Five-CD collection comes housed in a fabric-wrapped, hard-cover book

Everybody Still Digs Bill Evans: A Career Retrospective (1956–1980) spans the pianist’s Riverside, Milestone, Fantasy, Verve, Warner Bros., and Elektra/Musician catalogs, and features such collective personnel as Tony Bennett, Cannonball Adderley, Kenny Burrell, Stan Getz, Zoot Sims, Eddie Gomez, Shelly Manne, and Lee Konitz, among many others.

Produced by Nick Phillips, the five-CD collection comes housed in a fabric-wrapped, hard-cover book, containing 48 pages of photos and ephemera, as well as new liner notes from the GRAMMY® Award-winning writer, radio host, and music journalist, Neil Tesser, who offers insight into the life and career of Evans through recent and archival interviews with a variety of subjects, as well as a deep survey of the box set’s tracks.  Everybody Still Digs Bill Evans includes newly remastered audio by GRAMMY®-winning engineer, Paul Blakemore.

The majority of the box set’s musical selections are culled from Evans’ trios, with whom he released over 40 albums.

Discs one and two offer highlights from those recordings, with the first disc spotlighting his Riverside sessions and spanning Evans’ earliest days working with Philly Joe Jones, Teddy Kotick, Paul Chambers, and Sam Jones, to solidifying a group with drummer Paul Motian and bassist Scott LaFaro, who died tragically in 1961, to the post-LaFaro trios featuring Motian, Chuck Israels, and Larry Bunker. The second disc focuses on Evans’ trio recordings from the mid-’60s onwards, collaborating with sidemen like Eddie Gomez, Marty Morell, Eliot Zigmund, Gary Peacock, Jack DeJohnette, Joe LaBarbera, and Marc Johnson.
Evans’ many solo recordings were also an important aspect of his career, garnering him two of his seven GRAMMY® Awards (for 1963’s Conversations with Myself and 1968’s Alone). Disc three of the collection spotlights the pianist’s performances unaccompanied by others (some are truly “solo” while others feature Evans accompanying himself by way of overdubbing), including some of his seminal works like “Peace Piece” and “N.Y.C.’s No Lark,” as well as his musical composition to his son, “Letter to Evan,” and the Miles Davis-penned “Nardis,” which, in a lengthy and abstract solo piano exposition, Evans made wholly his own.

Disc four, meanwhile, focuses on Evans’ non-trio collaborations—of which there were many. Highlights include his famous duet partnerships with legendary vocalist Tony Bennett and lyrical guitarist Jim Hall, and a rare pairing with fellow pianist and interviewer Marian McPartland, excerpted from her long-running NPR show. Evans’ work within quartet and quintet settings is also highlighted on this disc, with such esteemed musicians as Cannonball Adderley, Stan Getz, Freddie Hubbard, Toots Thielemans, Zoot Sims, and Lee Konitz.

For the final disc of Everybody Still Digs Bill Evans, fans will enjoy a newly discovered live performance by the Bill Evans Trio, featuring Eddie Gomez on bass and Eliot Zigmund on drums. Available in its entirety, the previously unreleased concert took place on June 20, 1975, at Oil Can Harry’s—an intimate club that operated until 1977 in Vancouver, BC. The show was captured for Canadian radio host Gary Barclay, who served as the evening’s announcer, and later aired the set on his popular CHQM jazz show. Then, for nearly half a century, the tapes lay forgotten—until now. Thanks to audio restoration by Plangent Processes and meticulous mastering by Blakemore, the intimate recording sounds just as fresh today as it did more than 45 years ago.