Bill Evans Trio - On A Friday Evening [CD]

A newly-discovered live performance by Bill Evans, featuring Eddie Gómez 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 Paul Blakemore, the intimate recording sounds just as fresh today as it did 45 years ago.

On A Friday Evening, and will be available on two 180-gram vinyl LPs, CD, and across digital and streaming platforms. The digital release will also be available in hi-res 24-bit/192 kHz and 24-bit/96 kHz formats. The nine-track outing includes its own set of original liner notes from GRAMMY^® Award-winning writer, radio host, and music journalist, Neil Tesser, who incorporates new interviews with trio members Eddie Gómez and Elliot Zigmund, along with meticulous, track-by-track details on the evening’s program – which included both original compositions and standards.

On A Friday Evening also offers listeners the rare chance to hear Evans and his bandmates settling into a new reconfiguration of the trio, which Zigmund had joined just months before. Tesser explains that this live recording“merit[s] attention, and much of that comes from hearing Zigmund, in an intimate setting away from the concert hall, finding his place in the lineage of the most important piano trio of its era – a trio that for 15 years had exploded the established piano-plus-accompanists model and replaced it with a true trialogue among instruments.”