Originally posted by Serial_Apologist
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About a year later he was playing with Miles!
JR
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More like Dexter Gordon, I thought.
About a year later he was playing with Miles!
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Willie Dixon's 'Spoonful' from the 1963/64 album 'The Individualism of Gil Evans':
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JazzrookOriginally posted by Jazzrook View PostWillie Dixon's 'Spoonful' from the 1963/64 album 'The Individualism of Gil Evans':
JR
This was my favourite Gil Evans album when I first discovered his music and became obsessive about it. I think "Spoonful" is one of the best tracks on it although I have always felt that "The Barbra Story" is perhaps one if his finest arrangements. Over the years my perception of this record has changed as it it dawned on me that the record was culled from a number of recording sessions and initially heavily edited. My main feeling about this record now is one of frustration that his appearances in the recording studio were too rare. From recollection, in the 1960s this was one of only three albums he made , the other being "Out of the cool" and the uneven "Blues in orbit." ( I have not heard this latter record for years but I always felt that it was one of his lesser efforts although not as bad as "There comes a time" which has aged poorly.) Listening again, "Individualism" strikes me as being a workshop for Evans' ideas as not a fully focussed and realised album. Consequently, there are elements that are outstanding and other like "Hotel Me" which are less impressive. I love "Time of the barracudas" and "Spoonful." "Concorde" is also a fascinating chart. The biggest disappointment for me is "Las Vegas Tango", perhaps the most beguiling and sublime arrangement on the whole record yet marred by the sloppy trumpet section playing at the end that accentuates the shout chorus. They are out of time and there are moments where it also sounds like some wrong notes are being played too. Gil was rarely given sufficient time to rehearse his bands and it is a shame that after Jimmy Knepper's wonderful trombone solo, the trumpets fluff the arrangement at the crucial point although I think that what Gil was expressing was not necessarily easy to execute.
What I think is fascinating about the "Individualism" album is a loosening up of the arrangements which first started with "La Nevada" on "Out of the cool." In the end, this approach dominated his later albums but the germs of this are on this disc. This albums benefits from having Elvin Jones on many of the tracks and this gives it a more organic feel that his previous charts which seem far more formal. If you like, "individualism" feels like it is Gil loosening his tie.Comment
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I agree - especially as regards The Barbara Song - rightly given prominence by one of your very favourite current big band leaders on Saturday's J to Z. Normally I would not favour re-arrangements of early Weill themes which usually manage to destroy their (for me) self-sufficient idiosyncracy - where Mike and Kate Westbrook do this they enhance that character rather than the opposite - but Gil's is effectively a total re-composition, employing some of the most gorgeous timbral combinations anyone in any genre could have come up with - even composers such as Koechlin or Dutilleux.Originally posted by Ian Thumwood View Post
I've never managed to figure Gil Evans's tie-loosening in his later work, given his diamond-precisioning attention to timbral subtlety in the minutiae that deserved his celebrated reputation in the collaborations with Miles; they resulted in a convergence in the direction of Sun Ra, which sounds fine in any other respect, and gave quite a few (including Brits) some chances of self-promotion in vaunted associations and presumably not bad pay!Comment
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Gil Evans plus 10, I think his first "name" album on Prestige with Lee Konitz. Not sure of the background as Prestige didn't normally pay for rehearsals, but some lovely early-ish stuff. http://youtu.be/eerFtn--GyQ
And as an aside, listening to Chick Corea's favourite influences last week, his choice of Bartok's Concerto for Orchestra (the opening), had strong hints of Gil. But I could be wrong.
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Well the Bartok was composed in 1943, so maybe a tad early for Gil; Bartok always struck me as slow to learn how to de-clutter his orchestral pallette - the early works, even "The Wooden prince" ballet of 1914-16, marvellous music though they contain, were still full of Straussian over-elaboration - thickening of parts by doubling for the sake of new sonorities - but by the time of the C for O he had learned what lessons he found in Debussy's subtlety in that area. Oddly enough, the passage Corea chose as illustration has always sounded to me like Bartok had studied Holst's score for "the Planets"! If you want to hear something approaching Gil's genius, go there - especially "Venus"! Another influence there was Schoenberg's fantastic scoring of his Op 16 Five Orchestral Pieces of 1909 - a score of which Holst is said to have had permanently on his work table when composing.Originally posted by BLUESNIK'S REVOX View PostComment
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I knew that would happen! I meant Bartok's orchestral influence (possibly) on Gil, given that they were all at that time into Bartok! I mean, I don't think Bartok ever played with Claude Thornhill, but ...
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Ah ! "This motive from the first movement of Bartók’s Concerto for Orchestra emerges as a ghostly echo in Gil Evans’ arrangement of the Richard Rodgers and Lorenz Hart song, Wait Till You See Her. This is from the 1963 album, Quiet Nights, featuring Miles Davis and Gil Evans..."
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Allan Holdsworth - The Sixteen Men of Tain
Supernally beautiful, convulsively exquisite.
I can't wait for the new live album next week. 
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No, but he did with Benny Goodman!Originally posted by BLUESNIK'S REVOX View Post
Goodman was classically-trained, of course, and had concertos written for him by Copland and Hindemith. That said, Goodman negotiates complex lines on that recording of "Contrasts" which pre-figure Jimmy Giuffre's ideas on those trio recordings with Paul Bley and Steve Swallow 23 years later.Comment
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Hummm - I have that recording, and will check out later. BTW it's one of the recordings issued by Teo without Miles's permission.Originally posted by BLUESNIK'S REVOX View PostComment
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I have just ordered "Quiet Nights" as this is an album I had totally over-looked. I have so much my Miles in my collection that I had forgotten about this.
I think that there are probably four "eras" of Gil Evans' work. The first era runs from his work with Claude Thornhill through to Birth of the Cool which I think is very much a culmination of where his work was headed. Because Thornhill's work often went outside of the realms of jazz, Evans' work is someone over-looked as jazz fans just tend to plump for the Bop tracks with Lee Konitz and forget that Gil already had been working professionally as an arranger prior to this point having started with the dance band led by Skinnay Ennis. Thornhill's band was highly original. I would then say that there was a point through the 1950s where Evans refined his craft and which includes stuff like "Plus ten" and the work with Miles as well as the "New Wine, old bottle" albums which stripped the concept of the Davis collaborations down to a series of punchy, epoch defining arrangements. That said, I think there is a quantum leap between "Plus ten" and Miles ahead." The "Porgy & Bess" album was so definitive that any other arrangements of his material sound pale by comparison. It is the ultimate version of this Gershwin work.
By the 1960s I think that Evans started to reduce the element of writing down further and allowed greater expression for the soloists. The albums "Out of the cool" and "Individualism" both strike me as finding Evans at his most uninhibited. The first album is one of his most radical statements and, for my money, it is the arrangement of "Bilboa Song" which is his greatest achievement as a writer / arranger. Nothing else he arranged sounded this strident. It is his ultimate "modernist" statement in my opinion. The more I listen to it, the more I feel this arrangement is increasingly radical. This arrangement and "Barbra Story" are highpoints in Evans' work after the collaborations with Davis. As I said previously, these albums also have the antecedents of Evans' more "minimal" approach to writing with "Hotel Me" and "a Nevada." I think it is disappointing that there is so little else by Evans from this period. There are some decent arrangements for Kenny Burrell on the "Guitar Forms" album and a number of charts for Astrid Gilberto and Helen Merrill. Ryan Truesdell made some recordings of "salvaged" Evans scores a few years back and the biggest disappointment for me is how little there was that had not been previously recorded. I don't think that Evans was at all prolific and there are stories that he found arranging labourious. If you like, "Impressionism" does a fine job of collating a number of disparate Evans sessions which might otherwise not have seen the light of day. I love this era of Gil's writing and just wish there was more of it. Given the importance of Gil Evans in the jazz pantheon, the record labels did not put enough work his way. In the late 50s, he was still getting commissions by the likes of Benny Goodman for work as something of a "jobbing arranger" even though Goodman declined to perform the charts he had written for the band for a tour of Russia, I believe.
It is a job to see the exact point at which Evans' output dropped in quality. I believe he was unrecorded from about 1965-69 when he produced "Blues in orbit" which always disappointed me. The following "Svengali" is a record I did not care much for until recently but I am now a convert. Tracks like "Cry of hunger" and "Thoroughbred" as well as the reworking of "Summertime" with the guitar of Ted Dunbar still demonstrate the traits in Evans' writing but the line up dispenses with woodwinds and features keyboards as well as the trademark tuba. It is one of his best albums from 1970s onwards. I also think that "Priestess" is a terrific album with the excellent "Orange was the colour of her dress" and the wonderfully atmospheric "Lunar Eclipse" which is one of my all time favourite Evans arrangements. It is miles away from where he was 15 years previously but still a brilliant arrangement. The final period of his work from 1973-1987 is therefore a mixed bag. In the end the band seemed to dispense with arrangements altogether and the band seemed happy to perform from a relatively small book and with an approach which was more in keeping with head arrangements. No wonder that MM&W consider is as an inspiration because it was just a big band jam session in the end, riffing through a programme of Mingus, Parker and Hendrix covers. If you took his work from this period, I am not sure that his reputation would have been so great with arrangers like Mike Gibbs who took his cues actually being more interesting. Annoyingly, he was very prolific in his last ten years but inconsistent. The albums with Laurent Cugny's French orchestra always seemed "cleaner" than the American outfit but a little bit bland.
I would have to be frank and suggest that the key to Evans' work is probably contained within 8 albums - the three "official" records with Miles, Out of the Cool, New wine, Individualism, Svengali and perhaps "priestess." This is about ten hours of music which isn't a great deal to show for his genius. It is frustrating that when labels did show an interest, Gil seemed to have lost interest in writing and the records all tend to feature the same material.Comment
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Listening to the "Quiet Nights" album and reading the liner notes, I can appreciate why Miles was hacked off that this was released. The music has the feel of a rough draft and the arrangements were not fully realised. It is tantalising as effectively there is only about 20 minutes of music from the project and you wonder where it might have ended up had they produced enough music for a whole LP. Early sixties Miles is something of a hinterland in his music but I have to say that some of Gil Evans' scoring is so good that you wish it had been fully realized, even though I think Miles was ultimately looking for something else in his music. The liner notes by the late Bob Belden mention the rhythmic element of the arrangements and I would concur that there isn't the attention to detail with the percussion in this instance as you might have encountered with someone like Sun Ra. The percussion does seem a bit flat. My edition of the CD has some tracks from a later session where Tony Williams is on drums and the music seemed reinvigorated. You get the same feeling when Elvin Jones appeared on the "Individualism" album.
A name I have heard mentioned in the recent past as someone who has evolved from the kind of approach of Gil Evans is Jihye Lee. Her debut album was really well received about five years ago but she is now signed with a larger label with a new album due out later this month. The samples seem quite incredible and very much akin to someone like Maria Schneider. There are some other tracks which are a bit more strident. The weird thing about her is that I believe her origins were as a singer in K-pop back in South Korea where she grew up but when she left to study music at Berklee she fell under the tutorage of arranger Jim McNeely despite having no previous knowledge or awareness of jazz. Her new album has been produced by fellow arranger Darcy James Argue. The music is impressive even if you set aside the fact that someone in their twenties can seemingly arrive on the scene fully formed like this.
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