Gil Evans

Diese Musik in meiner Werbung BIOGRAPHY

The innovative arranger, composer and bandleader Gil Evans (Ian Ernest Gilmore Green) was born May 13, 1912, in Canada. Evans, his mother and stepfather lived in various places in the Pacific Northwest until he was age eight, when the family settled in California. Evans was a self-taught musician who formed his first band as a high school student in Stockton, California, and started learning arranging by copying instrumental parts off the big pop records of the day. By 1936, Evans had a 12-piece dance band that was a hit with the college crowd in Southern California. In the fall of 1937, due to lack of work, the band was taken over by the vocalist Skinnay Ennis. Gil became Ennis's chief arranger, and he and some of his musicians moved to Hollywood, where the band backed up Ennis in swanky restaurants and nightclubs, and on Bob Hope's popular radio show. The more well-known arranger Claude Thornhill was also hired for the Hope Show, thus beginning one of Gil's most significant musical associations.
Thornhill started in his own dance band in late 1939, and was able to officially hire Gil in early 1941, when the band was finally on its feet. The Thornhill band, with its unique instrumentation -- a full woodwind section, french horns and later on tuba-- and Claude's interest in orchestral textures and complex harmonies--was one of the most unusual dance bands of the era. Thornhill gave Evans a lot of leeway, and the band became a "lab" for Gil.

After World War II, Evans settled in New York to work full-time for Thornhill. Evans was thrilled by the move -- he was drawn by the beboppers, and the entire vibrant musical scene. In 1947, he wrote several sophisticated charts of bebop tunes for the Thornhill band, as well as unique reworkings of themes by Moussorgsky, Yradier and other 20th century composers. These scores established Gil's reputation among musicians; they were not just novel arrangements but amounted to recompositions, which had few antecedents in jazz.

At that time, Evans was living in a basement apartment right near 52nd Street, which became a talking shop for other inquisitive jazz musicians. Evans, Miles Davis, Gerry Mulligan, John Lewis and others were interested in creating flexible arrangements that embodied the textures of the Thornhill band, but for a smaller ensemble. The result was the Miles Davis Nonet and several arrangements that were recorded in 1949–50, first issued as singles, then as the 1954 LP, aptly titled The Birth of the Cool. Evans's scores, Boplicity and Moon Dreams had subtly shifting textures, from which Davis's horn emerged. This combination of luminous textures, formality and fluidity, became the hallmark of Evans’s art.

Evans freelanced sporadically during the early to mid-'50s, doing occasional arrangements for radio and TV orchestras, various singers and record dates. But he was out of the public eye until he collaborated with Davis on MILES AHEAD (1957), a groundbreaking LP that featured Davis, then a bona-fide jazz star, with a 19-piece jazz orchestra. Two strikingly different Davis-Evans LPs followed, an adaptation of George Gershwin's PORGY AND BESS, and the suite-like SKETCHES OF SPAIN, that incorporated compositions by Roderigo and Falla with three of Evans’s own flamenco-based compositions. Evans finally received artistic recognition with these masterworks, though by then he was already in his mid-40s. Through the late '50s and well into the '60s, though Evans could barely get any club work with his large ensemble, he created several equally masterful recordings as a leader. On albums such as NEW BOTTLE, OLD WINE, OUT OF THE COOL and THE INDIVIDUALISM OF GIL EVANS, Evans enhanced the artistry of other leading jazz musicians --such as Steve Lacy, Cannonball Adderley, Wayne Shorter and Phil Woods -- with his arrangements.

Throughout the '60s, Evans spent more time on composition: Flute Song, Last Vegas Tango, Proclamation and Hotel Me became part of his working repertoire. From the late '60s on, his arrangements generally became quite flexible, allowing greater space for improvisation, and he experimented with electronic instruments, percussion instruments, and freed-up rhythms. His work attracted a new generation of musicians, notably the innovative rock guitarist Jimi Hendrix. Evans himself was captivated by Hendrix's wholly new guitar style, as well as his songs; an Evans-Hendrix recording project was in the planning stages when Hendrix died in August 1970.

In 1973, Evans decided to do a Hendrix tribute for a Carnegie Hall concert. He now had a fairly active band with noted young musicians such as Lew Soloff, Hannibal "Marvin" Peterson, David Sanborn, Billy Harper, and John Abercrombie, who were excited about doing this material. Most of the Hendrix arrangements were written by Gil's musicians, but Gil wrote charts for “Little Wing,” Castles Made of Sand," and “Up from the Skies.” These scores and others Gil penned during the '70s were the epitome of a new fusion—trailblazing examples of how jazz, rock and myriad musical elements could come together in an uncompromising way. Evans’s Hendrix arrangements, as well as revamped versions of his scores for compositions by Gershwin, Thelonious Monk and Charles Mingus were mainstays of his band's repertoire, as Evans went on to new-found fame and visibility during the 1980s. His work remained strikingly original, up until his death, March 20, 1988.