Gil Evans

The first record Evans made under his own name is also one of the finest orchestra jazz records ever made, which is a remarkable statement about a debut. The combination of instruments here is unusual even by Evans's standards: French horn, bassoon, and soprano saxophone alongside the more conventional jazz ensemble, and the effect is a sound that exists nowhere else, simultaneously warm and weightless, dense in harmony while remaining transparent in texture.

Steve Lacy's soprano saxophone, still a rare sound in jazz in 1957, is the main solo voice, featured on "Remember," "Ella Speed," "Big Stuff," "Just One of Those Things" and "Jambangle," its nasal shimmer riding over the heavier brass. Lee Konitz, credited on the jacket under the anagram Zeke Tolin, is mostly a section player here, with alto solos on "Ella Speed" and "Just One of Those Things."

Paul Chambers's bass provides the grounding that allows the unusual ensemble to float without drifting. Jo Jones drums only on "Remember"; Nick Stabulas has the other six tracks, and both keep a light touch that suits the lighter-than-usual ensemble. This is Evans at the beginning of his independent career, and it is already fully formed.

The concept is deceptively simple: take eight jazz standards running from W. C. Handy and Jelly Roll Morton through Louis Armstrong's Hot Five, Lester Young and Monk to Dizzy Gillespie and Charlie Parker, and arrange them for a larger orchestra than the one on Gil Evans and Ten. The difference between this and an ordinary orchestral reworking of bebop standards is the difference between translation and transformation. Evans does not deliver the chord changes with different instrumentation; he reconceives the harmonic and rhythmic structures from the ground up, so what you hear is new music that happens to contain recognizable material in the way a river contains rain.

Cannonball Adderley is the featured soloist throughout, a role Steve Lacy's soprano largely filled on Gil Evans and Ten, and the change is significant. Where Lacy fit the quieter emotional register of the Prestige record, Adderley's extroversion pushes against the arrangements in a productive tension: the ensemble is cool and the soloist is anything but, and the gap between them generates more energy than either could produce alone.

Art Blakey's drumming here is worth specific attention: he plays with a lightness that serves the ensemble's transparency without losing the rhythmic forward motion that keeps Adderley's solos grounded. The whole rhythm section, Chambers and Blakey (Philly Joe Jones sits in on "Willow Tree"), had an unusual ability to be present without asserting, which was exactly what Evans's writing required.

The second World Pacific record shows Evans expanding his ensemble slightly and sharpening the approach. Johnny Coles replaces Cannonball Adderley as the principal solo voice, and this turns out to be a crucial decision: Coles's trumpet has a plaintive, slightly vulnerable quality that matches Evans's harmonic sensibility more closely than any previous soloist, and the partnership between them on this record and on Out of the Cool is one of the great arranger-soloist relationships in jazz.

Elvin Jones, on four of the seven tracks (Dennis Charles has the other three), marks a generational shift in the rhythm section, his more forceful and irregular approach contrasting with the lighter drumming of Nick Stabulas and Jo Jones on the Prestige record. The tension between Jones's rhythmic intensity and the ensemble's harmonic delicacy is not a contradiction but a source of power: the music needs something to push against, and Jones provides exactly that without overwhelming the more subtle elements of Evans's writing.

The repertoire runs from Bix Beiderbecke and Don Redman through Monk, Clifford Brown and John Lewis to a Landesman and Wolf ballad, and the range of source material is matched by the range of Evans's interpretive approaches: some pieces are relatively faithful to their origins, others are so thoroughly reconceived that the original is effectively gone. Great Jazz Standards closes the World Pacific period and leads directly to the even more ambitious Impulse! recordings that followed.

The masterpiece. Everything Evans had been developing across the Prestige and World Pacific records arrives here at its fullest expression, the ensemble now completely his own and the writing achieving a level of sophistication that has never been equaled in jazz orchestra music. The pieces are longer, the structures more ambitious, and the relationship between soloist and ensemble more deeply integrated: Johnny Coles's trumpet does not solo against the ensemble but with it, as if his lines were written into the arrangements from the beginning.

"La Nevada" runs more than fifteen minutes and moves through sections and moods with the patient inevitability of a film score, though a film score with more musical substance than most films deserve. The opening builds slowly from a guitar figure over sustained bass and drums, the ensemble entering in layers until the full sound is present, and then Evans begins to take it apart again. It is a piece that reveals more on each listening, the structural logic becoming clearer without the wonder diminishing.

Ron Carter's bass is recorded with an unusual clarity and warmth, sitting at the center of the sound rather than at its bottom, providing harmonic as well as rhythmic guidance. Out of the Cool is the record Evans had been building toward since 1957, and it remains one of the most fully realized artistic statements in jazz, the equal of his Columbia collaborations with Miles Davis and the product of a vision that was entirely Evans's own.

An anomaly in the Evans catalog and one worth approaching with accurate expectations. Evans does not play a note and none of the music is his: Creed Taylor produced the date, and Evans's part was choosing the two composers and sitting in the booth. Three of the six tracks, alternating through the LP, belong to Cecil Taylor's group in one of Taylor's earliest and most important recordings, featuring a young Archie Shepp and, on "Mixed," Roswell Rudd, in a free jazz context that was genuinely radical for 1961. The other three are Johnny Carisi's compositions and arrangements for a studio orchestra, work Evans admired and wanted to document.

The Taylor performances are extraordinary on their own terms. "Pots" and "Mixed" find Taylor at the intersection of his classical training and his free jazz vision, the piano playing percussive and dense, Shepp's tenor already displaying the aggressive expressionism that would define his career. Sunny Murray's drumming here is a revelation, his pulse-based approach dissolving the fixed tempo into something more elastic and responsive, and the result is among the best documented early Taylor.

The Carisi tracks are more accessible but less historically significant, well-crafted orchestral writing in the tradition Evans himself occupied. Taken together the two bands constitute an unusual document: an arranger of genius presenting the work of others because he believed the work deserved to be heard. The record is imperfect as a single statement but invaluable as a document of what jazz was doing in 1961.

The Verve period represents the last chapter of Evans's classic orchestral work before the electric 1970s transformed his approach, and The Individualism of Gil Evans is the finest record of that period. The ensemble has grown more flexible across the sessions, different combinations of musicians for different pieces, and Evans exploits the variability to achieve a range of textures wider than any single instrumentation could have produced. "Las Vegas Tango" alone justifies the record's existence: a slow, modal piece that builds over six minutes from a near-silence into something huge and then dissipates again, Johnny Coles's trumpet at the center throughout.

Wayne Shorter's inclusion in the reed section is a signal of where jazz was going in 1964: his tenor brings a harmonic adventurousness that engages with Evans's writing on its own level, finding the implied spaces in the arrangements and filling them with something unexpected.

The record's title is accurate: this is Evans at his most identifiably himself, the ensemble sound completely defined, the compositional voice unmistakable. It was the last major statement of the approach he had developed over the previous decade, and it remains among the finest things he ever did.

The turn to electric instruments in the late 1960s was not a capitulation to commercial pressure but a genuine expansion of Evans's sonic palette, and Blues in Orbit is the best document of the transition. The acoustic orchestra of the Prestige and Verve years is here supplemented with electric piano, electric bass, and the more insistent rhythmic pulse that Miles Davis was simultaneously exploring on Bitches Brew. The effect is strange at first for listeners who came to Evans through Out of the Cool, but the underlying compositional intelligence is identical.

The tuba, which Evans had used as a low-register color in the earlier records, here takes on a more prominent role: the instrument's fatness of tone sits at the center of the new electric ensemble the way it could not in the acoustic context, and Johnson's playing has a personality that rewards the attention. Billy Harper's tenor is one of the fiercer voices in post-Coltrane jazz, and his presence changes the emotional temperature of the record significantly from the cooler earlier work. Joe Beck's electric guitar brings a new texture to the Evans ensemble, and Elvin Jones, back in the drum chair he held on Out of the Cool and The Individualism of Gil Evans, drives the six 1969 tracks, with Alphonse Mouzon on the two from 1971.

Sue Evans's percussion adds a rhythmic dimension that the acoustic ensembles never had, and Gil Evans integrates it with the characteristic ease of someone who has been hearing these textures in his head for years. Blues in Orbit is the record that makes the 1970s Evans records comprehensible, the point where the transition became a new aesthetic rather than a work in progress.

Recorded in 1971 but not released until 1981, Where Flamingos Fly is both a document of the transitional period and a reminder that Evans's 1970s sessions produced far more material than was released at the time. The sessions were made for Capitol, which never issued them, but the record does not sound like an afterthought or an archive release: it is among the more coherent of the electric-period statements.

These are New York studio sessions by two overlapping groups, one on "Zee Zee" and "El Matador" and a larger one on the four pieces in between, and the looser structures leave more room for improvising than the Verve records did. The writing is still Evans's, the proportions and the balance between written and improvised material still characteristic, but there is more room for the individual voices to breathe than the packed textures of the earlier records permitted.

Where Flamingos Fly is a minor Evans record in the best sense: it does not attempt the ambition of Out of the Cool or The Individualism, but it does what it sets out to do with completeness and conviction. For listeners who came to the 1970s records through the 1960s classics, it serves as a useful middle ground, the transition point becoming visible in retrospect.

Svengali, taped live at two New York concerts in May and June 1973, is the most fully realized of Evans's early-1970s records, the electric ensemble now settled into its own identity rather than being in transition from the acoustic one. The personnel, largely the same working band from the previous few years, has developed a collective understanding of Evans's requirements: when to play densely, when to thin out, how to navigate the slow-moving harmonic changes without losing the internal momentum that makes the music feel alive rather than static.

Richard Williams and Hannibal Marvin Peterson share the trumpet chair, each bringing a different character: Williams is precise and brassy, Peterson fiercer and more declamatory, and the contrast gives different tracks strikingly different lead voices. David Sanborn's alto saxophone, raw-toned and intense, adds another sharp edge to the ensemble that the earlier orchestras never had. Ted Dunbar's guitar provides a textural warmth beneath the horns that Evans integrates into the ensemble fabric with characteristic subtlety.

There is no title piece; the name is an anagram of Gil Evans. The centerpieces are the two ten-minute performances, George Russell's "Blues in Orbit" and Billy Harper's "Cry of Hunger," long, slowly evolving ensemble pieces that move through zones of density and transparency in the manner of the best earlier Evans, and they demonstrate that the electric instruments had not fundamentally altered his approach to form. Svengali is the 1970s record to start with for newcomers to that period of his career.

The most improbable record in Evans's catalog is also one of the best: a jazz orchestra reworking of Jimi Hendrix compositions that manages to be simultaneously faithful to Hendrix's spirit and entirely Evans's own. The project was not ironic or nostalgic but a genuine musical argument that Hendrix's compositions contained more than the original performances had revealed, that the underlying structures were rich enough to survive the radical change of context. The argument is convincing.

The arranging was shared around the band: Tom Malone arranged "Angel" and the "Crosstown Traffic" medley, Howard Johnson "Voodoo Chile," Trevor Koehler "Gypsy Eyes" and David Horowitz "1983," while Evans kept "Up from the Skies" and, with Warren Smith, the "Castles Made of Sand" and "Foxey Lady" pairing, which runs past eleven minutes and is the longest thing on the record. Evans's "Little Wing" is not on the LP; it came out on There Comes a Time in 1976 and was added to the CD reissue here. John Abercrombie's guitar is present but not dominant, functioning as one color among many rather than the primary voice, which is both unexpected and exactly right.

David Sanborn's alto saxophone, typically associated with the more commercially oriented jazz of the era, proves to be an inspired choice in this context: his tone has a rawness that connects to the rock origins of the material without being inauthentic to the jazz orchestra setting. Plays the Music of Jimi Hendrix is the 1970s Evans record that most rewards the attention and most surprised its original audience, and it has lost none of its strangeness or beauty in the decades since.

The Montreux festival recording documents the Gil Evans Orchestra in live performance, which is in some ways the truest context for the 1970s ensemble: the working band had developed a flexibility in performance that studio recordings only partially captured, the arrangements serving as frameworks for improvisation rather than complete specifications. The European festival audience received the music warmly, and the recordings have a correspondingly relaxed energy, the musicians playing with an ease that comes from months of working the same material.

There is no Hendrix on this record. The five pieces are Alan Shorter's "Parabola," Masabumi Kikuchi's "Lunar Eclipse," Trevor Koehler's "Amadama," and two Evans pieces, "Hotel Me" and "Waltz," and the arrangements are opened up for long solos and collective playing.

The sound quality is acceptable for a festival recording of the period, and the performance quality is consistently high. For listeners who have worked through the studio catalog, the Montreux record provides essential supplementary evidence of what the 1970s orchestra sounded like outside the studio, and it is the most valuable live document of this period of Evans's career.

The second RCA record gives the synthesizers a bigger role than before, his continuing curiosity about new timbres taking him into territory that most jazz musicians of his generation were actively avoiding. The synth textures are integrated into the ensemble writing with the same care as the earlier acoustic instruments, which is to say they do not sit on top of the music as a novelty but are woven into its harmonic and rhythmic fabric. The effect is strange and occasionally wonderful, the electronic colors providing a new dimension that the acoustic and electric instruments alone could not have reached.

"Anita's Dance," written for his wife, is the most melodically straightforward thing Evans wrote in the 1970s, a simple tune played with genuine tenderness against the more complex ensemble backdrop. The piece suggests that the density and complexity of the orchestra was always in service of an emotional directness that Evans rarely permitted himself elsewhere, and its presence here is a small revelation about what the whole career had been about.

There Comes a Time is a late-period record with the rewards and the roughnesses that description implies: more experimental and less resolved than the major earlier statements, but consistently interesting and occasionally extraordinary. As a document of where Evans was heading in the final decade of his career, it is essential, and "Anita's Dance" alone is worth the price of admission.

The Tokyo recordings document the 1976 Japanese tour, and the Japanese audience's reception of Evans and his orchestra was notably warmer than what the American market had managed for the more experimental work. The performances have a confidence and a generosity that comes from musicians playing for an audience that has come specifically to hear them. The orchestra sounds different when it knows it is appreciated, and the Tokyo Concert is among the more relaxed and communicative of the 1970s live documents.

The three pieces are "Amanda," Charles Mingus's "Orange Was the Colour of Her Dress," and George Russell's "Stratusphunk," which Evans had first recorded on Out of the Cool in 1960. George Adams's fierce tenor, paired with the Japanese saxophonist Kohsuke Mine, creates a reed section with a different character from the New York records: Adams's raw power tempered by Mine's more controlled approach. Lew Soloff and the Japanese trumpeter Kunitoshi Shinohara share the brass lead, with Bob Stewart's tuba anchoring the low end.

The Tokyo Concert closes the survey of Evans's twenty-year recorded career covered here, and it does so with the orchestra still developing, still finding new approaches within the aesthetic that Evans had defined across five decades of musical thought. He would continue working until 1988, but the Tokyo recordings are a suitable place to pause and take stock of what the whole arc had produced: one of the most original bodies of work in American music, assembled by a man who had spent his entire career refusing to repeat himself.