The Pianist Bill Evans had a huge influence in the jazz fraternity and particularly on the drummer Larry Bunker. Bunker seems to have taken it calmly in 1963 when Evans, who was playing a couple of weeks at a club in Bunker's home town of Los Angeles, called the drummer over from his seat at the bar and asked him to make up a trio.
During the Sixties he played jazz as a sideman in Los Angeles with groups led by Bud Shank, Pete Jolly and Clare Fischer. He toured Australia backing Judy Garland in 1964 and in 1965 Japan with Stan Getz.
The Gerry Mulligan Quartet had been in existence for only a few months when in 1953 Bunker replaced its drummer Chico Hamilton. Bunker moved into a band that included Mulligan, his trumpeter Chet Baker, Evans, and Art Pepper.
American jazz drummer, vibraphonist, and percussionist. A member of the Bill Evans Trio in the mid-1960s, he also played timpani with the Los Angeles Philharmonic orchestra.