RealFood at Home: Making Chilaquiles Verdes

Chilaquiles Verdes con Pollo

Chilaquiles is a traditional Mexican dish of fried tortilla chips (totopos) cooked with salsa until softened.

It is most often served for breakfast, with refried pinto beans and scrambled eggs. It is a highly adaptable dish that may be prepared a hundred different ways, incorporating salsa roja, salsa verde, or mole; shredded chicken, pork, or chorizo (or Jimmy Dean’s breakfast sausage); and many possible dressings and condiments.

Despite the proliferation of good, authentic Mexican eateries in the United States, it can be challenging to find Chilaquiles on a restaurant menu. That is because Chilaquiles is very much a home cooks’ specialty, and while it lends itself well to familial variation, it does not yield to commercial refinement or expedient methods.

Like many of our more familiar comfort dishes – like chicken and dumplings, warm banana bread, or a good shepherd’s pie – Chilaquiles is an old-fashioned dish that must be prepared slowly and lovingly by the home cook, and it must be served with the same care: as a family or workingman’s breakfast, as a Saturday hangover curative (with a fiery michelada), or most often, as a reminder of home for millions of Mexican expatriates.

I have been preparing Chilaquiles for several years now. It is, for us, a leisurely Sunday morning dish – a late breakfast to be enjoyed while still in our pajamas. Although I first clipped the recipe out of a magazine, I no longer follow it. The dish is now ours.

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Preparation starts with a trip to the Mexican grocery store. Our local favorite is Carneceria Morelos, with several locations in Indianapolis. You could go to the “ethnic foods” section of your domestic grocer for some of these ingredients, but why would you? A Mexican grocery gives you access to some of the best-quality meats, produce, and dry goods to be found anywhere, at excellent prices.

Here is what we need:

Fresh corn tortillas: We look for paper packaged tortillas coming out of Chicago (a city with more tortellerias than Mexico City). Fresh tortillas should only have three ingredients – yellow corn, water, and lime.

Roast chicken: Mexican grocers usually have pre-roasted chickens available for sale. At our grocery, they are dressed with a garlicky marinade, seasoned with chiles, then cooked on a rotisserie to a golden brown. All for around six bucks.

Produce: The produce at Morelos is among the freshest I’ve ever seen. We buy one bunch of cilantro, one yellow onion, one head of garlic, two avocados, a bag of tomatillos, a couple of serrano chiles, and some soft, yellow limes.

Mexican Crema: Mexican sour cream is thinner and saltier than American sour cream; you can make your own by combining 1 cup regular sour cream, ½ cup milk, and ½ tsp. salt.

Queso Fresco: This is a white farmer’s-style cheese with a mild, refreshing flavor.

Refried Beans: Pinto beans are most traditional, or you can go with refried black beans, my favorite. If buying canned refried beans, thin them out with a 1 part water or chicken stock to 3 parts beans.

Mexican Soda: Sodas sold in Mexico are made with 100% cane sugar, instead of the corn syrup that is most common here, and they are sold in traditional glass bottles. Mexican Coca-Cola is my favorite. Becky likes Mexican Fresca, which  contains three ingredients: grapefruit juice, cane sugar, and carbonated water. Delicious.

On the weekends, Morelos sells homemade pork tamales out of steam kettles near the register. We bought some of these to serve with our Chilaquiles.

Pork Tamale w/ Salsa and Crema

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Next, we prepare our ingredients:

Making Salsa Verde

Salsa Verde

Somehow, homemade salsa verde makes this dish. We’ve tried using good-quality bottled salsas. They just don’t work. Making your own salsa is inexpensive, fast, and easy.

To prepare, remove the husks from twenty tomatillos. Blanch in boiling, salted water for 3-4 minutes. Puree blanched tomatillos in a food processor with a few cloves of garlic, a handful of cilantro, one serrano chile (de-stemmed and seeded), one teaspoon of salt, and the juice of two limes.

Preparing Totopos

Totopos (Fried Tortilla Chips)

As with the salsa, we’ve tried using bagged chips to make Chilaquiles, but they don’t measure up. Homemade totopos, fresh out of the hot oil, is the way to go.

To prepare, cut one package of corn tortillas into quarters, producing triangular pieces. Heat 1-2” of corn or peanut oil to 350 degrees in a heavy-bottomed stock pot, and fry the tortilla pieces in batches. When the oil is the correct temperature, tortillas will fry to a golden brown in about one minute. Drain on paper towels, adding kosher salt to taste.

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Preparing Chilaquiles

Chilaquiles Recipe:

1) In a large cooking pot, sauté half a diced yellow onion with two tablespoons of cooking oil over medium heat, until soft. Add a few cloves of garlic, thinly sliced, and cook until fragrant.

2) Add salsa verde and simmer for five minutes, lengthening with a little chicken stock, if needed.

3) While salsa is simmering, heat beans in a saucepan, stirring occasionally.

4) If serving Chilaquiles with scrambled eggs, whisk four eggs with ½ cup crema, and cook with butter. Keep scrambled eggs warm in the oven until ready to serve.

5) Add 1 ½ cups pulled roast chicken to salsa, lower the heat to medium-low and simmer for an additional five minutes.

6) Add tortilla chips, using a wooden spoon to crush and break the chips while combining with the salsa. The chips should soak up most of the salsa, but should not be dry.

7) Lower the heat to low and cover, cooking for two more minutes. The chips should be soft and pliable, but not mushy. At this point, you can add a handful of fresh chips, if desired, for texture.

8) Plate the chilaquiles. Top with (in this order): sliced yellow onion, crema, crumbled queso fresco, and cilantro. Serve with lime wedges, fresh avocado, refried beans, and scrambled eggs.

Serves two.

Chilaquiles with Scrambled Eggs and Refried Beans

Night Dreamer

The Meteor of 1860, by Frederic Church

It’s late, and I have some miscellaneous thoughts kicking around in my head.

Here it is, my detritus, as free-association:

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Quotation #1: Tenor saxophonist Wayne Shorter, as quoted in a recent interview on National Public Radio:

“For me, the word jazz means ‘I dare you.'”

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Quotation #2: Coleman Andrews, founding editor of Saveur Magazine, as quoted in the September/October 1995 article, “Secrets of Vieux Nice”:

“Cuisine, like language, changes as long as its alive.”

I thought: just like jazz.

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My favorite Wayne Shorter album is the 1964 quintet recording, “Night Dreamer”. The centerpiece of the album is a lovely, premonitory minor-key blues entitled, “Armageddon”.

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For years now, I have been dreaming about tornados. In my “tornado dreams”, I am on a rooftop, or somewhere high on a lookout, when a series of churning, black storm clouds approaches, followed by funnel clouds which sweep across the landscape, eating everything in their path. The dreams are scary, and thrilling. I frequently tell Becky about these dreams. She is scared of tornados. I have never seen one in person.

A few weeks ago, I lamented to Becky that I never had any dreams about meteor impacts. Meteors fascinate me, although I have never seen a real shooting star, either. It seems to me that it would be very exciting to see a bolide streak across the sky, at least once. If I never see one, I said at the time, I would at least like to dream about seeing one, now and again.

About a week later, I experienced a “meteor dream”, in which I was walking on a bridge, and saw two meteors blaze across the sky overhead. There was a series of bright flashes, then a thunderclap which cause the bridge to sway underneath my feet. It was pretty scary stuff.

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Yesterday, a massive meteor entered the Earth’s atmosphere over the city of Chelyabinsk, Russia, exploding with the force of twenty Hiroshima bombs. It was the largest celestial impact in over a hundred years. I read that some of the live witnesses thought that the world was coming to an end.

The bolide, as captured on video, looked very much like it did in my dream. I swear it did.

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Quotation #3: Helen Keller, discussing her dreams:

“My dreams have strangely changed during the past twelve years. Before and after my teacher first came to me, they were devoid of sound, of thought or emotion of any kind, except fear, and only came in the form of sensations. I would often dream that I ran into a still, dark room, and that while I stood there, I felt something fall heavily without any noise, causing the floor to shake up and down violently; and each time I woke up with a jump. As I learned more about the objects around me, this strange dream ceased to haunt me … I began to dream of objects outside of myself.”

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While attempting to read about Charlie Parker’s composition, “Koko”, I somehow ended up reading instead about Koko the Gorilla, who uses sign language to communicate. Before Koko, researchers taught an orphaned Silverback Gorilla named Michael to use sign language, although Michael’s vocabulary was limited to about six hundred words.

Michael’s handlers recounted that he would often attempt to relate his memories of his mother’s death at the hands of poachers, and that he would do so most urgently after waking from a nap. His handlers therefore concluded that Michael was experiencing recurring nightmares of his mother’s death.

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Whether we dream of things seen or unseen, I guess we all have unsettling dreams sometimes.

The Babe Ruth Thought Experiment: Part 2

The Babe Ruth Thought Experiment

Part 2: That Big Son of a Bitch

How does Babe Ruth come to the modern game? Does he simply emerge from the tall maize and stride onto the manicured lawn of our private ballpark, as in Field of Dreams?

Or does he knock on the clubhouse door at the new Yankee Stadium, announcing himself with a few shouted invectives?

Do we retrieve him from the past, and does he know when and where he is?

If he debuts with the New York Yankees (doesn’t he have to?), does he play with the navy “3” embroidered on the back of his player’s jersey? No Yankee has worn that sacred number in seventy-five years … Does Manager Joe Girardi let Ruth smoke his cigars in the clubhouse?

When Ruth steps in against one of our greatest pitchers, say Doc Halladay, is Big Roy thinking about those seven-hundred-and-fourteen career home runs, or does Ruth appear as a fresh-faced young prospect?

How does it all play out?

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The Babe’s ability to adjust to the modern game depends on the age at which he is transferred to the modern era, of course, and this is our first problem. Take the 35-year old veteran and bat him ahead of Robinson Cano, and it is unlikely that he will be able to overcome the changes in the game that have taken place in the eight decades since his retirement. He will fail.

Ruth never played a night game. He never played a professional ball game west of St. Louis, or south of Washington DC. He didn’t play against African American or Latin players.*Ruth didn’t face specialized relief pitching, and as a notorious pull hitter, he didn’t have to contend with the defensive shift. These factors would clearly put Ruth at a significant disadvantage as an older hitter with declining skills.

However, if we examine Ruth’s biography, we quickly find a solution to the problem of when to have him step forward, out of the past. The secret to his manifestation is in his upbringing.

*The percentage of African-American players in Major League Baseball has dropped from 27% in 1975 to 8% in 2012, a worrisome statistic. Meanwhile, the percentage of big leaguers who are foreign born is at an all-time high – 28% in 2012.

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In 1902, George Herman Ruth was sent by his father to live at the St. Mary’s Industrial School for Boys, a reformatory and orphanage in Baltimore, Maryland. Seven-year-old George had been declared incorrigible, his father exasperated at George’s truancy from school, his petty criminal activities, and his tendency to steal beer from his father’s saloon.

St. Mary’s was run according to strict disciplinary principles. Residents of the school were expected to do everything to sustain and better themselves: cook, clean, make their own clothes, and learn skilled trades. Despite repeated escape attempts, George genuinely thrived under these conditions, learning the skills of tailoring, and more importantly, of schoolyard baseball.

Ruth was tutored in baseball fundamentals by one of the school’s principals, a big Catholic minister from the Maritimes named Brother Matthias. George closely modeled his hitting and pitching techniques after Matthias, and developed quickly under his mentorship. By the time he was in his teens, Ruth was proficient at every position, playing up to two hundred games each year against older boys at the school.

Despite George’s burgeoning talent, he was rarely allowed outside of the reformatory during his twelve years in residence. At the time he signed his first professional contract to play for the minor-league Baltimore Orioles at the age of nineteen, he was a young man with little real world experience who had never journeyed beyond the limits of his home city. Everything was new. His Oriole teammates took to calling the unrefined, overgrown youngster, “Babe”.

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This is the point at which we’ll open the door for Ruth to enter the modern era. As he left St. Mary’s a fully-formed prospect with only a rudimentary understanding of the outside world, his twentieth year was a period of intensive natural discovery and transition. Removing Ruth to the future from this point in time won’t make his journey any more bewildering from here on out. This decision also allows us to observe the entirety of Ruth’s career, from his first appearance with the Red Sox as a power-hitting southpaw pitcher, through his prime years as the centerpiece of the Bombers’ “Murderers Row”,  to his final curtain call as a 39-year old slugger for the dreadful Braves.

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Baseball is a deceptively simple game. In evaluating how Ruth’s skills as a player make the leap from the second decade of the 20^th century to the second decade of the 21^st, we are analyzing a finite set of variables.

Let me explain:

>Ballpark factors are negligible, or are slightly beneficial to Ruth. While it is true that today’s ballparks are significantly different than historical parks, the elements that affect on-the-field play are unchanged. The playing surface is the same, with the exception of the two parks that still feature artificial turf. Infield dimensions are the same, except that the pitcher’s mound has been lowered by five inches since Ruth’s playing days (this benefits the hitter). Outfield dimensions are generally the same, except that distances to the center field fences have decreased (this benefits the hitter). Foul territory continues to vary by ballpark, but the placement of foul poles has been standardized. The requirement of a “batter’s eye” feature in each ballpark is more standardized, providing today’s hitters with more consistent pitch visibility.

>For the most part, baseball rule changes since 1920 (when doctored baseballs were outlawed, leading to the beginning of the “live ball” era) are minor considerations in our analysis. The two exceptions are the changes in 1969, when MLB lowered the pitcher’s mound (as mentioned above) and reduced the size of the strike zone to normalize offensive levels, and 1974, when the American League adopted the designated hitter rule, possibly benefiting Ruth’s utility and longevity. We will discuss these specific rule changes more in the next post.

>Lastly, changes in player athleticism, with the exception of the pitcher*, are not relevant to our discussion. In other team sports, physicality is an important barrier between generations of players. This is not true in baseball, where the only contact between players is incidental, and where players execute hitting, fielding, and base running plays autonomously of one another. Ruth’s conditioning is important, of course, and we will get to that, but his individual performance is not impacted by the increased physicality of other position players.

 

*A thorough analysis of pitchers and changing pitch mechanics is coming in Part 3.

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By eliminating the variables in ballpark factors, rules changes, and player athleticism, we are left with seven variables that may impact Ruth’s performance and statistics as he transitions to modern baseball. They are:

The Bat; The Ball; The Team; Hitting Mechanics; Opposing Pitchers; Physical Conditioning; and League Competitiveness.

Now let’s see that big son of a bitch go to work.

The Babe Ruth Thought Experiment: Part 1

The Babe Ruth Thought Experiment

Part 1: Deep Time

This post is about Babe Ruth, the greatest baseball player who ever lived.

Specifically, this post addresses a question that I extracted from a dream several weeks ago:

What would happen if Babe Ruth could play baseball today?

This question is both naive and impractical, a child’s question, and I realize that any attempt to answer it will be unsatisfactory, because bringing the Babe forward in time is an impossible proposition. Separating a man from his time and place is as impractical as rearranging history.

But it is a fascinating question nonetheless. A child might wonder about meeting his hero, and a scholar might wonder what lessons the great men of history would impart about our present circumstances, but I wonder whether Babe Ruth, who was both a hero and a man of extraordinary talents, would measure up against our expectations if we could see him now.

Before we begin our exposition, a few thoughts on the nature of deep time…

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Several years ago, I read a book called Annals of the Former World by John McPhee, about the geology of the North American continent. The author incorporates biographical sketches, travel narrative, and vivid set pieces to tell the story of our lithic history through “a piece of writing that [describes] not only the rock exposed in roadcuts, but the geologists with whom [he] travelled”.

Integral to the study of geology is an understanding of the concept of deep time, or the measurement of time on a geologic scale, where events and processes unfold over eons and billions of years. McPhee’s description of how we perceive deep time has stayed with me.

Here is an excerpt:

 “The human consciousness … has, by and large, retained the essence of its animal sense of time. People think in five generations – two ahead, two behind – with heavy concentration on the one in the middle. Possibly that is tragic, and possibly there is no choice. The human mind may not have evolved enough to be able to comprehend deep time. It may only be able to measure it. At least, that is what geologists wonder sometimes, and they have imparted the questions to me. They wonder to what extent they truly sense the passage of millions of years. They wonder to what extent it is possible to absorb a set of facts and move with them, in a sensory manner, beyond the recording intellect and into the abyssal eons. Primordial inhibition may stand in the way. On the geologic time scale, a human lifetime is reduced to a brevity that is too inhibiting to think about. The mind blocks the information. Geologists, dealing always in deep time, find that it seeps into their beings and affects them in various ways. They see the unbelievable swiftness with which one evolving species on earth has learned to reach into the dirt of some tropical island and fling 747s into the sky. They see the indiscernible stratifications of Cro-Magnon, Moses, Leonardo, and now.”

McPhee continues, quoting several geologists as they discuss the personal effect of staring into the abyss of geologic time:

“In geologists’ own lives, the least effect of time is that they think in two languages, function on two different scales.

“A sense of geologic time is the most important thing to suggest to the nongeologist: the slow rate of geologic processes, centimeters per year, with huge effects, if continued for enough years.”

“A million years is a short time – the shortest worth messing with for most problems. You begin tuning your mind to a time scale that is the planet’s time scale. For me, it is almost unconscious now and is a kind of companionship with the earth.”

“It didn’t take very long for those mountains to come up, to be deroofed, and to be thrust eastward. Then the motion stopped. That happened in maybe ten million years, and to a geologist that’s really fast.”

“If you free yourself from the conventional reaction to a quantity like a million years, you free yourself a bit from the boundaries of human time. And then in a way you do not live at all, but in another way you live forever.”

(McPhee, 1998, pp. 89-91)

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Baseball exists on its own time scale, somewhere between deep time and the phases marked by calendars, schedules, and clocks. It has existed as our national pastime for a hundred and forty years, and probably longer. Walt Whitman observed boys playing base-ball, and wrote that the game was glorious. Civil War soldiers, on both sides of the confrontation, played ball to pass the time in the meadows where they fell. The baseball season ends each Fall, when the leaves change, and returns each Spring, with the cycle of growth. Opening Day has been on our calendars for nearly six generations.

Only in baseball would a player who made his professional debut ninety-nine years ago be venerated as the best ever. Yet, in 1998, when the Sporting News selected Babe Ruth as the greatest player of all time, most baseball fans concurred. Who else would it be?

If not Babe Ruth, then who?  The honor would pass to Ty Cobb, Cy Young, or Walter Johnson, players a generation older, even, than Ruth.

Major League Baseball has existed since 1876, when William Hulbert founded the National League, consisting of teams in eight cities. Despite a convoluted history, eight NL teams have operated continuously for more than 120 years. They are the Chicago Cubs, Atlanta Braves, Los Angeles Dodgers, Cincinnati Reds, San Francisco Giants, Philadelphia Phillies, Pittsburgh Pirates, and St. Louis Cardinals. Babe Ruth played one year on the senior circuit, when he joined the Boston Braves for a miserable last-place season in 1935. The American League was not founded until 1901, but all eight charter teams are still in existence. Babe Ruth played nineteen years in the junior league, first for the Boston Red Sox, from 1914-1919, then the New York Yankees, from 1920-1934.

Those who are incredulous at the idea that the Bambino – a fat, reckless barkeeper’s son who played during the Great Depression – could be venerated as the greatest athlete of the 20^th Century  need to take a longer view of history*. Professional baseball had existed for forty years before Ruth made his debut, and the game as it was played then was essentially modern. Ruth debuted at Fenway Park, a place that still stands. Yankee Stadium was the “House that Ruth Built”; though refurbished, it was not dismantled until 2010.

*We will discuss Ruth’s upbringing and conditioning in Part 2 of this post.

We know everything about Ruth’s performance – his complete statistics, the box scores of all the games in which he played, how thoroughly he dominated the league. This evidence is real and, in a way, immortal. The subjective greatness of his performance can be debated; his objective results are there to see. The point is that Ruth exists as the star of the highly developed early-middle period in the game’s history, not as an undocumented primitive. His legend has more to do with the degree of his achievements than with their veracity.

Taking the long view, seeing Ruth through the lens of baseball’s deep timeline, one comes to appreciate the lessons that McPhee’s geologists imparted to us. The Babe exists slightly beyond the scope of our animal sense of time, but we’ll bring him forward into the fully modern game, into the boundaries of human time, in the next post. In doing so, we’ll examine a legend who, by turns, seems never to have lived, and who lives forever.

Bibliography

McPhee, J. (1998). Annals of the Former World. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

 

 

The Best Live Jazz Albums: #2 – #1

2) Sonny Rollins – A Night at the Village Vanguard

Recorded in November, 1957 at the Village Vanguard, New York City, NY

“Good afternoon everybody. Boys and girls, this is Uncle Don.”

-Sonny Rollins on A Night at The Village Vanguard,  introducing himself to the audience in a sardonic reference to the children’s radio show ‘Uncle Don’

A few months ago, I was reading an article by Joe Posnanski on the subject of band names (Joe usually writes about sports, but he is a compelling writer on any subject), and his article concluded that Metallica was the best band name of all time, because the name represented their sound perfectly. He reasoned that if an unfamiliar listener imagined what a band called “Metallica” might sound like, well, it would sound like Metallica.

By Joe’s definition, the majestic tenor player Sonny Rollins has a great nickname. He is known as the Saxophone Colossus, and in that moniker you can visualize everything about him: his sound, his prescence, the way he holds his instrument. On record, he is rarely less than his name suggests, and on A Night at the Village Vanguard, he is somehow more, a giant of the burnished horn.

Rollins is an interesting figure. Many critics argue that he is the most compelling individual soloist in jazz history, and I concur that he seems to have more to say with every solo than anyone else. He is a major horn stylist, possessed of the prototypical tenor sound and a flawless technique. Yet his approach is resoundingly self-critical, and his relentless desire for improvement has resulted in more than one hiatus from the music (the figure of the jazzman on the bridge, blowing his horn into the wind – that’s him). Rollins is maybe the most eminent living jazz musician, one of the few innovators in the music to reach his biblical lifespan. As a player, he has not changed his technique much in fifty years, yet he has played in many different settings and styles, and his vast reservoir of musical knowledge allows him to, in critic Stanley Crouch’s words, “summon the entire history of jazz” in his solos.

Rollins’ abilities as a live performer, and his commitment to his audience, are legendary.  In 1986, he broke his foot by jumping off stage during a concert, and played the next tune, “Autumn Leaves”, from a supine position before seeking medical attention.

A Night at the Village Vanguard captures Rollins at his very best (at anyone’s best, really), “strolling” through two sets with bass and drums (on the first set, bassist Donald Bailey and drummer Pete La Roca; on the next, Wilbur Ware and the hyperactive Elvin Jones). By eliminating the keyboard, Rollins essentially has the floor to himself for two hours, and what follows is the most powerful live jazz performance ever captured on record. His playing is tremendously muscular, his line of attack so well-developed and full of ideas that one wonders how he could possibly sustain it as long as he does.

Standards like “I’ve Got You Under my Skin”, “Old Devil Moon”, and “What is This Thing Called Love”, which should yield few surprises, are flattened by Rollins’ intense improvisations that, for their unpredictability, stay remarkably close to the original melodies. If it is relatively easy to dismantle a tune from the “outside”, as players of free jazz often do, it is much harder to do it from the “inside”, the way Sonny does it. Not since Bird invented it has bop sounded so new and full of possibilities.

The Saxophone Colossus sounds like this.

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1)  Bill Evans – The Complete Live at the Village Vanguard, 1961

Recorded on June 25^th, 1961 at the Village Vanguard, New York City, NY

Well, here we are, at the end of the road. Bill Evans’ The Complete Live at the Village Vanguard is the greatest live jazz album of all time. This survey has taken me two months to complete, and while I debated the ranked positions of many of these records for much of that time, this one was always at the top of my list.

This three-disc set contains the afternoon and evening sets performed by the Bill Evans Trio (Bill Evans, piano; Scott LaFaro, bass; Paul Motian, drums) at the Village Vanguard on June 25^th, 1961. The trio play a few Gershwin standards, but focus largely on a lovely set of original ballads and mid-tempo pieces. There is nothing more striking in the entire jazz repertoire than “My Foolish Heart” or “Waltz for Debby”, as played here.

Evans plays in a classical-impressionist style, bringing a delicate lyricism and a blushing beauty to these pieces that is incomparable. Motian is a sensitive accompanist, shading his playing with fine brushwork on the snare and cymbals, snapping his brushes to provide a soft backbeat during the ensemble passages. LaFaro plays an ancient (circa 1825) bass instrument with a warm, deeply resonant tone, his counter-melodic runs balancing the light piano work with handsome swallows of sound. The group interplay is perfect – perfect.

Bill Evans would never lead a better group. Ten days after this performance, Scott LaFaro was killed in a car accident. Instead of moving on, Evans simply stopped recording for two years, and succumbed to a deep depression that would stay with him, more or less, until the end of his life. When he re-surfaced in 1963 with a new bassist, Scott Gomez, there was something missing in his playing that would never be regained.

When I first heard this music without understanding its context, I imagined that the Vanguard must be a place that overlooks a trellised garden, with the band playing to an audience seated in the shadows of a late afternoon sun. That was what the music evoked for me.

Little did I know that the Vanguard is a cramped basement club, with scarlet-colored walls lined with pictures of many of the musicians who have played there. Bill Evans’ picture is there. Piano players sometimes touch his image for luck before taking the stage, as if he was a patron saint. For his extraordinary body of work, he isn’t far off.

So long.