Artist: Gil Evans
Genre(s):
Jazz
Discography:
Jazz Masters 23
Year:
Tracks: 10
One of the to the highest degree significant arrangers in jazz history, Gil Evans' three album-length collaborations with Miles Davis (Miles Ahead, Porgy and Bess and Sketches of Spain) ar all considered classics. Evans had a extended and varied life history that sometimes ran analogue to the trumpeter. Like Davis, Gil became involved in utilizing electronics in the 1970s and preferable non to face plunk for and recreate the past. He lED his own band in California (1933-38) which eventually became the backup mathematical group for Skinnay Ennis; Evans stayed on for a time as arranger. He gained recognition for his pretty futurist charts for Claude Thornhill's Orchestra (1941-42 and 1946-48) which took vantage of the ensemble's cool tones, utilised French horns and a tuba as frontline instruments and by 1946 merged the influence of federal Bureau of Prisons. He met Miles Davis (wHO admired his act upon with Thornhill) during this time and contributed arrangements of "Moonlight Dreams" and "Boplicity" to Davis' "Birth of the Cool" nonet.
After a time period in obscureness, Evans wrote for a Helen Merrill session and and so collaborated with Davis on Miles Ahead. In addition to his work with Miles (which too included a 1961 recorded Carnegie Hall concert and the half-album Subdued Nights), Evans recorded several superb and highly original sets as a leader (including Gil Evans and Ten, Young Bottle Old Wine and Peachy Jazz Standards) during the epoch. In the 1960s among the albums he worked on for other artists were famed efforts with Kenny Burrell and Astrud Gilberto. After his possess sessions for Verve during 1963-64, Evans waited until 1969 until recording once more as a loss leader. That year's Blue devils in Orbit was his first successful travail at combining acoustic and electric instruments; it would be followed by dates for Artists House, Atlantic (Svengali) and a far-famed tribute to Jimi Hendrix in 1974. After 1975's In that location Comes a Time (which features among its sidemen David Sanborn), to the highest degree of Evans' recordings were taken from live performances. Starting in 1970 he began playing with his large supporting players on a weekly footing in New York clubs. Filled with such all-star players as George Adams, Lew Soloff, Marvin "Hannibal" Peterson, Chris Hunter, Howard Johnson, Pete Levin, Hiram Bullock, Hamiet Bluiett and Arthur Blythe among others, Evans' later on bands were top-heavy in talent only tended to stray on excessively long. Gil Evans, other than sketching out a framework and contributory his keyboard, seemed to permit the orchestra largely campaign itself, inspiring rather than close guiding the music. There were some worthwhile recordings from the 1980s (when the stripe had a long cosmic string of Monday night gigs at Sweet Basil in New York) merely in general they do non ofttimes live up to their potential difference. Prior to his end, Gil Evans recorded with his "arranger's piano" on duets with Lee Konitz and Steve Lacy and his body of
Thalia
