Evans And Bennett: The CBC Program

It’s not his birthday or the anniversary of his death, but Bill Evans seems to be in the air. Perhaps he’s always in the air. Response to the previous Rifftides post seems to say so.

Pianist Jack Reilly, whose two books on the subject are indispensible to appreciation of Evans’s harmony, sent an alert to a television program that could be thought of as an adjunct to his studies of Evans. The 1976 show aired by the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation gives us the opportunity to intimately observe Evans’s harmonic, and melodic, genius in solo and as an accompanist. The half-hour show aired in 1976 on the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. It reunited Evans with Tony Bennett. They reprised songs from the two albums they made together. Here is the progam in its entirety. The video quality supports full screen viewing.