Gil Evans project [EN]

Gil Evans (1912-1988)

Gil Evans was born as Gilmore Green in Toronto, Canada. His mother and stepfather (whose surname Evans he adopted), led itinerant lives but eventually settled in California when Gil was about ten years old. His first true encounter with music occurred at the age of fifteen, when he heard the Orchestra of Duke Ellington perform at a local auditorium--an experience which was to change his life for good.

Convinced he too would dedicate his life to music, Evans set out to learn to play the piano and trained himself as a composer-arranger by transcribing jazz records. In the early 1930s, he began to work with different, today little-known orchestras on the West coast. By 1941 had honed his skills sufficiently to become the staff-arranger of Claude Thornhill (1909-1965). Thornhill was a conservatory-trained pianist, bandleader and composer-arranger, who in 1939 began a band that would be “something new and arresting.” European classical and Impressionistic elements formed an important part of the musical palette of this new Claude Thornhill Orchestra. As an unusual addition, the big band featured two French horns. Thornhill was quick to recognize and incorporate budding talents. Gil Evans and later Gerry Mulligan would write for him.   In Thornhill’s band, Gil Evans found fertile soil to further nurture and develop his musical vocabulary. Evans’s first work for Thornhill falls roughly into two categories: arrangements of pop tunes, such as There’s a Small Hotel and I Don’t Know Why, and arrangements of classical melodies, such as Mussorgsky’s The Old Castle, and Tchaikovsky’s Arab Dance. Thornhill himself arranged Brahms’s Hungarian Dance #5, Schumann’s Träumerei and Grieg’s Le Papillon. The Thornhill orchestra’s quasi-classical recordings and performances received critical acclaim from the trade press, but audiences were less enthusiastic.

Practical problems challenged the band as well: the draft put the band into a constant state of transition, until finally Thornhill himself was enlisted in October, 1942. his departure put an immediate end to the orchestra. Thornhill returned to the big band business after the war, having spent three years in the South Pacific as a Navy band leader. Early in 1946, he assembled a new band. In an unexpected tribute, no fewer than twelve of the original members returned, including Gil Evans. To achieve the sound he had striven for in his earlier band, Thornhill added a tuba, thus creating the particular instrumental combination of tuba and French horns, that Evans cum suis were to use later for the Miles Davis Nonet.

Around that time, Evans’s Spartan basement apartment on West 55th Street (the door always unlocked) became the regular pit stop for those who gigged on 52nd Street, including Gerry Mulligan, John Carisi, Charlie Parker, John Lewis, Dizzy Gillespie, Max Roach and Miles Davis. Through these musicians, Evans acquired first-hand knowledge of the bebop idiom, and before long he brought his first bop arrangements to Thornhill’s band, which, its name notwithstanding, was now effectively led by Evans. He used the band to try out his latest arrangements: an unlikely mixture of European Impressionism and American bebop   Among the seminal yet hitherto unrecorded works from this period are three arrangements for the full Thornhill orchestra, which call for an additional three flute players, i.e., a total of eight woodwinds. This Thornhill Orchestra-plus apparently never recorded -- it may have been a rehearsal band. Evans’s arrangements for this large ensemble include a take on Lover Man (markedly different from the earlier version recorded by Thornhill) and a remarkable medley of three works -- Easy Living, Everything Happens to You, and Moon Dreams. The final segment of this medley, a monumental arrangement of Moon Dreams, became in a thinned-out version one of the most celebrated works from The Birth of the Cool sessions by the Miles Davis Nonet.

Evans would later in the 1950s collaborate again with Miles Davis, which resulted in some of their most famous records: Miles Ahead, Porgy and Bess, Sketches of Spain, and Quiet Nights. Meanwhile, Evans also recorded several albums as leader: Gil Evans and Ten (1957), New Bottle, Old Wine (1958, featuring Cannonball Adderley), Great Jazz Standards (1959), and Out of the Cool (1960). He continued to write and record in the remaining decades, although there were also intervals of relative inactivity. Among the many works that deserve mention are the live recordings with the Gil Evans Orchestra and the later so-called Monday Night Orchestra, which played weekly at Sweet Basil for some time in the 1980s.

Gil Evans - Dutch Jazz Orchestra CDs

Special thanks to Anita and Miles Evans,

The Gil Evans Estate,

Stephanie Stein Crease,

Jeff Sultanof,

David Joyner,

Fred Stride and

The Rutgers Institute of Jazz Studies

Further reading

Laurent Cugny. Las Vegas Tango: Une vie de Gil Evans.

Paris: P.O.L., 1989.

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