There's an introspective thread that extends from Bill Evans through a lot of the music that I love,' Ingram says. 'He was never faking anything on an emotional level; he was always able to speak who he was with total honesty. The way that I connect to Bill's music is through finding something undeniably true there. We live in an age where people seem to feel pressured to present themselves through curated external fronts, and I really appreciate someone like Bill who created something deeper, something that's real and that comes from more of an interior perspective.'
Ingram has not only studied Evans's music, but has embodied the pianist on screen. He portrayed Evans in the 2013 Swedish film Waltz for Monica (aka Monica Z), a biopic of the singer and actress Monica Zetterlund that became the year's highest grossing film in its home country and garnered several awards.
Sound Within opens with the Evans classic 'Turn Out the Stars,' Ingram setting the contemplative tone for the album with a short solo introduction before La Barbera and Reid enter with a tender yet vigorous rhythm in 5/4, placing the oft-reprised tune on a subtly challenging footing. It's followed by the timeless 'My Foolish Heart,' its lovely melody complicated by an unexpectedly tumultuous groove. The song, and Evans's memorable take on it, was one of the pillars of the album in Ingram's view.
'That has been a very important song for me for a long time,' he explains. 'I remember driving home from high school, when I probably should have been blasting Pearl Jam. But I had Waltz for Debby in the car stereo and would just sit there pressing repeat on the CD to hear 'My Foolish Heart' again because it was just so beautiful.'
Tour Dates
Wednesday, August 12 at The Pocket Jazz Club in Times Square, NYC. 7 p.m. Info at thepocketnyc.com.
Friday, August 14 at Jamestown Arts Center, 18 Valley St., Jamestown, RI. 7:30 p.m. $45-$50. Presented by Puddingstone Music. Info at puddingstonmusic.org.
Saturday, August 15 at The River Room, 50 Riverside Drive, Willimantic, CT. 7:30 p.m. Tickets $44.52. Info at riverroomwilli.com.
Sunday, August 16 at Deer Head Inn, 5 Main St., Delaware Water Gap, PA. 7:30 p.m. Info at deerheadinn.com.
SOUND WITHIN features songs associated with Evans alongside original compositions by Ingram written in response to the pianist's influence on his own musical development.
Photo Credit: Vivianne Zhou
Photo Credit: Vivianne Zhou
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