Album review: Noa Levy & Paul Edis Trio - Portrait in Evans (Dot Time Records)

Giving Voice to the Unspoken

Noah Levy (voice); Paul Edis (piano); Adam King (bass); Joel Barford (drums); Alan Barnes (reeds)

There’s a moment, when you sit with this record, where the question shifts.

It’s not a question of whether or not you can put lyrics to Bill Evans, this has been done over the years with varying degrees of success. It’s about how brave you are, to attempt to paint a lyrical picture upon music whose meaning has always been subjective.

Because Evans’ music has always lived in that rare space where meaning isn’t stated, it’s suggested. You don’t arrive at it. You circle it. You sit inside it. And over time, it reveals something back to you — something personal, something that feels like yours alone.

That’s what makes it feel untouchable.

And yet, what Edis and Levy do here is not to impose meaning, but to gently draw it out — as if the words were always hovering just beneath the surface of the harmony.

It feels like music that belongs in a room — low light, close quarters, where every word has somewhere to land. The kind of space where you don’t just hear the lyric, you feel how it sits against the piano, how it leans into the bass, how the drums leave just enough air around it for the meaning to settle.

And that’s where the trio becomes so important.

This isn’t piano with accompaniment. This is a true trio in the Evans sense — conversational, fluid, constantly shifting. Adam King on bass moves through the harmony rather than sitting beneath it, while Joel Barford shapes the space with a lightness that never intrudes. At the centre, Edis holds it all together, not by leading from the front, but by creating room — for the voice, for the words, for the music itself. And then there’s Alan Barnes, a presence that quietly but unmistakably shifts the centre of gravity. Moving between bass clarinet, clarinet and saxophone, he colours the music with an unmistakable blend of wit and warmth.

The risk, of course, is that the moment you give Evans’ music language, you narrow it. You take something beautifully ambiguous and you pin it to a single emotional thread. That’s the danger running right through this project.

 But what’s striking is how often they resist that temptation.

Take Blue in Green. In its original form, it’s all atmosphere — suspended, unresolved, impossible to fully grasp. You feel it more than you understand it. With lyrics by Meredith d’Ambrosio, that feeling inevitably shifts. It becomes more intimate, more recognisable — memory, longing, a sense of something just out of reach. And yet, it never feels over-explained. The words don’t close the door; they just draw the curtains slightly, letting you see the shape of something that was already there. Levy delivers the lyric in a more optimistic tone and the arrangement is lifted by Barnes clarinet. This is not a tribute to Evans, it’s a reimagining, of songs that have become part of the story, and it works. Edis and Levy have approached this project with sensitivity to the original material and that shows.

It’s a similar story with Very Early. Evans plays it like a question — light, almost childlike, but harmonically full of possibility. Here, with words, it becomes reflective. Not a moment lived, but a moment remembered. And that’s a subtle but important shift. The innocence is still there, but now it carries the weight of hindsight.

Waltz for Debby is perhaps the most delicate of all. Written for his niece, it already holds that fragile balance between innocence and the knowledge that it won’t last. The lyric — familiar, well-worn — risks making it feel too defined, too complete. But they don’t push it. They let the music do what it always did: suggest that beneath the surface, something is already slipping away.

And then there’s Turn out the Stars.

This is where things could easily fall apart. The title itself—Turn out the Stars—suggests something vast, almost cosmic, but the music feels intensely personal. There’s a kind of quiet resignation in it, a sense of looking inward rather than outward.

Put words to that, and you run the risk of reducing it to something smaller, something manageable. But here, the restraint is everything. It doesn’t become melodrama. It stays quiet. And in that quiet, it lands beautifully.

If anything, the real revelation comes in the lesser-known pieces — the ones you don’t arrive at with years of listening already behind you. Peri’s Scope, Time Remembered, Only Child, Laurie — these feel less like reinterpretations and more like discoveries. There’s no weight of expectation, no sense of “this is how it should sound”. And in that space, the writing — particularly from Edis — feels most at ease.

He doesn’t try to explain Evans.

He writes alongside him.

And that’s the key to the whole record.

Because this doesn’t work if the words try to lead. They have to follow. They have to sit inside the phrasing, inside the harmony, inside the spaces Evans leaves behind. And more often than not, that’s exactly what happens.

There’s still that underlying tension — that sense that by giving the music language, you’re fixing something that was never meant to be fixed. But what Portrait in Evans understands is that Evans’ music isn’t as fragile as we sometimes think.

It can take it.

It can hold these interpretations without losing itself.

And in the best moments, the lyrics don’t feel like answers at all.

They feel like one way in.

One way of hearing something that was always there —

Waiting, just beneath the surface.

And then there’s the real test.

On April 30th, at Pizza Express Jazz Club Soho, this music moves out of the safety of the studio and into a live room — the kind of room it feels written for. Close, immediate, nowhere to hide. A space where Evans’ music has always made the most sense, and where any added layer — especially something as exposing as lyric — has to earn its place in real time.

Because in a room like that, you can’t lean on concept.

You can’t lean on intention.

The words either land, or they don’t.

And if this record is anything to go by, they won’t just land — they’ll linger.

 Glenn Wright