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In the fall of 1965 pianist Bill Evans, alto saxophonist Lee Konitz, bassist Niels Henning Ørsted Pedersen and drummer Alan Dawson toured parts of Western Europe. It was both a time of Cold War tension and a time when jazz enjoyed popularity in every part of the continent. In countries behind the Iron Curtain, jazz devotees risked being caught at their shortwave radios listening to Willis Conover on the forbidden Voice of America. In Western Europe, nowhere was openness to jazz more evident than in Scandinavia, where the quartet played at Copenhagen’s Tivoli Concert Hall.
On the same tour, Evans, Konitz, Pedersen and Dawson played in Berlin, where a wall constructed by the leadership of East Germany divided the country. While their countrymen across the wall hunched around radios to hear records broadcast by Conover on the VOA, West Germans were free to gather in concert halls for live performances. This was October 29, 1965.
This DVD has an additional performance by the quartet and seventeen live numbers by the Bill Evans Trio with Chuck Israels, bass, and Larry Bunker, drums.