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"Sunday at the Village Vanguard may be the ultimate monument to LaFaro’s talent; it features two of his compositions, 'Gloria’s Step' and 'Jade Visions,' and he plays lengthy and dazzling solos on nearly every track. It’s not just LaFaro who was playing well, though — the whole trio was in top form for this date, a delicately balanced unit anchored weightlessly by Motian’s ever-shifting, reactive timekeeping, with Evans’ limpid, impressionistic harmonies floating above like clouds. There are no missteps in this set, but a highlight is the dark, mournful reading of Gershwin’s 'My Man’s Gone Now.'" - Thomas Bartlett, eMusic Sunday At The Village Vanguard represents the pinnacle of spontaneous musical communication: three men breathing as one on a tiny bandstand. The performances on this album demonstrate a new and more interactive approach to playing as a trio, one in which all instruments carry melodic responsibilities and function as equal voices. Keepnews recalls in his liner notes that “from the very first moments of the recording, it was impossible to ignore the importance of these performances.” Everything Bill Evans, Scott LaFaro, and Paul Motian had been working on for the previous 18 months led to this moment on June 25, 1961. The little-known pianist and his trio performed afternoon and evening sets that Sunday to a small audience that unknowingly sat through what would become a very famous — and final — set by the trio (the 25-year old LeFaro died tragically in a car accident just days later). Alongside companion album Waltz for Debby, these recordings provide something of a sonic time capsule: sequenced in the original order of the five sets, the audience’s murmurings and applause are peppered throughout; even an interrupted take is left intact. Belmont recalls the process of piecing the performance back together during the remastering process: “As was the practice with early live recording, the songs [on the original album] were faded just after the last note, and much, if not all, of the audience and banter from the stage was removed. So the first stage of the process was to find the reels—if they existed—and try and make a reconstruction of everything that was recorded…The task was to try to make the show flow as closely as possible to what had been recorded.”