Everybody Digs Bill Evans

I’m not exactly an avid cinema-goer but I couldn’t resist taking a short trip into Dublin to see Everybody Digs Bill Evans, a biographical drama about the late great jazz pianist Bill Evans, the trailer for which is above. I suppose Bill Evans is best known for his wonderful contributions to what many people regard as the greatest jazz album of all time, Kind of Blue which was released in 1959. This film, however, focuses on the period after he had left the Miles Davis band that made that album in order to pursue a career leading a piano trio. It could be argued that it was this step that led to Bill Evans’s most important contribution to the evolution of jazz because he basically created the modern piano trio, converting it from what it had been before – a pianist with bass and drum backing – to an equal partnership of the three diverse instruments. To put such a combination together required him to find musicians of equal creativity and understanding, and he found them when he…