Everybody Digs Bill Evans LP

Everybody Digs Bill Evans is an album by jazz musician Bill Evans. It was released in early 1959 on the Riverside label. Everybody Digs Bill Evans was Evans's second album, done two years after his first record as a leader. Though his producer (Orrin Keepnews) had wanted Evans to record a follow-up album to his debut sooner, the self-critical Evans felt he had "nothing new to say" before this album. The recording captures Evans at a time when he frequently played extended musical ideas using block chords, a technique also favored by Milt Buckner, George Shearing, Oscar Peterson, and other jazz pianists. That combined with his use of pedals gave him a sound considered by critics to be innovative. Though Evans had quit the Miles Davis band a month before the album was recorded, Davis was enamored of Evans' piano sound as it was developing through 1958, and decided to use him as the pianist for four of the five tracks on the 1959 recording Kind of Blue. In a 1967 interview with Cadence Magazine, Evans revealed he named the album after consuming a full bottle of Old Crow whiskey. "Don (Baker, Evans' publicist) wasn't happy with it when I phoned him," he recalled. "But I told them I wouldn't go ahead with the recording unless I got my title. So he relented." Writing for Allmusic, music critic Michael G. Nastos called the album "a landmark recording for the young pianist... Though not his very best effort overall, Evans garnered great attention, and rightfully so, from this important album of 1958."[3] Samuel Chell of All About Jazz wrote: "With its varied tempos, rhythms and programming, Everybody Digs Bill Evans sustains interest without allowing the listener for a moment to mistake the singular, inimitable voice of the leader. It's not hard to understand why many Evans followers, 'casual' and otherwise, list it as their favorite of the pianist's recordings. It's doubtful there's a more introspective, meditative trio set on record, yet the pianist shows he can dance as well."[2] It was voted number 3 in the 50 All-Time Overlooked Jazz Albums from Colin Larkin's All Time Top 1000 Albums.[6]