Originally posted by burning dog
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The legacy of Evans and Ellington is really quite staggering. I don't think someone like Maria Schneider could have existed without Evans and you could argue the same with someone like Darcy James Argue. There was an album review on one of the sites last week by Miho Hazama which looked again at the influence of classical music on jazz which was interesting. For me, as much as I loved Evans later stuff when I was younger, I think the stuff he produced in the 80's was a bit hit and miss, his album "Priestess" probably being the last masterpiece. By that time, his music sounded nothing like the stuff he had produced in the 50s and 60's. By contrast, I think that post-Strayhorn, Ellington's music entered a new stage of creativity. I don't think it helped Evans' cause that he worked at such a slow pace and produced a relatively small body of work for someone so important. As he got older, the extent of writing for his band seemed to diminish and it was just a large "jam band" in the end - the 1980's answer to the early Basie band.
It is a fascinating subject and I feel that Ellington is as essential to jazz as Bach is to Classical music. I don't feel the approach of Ellington has dated and it is the one influence in the music which continues to inspire as opposed to being derivative. (Thinking of someone like Jason Roebke's octet or some of the work by David Murray.) By contrast, I think that Evans was a massive inspiration but is more important for offering an alternative pointer to where jazz orchestration could go. To my ears, the questions he asked as still resonating with writers who are probably technically beyond what Evans was producing 60 years ago. In a nutshell, I feel it is easier to recast Ellington's music in to a contemporary style than Evans. Ellington's music has cast a shadow over composers throughout the history of jazz from the likes of Monk, Hill, Randy Weston, Charlie Mingus, David Murray, Stan Tracey, etc, etc.
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