the last book I ever read (3 Shades of Blue: Miles Davis, John Coltrane, Bill Evans, and the Lost Empire of Cool, excerpt nine)

from 3 Shades of Blue: Miles Davis, John Coltrane, Bill Evans, and the Lost Empire of Cool by James Kaplan:

We have no record of the Colony date of the Philadelphia weekend, but we do know that the Miles Davis Sextet, with Bill Evans on piano, opened on Friday, April 25, 1958, at the Café Bohemia opposite the Jimmy Giuffre Trio. And that Evans found himself thrown into the deep end of the pool—and, to his own surprise, stayed afloat.

“I had always had a great respect for Miles Davis,” he said some years later. “And when he asked me to join him I realized that I had to revise my views about my own playing. If I continued to feel inadequate as a pianist, it would be to deny my respect for Davis. So I began to accept the position in which I had been placed.”