Noa Levy & Paul Edis - Portrait In Evans

Jazz

When a Voice Meets an Icon: The Delicate Art of Setting Words to Bill Evans

An ambitious vocal project explores the poetry of a pianist’s music, and reveals both the promise and the limits of the form.

There is something quietly disorienting about this album from its very first moments. Setting lyrics to the music of Bill Evans, melodies that listeners have carried with them for decades, is an undertaking that borders on the audacious. Evans’s art is so deeply associated with the piano’s touch, with harmony unfolding in translucent layers, that any attempt to translate that language into words inevitably changes the balance of the music itself.

Approaching the recording required, at least for this listener, a conscious effort to set aside personal preferences. After several attentive hearings, it became clear that the album is aimed primarily at an audience that values a highly classical conception of jazz: carefully shaped phrasing, faithful arrangements, and a reverence for melodic clarity. Judged on those terms, the project is both serious and thoughtfully constructed.

Yet the listening experience carries an unusual sensation, as though two parallel albums were unfolding at once—one vocal, the other instrumental. With time, that impression begins to feel less like a flaw than an almost natural consequence of the material.

At the center stands the voice of Noa Levy. It is a voice of striking depth and composure, contemporary in tone yet rooted in the expressive traditions of jazz singing. Her phrasing is precise, her vibrato controlled, and her timbre carries a dusky warmth that can, at moments, feel almost tactile, like velvet brushed against the grain. She inhabits the lyrics, meditations on love, loss, fatherhood, and vulnerability, with a seriousness that never tips into theatricality.

And yet those very strengths highlight the album’s central tension. The texts are strong enough, and Levy’s interpretive personality vivid enough, that one begins to imagine a different album altogether, one built on original compositions, where the voice and the music might have grown from the same emotional soil. Instead, the listener hears the meeting of two powerful identities: Evans’s unmistakable harmonic world and Levy’s equally distinctive vocal universe.

Understanding why this meeting is so complex requires a brief return to Evans himself. Emerging in the late 1950s, he reshaped the language of jazz piano through an approach that fused impressionistic harmony, classical influence, and an almost conversational sense of rhythm. His work prized introspection over display; silence and resonance were as important as notes. Much of his repertoire was conceived with instrumental dialogue in mind, not the linear narrative of a sung lyric. That history makes any vocal adaptation an intricate balancing act.

Levy and her collaborator Edis have spoken about their process, recalling how they first worked together in London and discovered a shared devotion to Evans’s music. Levy has described the compositions as “incredibly human,” explaining that writing lyrics was not about altering the melodies but about feeling them more deeply. Edis has said the challenge was to listen closely enough to hear what the music already contained. Encouraged by enthusiastic responses from European audiences, the pair expanded the concept into a full-length recording.

Those intentions are sincere and audible in every phrase. The arrangements are elegant, the musicians attentive, and the performances consistently refined. Still, the sense of duality persists, perhaps because Levy’s artistic identity is so fully formed. She sings not as a guest in Evans’s world but as an artist who brings her own atmosphere, her own gravity. The result can feel less like a fusion than like two constellations briefly overlapping.

One track, however, achieves a rare equilibrium: Blue in Green. Its long, arching melodic lines and spacious harmonic pacing create a natural home for the voice, allowing the lyric to settle into the music rather than rest upon it. Here, the synthesis feels organic, as though the song had always been waiting to be sung.

Elsewhere, the music sometimes resists that transformation. Evans’s melodies, so often shaped as intimate instrumental reflections, can seem to shift uneasily when asked to carry verbal meaning. This is not a failure of interpretation; it is the inevitable friction that arises when forms designed for different expressive purposes meet.

None of this diminishes the album’s considerable merits. Listeners who value eloquent, characterful voices will find much to admire, as will those who appreciate finely crafted, classically oriented jazz. The musicianship throughout is consistently engaging, and the recording itself is beautifully balanced, preserving the transparency that Evans’s music demands.

More than anything, the album leaves one with a sense of anticipation. Levy emerges as a vocalist of rare presence, an artist who clearly thinks like a musician, shaping phrases with architectural care. One hopes that she will soon turn that sensibility toward a fully personal project built around her own compositions. The evidence here suggests that such a recording could be remarkable.

In a broader sense, this album belongs to a growing movement within jazz: the reimagining of instrumental repertoires through the addition of text and voice. Such projects walk a narrow line between homage and reinvention, and their success often lies not in perfect unity but in the dialogue they create between past and present.

This recording, with all its beauty and its tensions, is part of that conversation. And perhaps that is reason enough to listen.

Thierry De Clemensat
Member at Jazz Journalists Association
USA correspondent for Paris-Move and ABS magazine
Editor in chief – Bayou Blue Radio, Bayou Blue News

PARIS-MOVE, February 16th 2026

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