"Stella by Starlight" from Miles Davis's 1958 sessions features a half-chorus piano solo from Bill Evans at 90 BPM over Victor Young's beloved 32-bar ABCA' form in B-flat. Evans's contribution, though brief, is a masterclass in harmonic sophistication, his chord voicings and melodic choices transforming the familiar standard into something revelatory. The recording captures Evans during his pivotal tenure with the Davis sextet, a period that would profoundly influence the pianist's subsequent career and reshape jazz piano forever. Evans's approach to this ballad reflects the impressionistic harmonic language he was developing, with rootless voicings and modal substitutions that created a new vocabulary for jazz piano. The session features Davis's full sextet with Coltrane, Adderley, Chambers, and Cobb, though the solo spotlight falls exclusively on Evans for this track. Victor Young's composition, originally written for the 1944 film The Uninvited, became one of the most recorded standards in jazz, and Evans's brief solo here suggests depths of harmonic possibility that would occupy jazz pianists for decades to come.
