Let's talk about Gil Evans

my hero

http://www.jazzhouse.org/jpg/mephisto/Evans_Gil_1987.jpg

totally horrible cover! great album!

don't think i've heard anything by Gil post 60s ... curious about the Hendrix thang. Is that a good place to start?

i saw gil live about 5 or 6 times in the 80's and it was the only time i ever felt like a deadhead. "man, could you believe that goodbye pork-pie hat into zee zee!"

i wish more people would listen to those Live At The Public Theater albums. Two volumes. I love those so much. If you like sprawling shaggy pot-smoking big band records they are hard to beat. but i kinda like it all. love the sweet basil live sets too.

Not that this one makes a whole lot of visual sense:

http://www.torrentportal.com/uploads/images/3171736front.jpg

svengali is a great 70's studio album. if you want post-60's. but little wing and the plays the music of jimi hendrix are great too. honestly, there is always SOMETHING good on any studio album. for real. paris blues, the album he made with steve lacy - and the last studio album, i think - is such a sweet record.

I have no trouble believing all that stuff is great. I need to dive in.

feel free to be bewildered by THIS record. cuz it's three tracks written by John Carisi, and arranged and conducted BY John Carisi, and three tracks written by Cecil Taylor, arranged and conducted BY Cecil Taylor(!!!). and it's a great record! and archie shepp completists need it.

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/6/6e/Into_the_Hot.jpg

i don't own a copy of this and i really need one. i always forget to check ebay for copies. i'll get one eventually.

http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/31E7560E2GL._SS500_.jpg

i'm not the biggest bossa nova baby in the world, but i was really enjoying this album in the store this week. i have a soft spot for astrud.

http://musicodobrasil.com.br/loronixcontent/capasloronix/B/BK/AcertainSmileACertainSadness-image001.jpg

Gil Evans singlehandedly responsible for dominant orchestral soundtrack sound of 60s and 70s TV

I'd argue Shorty Rogers for this point (especially since Shorty gave Mancini his break), but I'm big on a Gil Evans/George Russell/Bill Evans kick, these days.

love this

http://img12.nnm.ru/7/e/8/f/a/7e8fa281615d7ac5284b542fb0db2e29.jpg

ooh i should get that.

This sounds like it could be good:
The Gil Evans Centennial Project: Newly-discovered works of Gil Evans

Cool!

The first time I heard Out Of The Cool it was one of those epiphanies. It's still a constant touchstone in my head for a certain timbral environment that I wish more records visited. The only other Gil I have which hits the same feel for me is Individualism. But it sounds like I need to hear those two Pacific Jazz LPs. Some of the 70s and 80s Gil is a little fonky for me.

Later on I found some of the same feel in the orchestral work of Delius; it was neat then to read somewhere that Gil was a Delius freak...

Happy 100th birthday, Gil Evans.

Here's a review of the Centennial album.

happy b-day. this is pretty groovy. kind of coming around on gil's hendrix album, did not like it much at all when i first heard it, but now i'm digging it.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mmf8F2uLXJE

ooh and here's a whole show from the 70s too
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jMyyb4BFqCk
pretty killer band. too bad that miles and evans didn't do a little more work together in the 70s -- would've been interesting to see how Gil would deal with, say, the Agharta band.

gil did work with miles on a lot of miles' 70's stuff. even though it was often uncredited.

oh yeah? what stuff? i know they were in touch all the time during those years and probably bounced plenty of ideas off one another, but i didn't know there are actual tracks on miles' albums that evans arranged.

That Barcelona video is great! I wonder what year that is?

26-XI-76

any idea who the guitarist is in that Barcelona clip?

"oh yeah? what stuff?"

there is a great book on gil that details some of this. basically, miles ALWAYS wanted gil's input on just about anything he did and gil worked with him on lots of his albums in the studio and also helped him with writing. there are people who think miles should have given gil more writing/arranging/production credits than he did but gil didn't really care. he helped miles with his music until the very end. he was there for him no matter what. money or no money.

Gil Evans : out of the cool : his life and music / Stephanie Stein Crease <-- I need a copy of this

I think it's this book that describes Miles and Gil having lengthy phone conversations during which all they did was watch TV together

any excuse to bump this thread

Maria Schneider Selects 12 Essential Gil Evans Tracks

Spotify playlist of her picks

the thornhill stuff is so great.

I'm enjoying the Thornhill and "Birth of the Cool" arrangements on here:

http://www.jazz.com/assets/2009/6/10/dutch_jazz_orchestra_moon_dreams.jpg?1244604718

I have been giving The Individualism of Gil Evans and Out Of The Cool some serious play today. Fucking great albums, probably not surprising considering the personnel involved but they have that Gil Evans touch.

Shit i thought this was a bill evans thread. Greatest of all jazz pianists. Gil evans on the other hand never did it for me. Whatever i jeard of his, it was always too orchestral, too much over the top. Quite the opposite of the tranquil beauty of bill evans. I probably don't know gil evans music enough.

I do agree with that last sentence. Alls I heard was Blah Blah the rest!

Out of the cool is an all time top 20 record for me, it's just fucking perfect

Aye, it truly is an exquisite piece of work. I thought that totally smoking guitar on it was Kenny Burrell cos it sounds lot like him, but it's Ray Crawford - known for being in Ahmad Jamal's band. Obviously working with Miles rubbed off on him somewhat, but I haven't heard much of his early gear to tell.

Love Johnny Coles on Out of the Cool too, 'Where Flamingos Fly' is just such a beautiful 'frozen moment' piece of music.

This record might have been the first one to show me frozen moment music. So that when laughing stock came out a few years later I was like YES THIS BUT EVEN MORE SO

In my early days as a jazz fan, after I got through with the Miles + Gil Evans box set, I found out that Gil had albums under his own name and this really got me excited. So, I hurried down to the used record store and headed straight for the "E" section in the jazz racks. Only album of Gil's in there was Out of the Cool, so I of course picked it up. I immediately loved it, as it was like his stuff with Miles, but with a more impressionistic overall vibe. For years, I kept the album, revisiting it sporadically and really just loving from the vantage point of, "This is the guy that worked with Miles."

Fast forward and I'm reading a current interview with David Axelrod, where he was talking about an album "that changed everything" for him. What was that album? Out of the Cool.

I was floored. Never, through all my listenings of the album, did I ever hear it with the thought that it had been so influential on my favorite music maker. I immediately went back to the album with this fresh thought in mind and it was a total paradigm shift in how the album sounded. It was so obvious, all along, that Axelrod adored this album. I actually felt a little dumb for not noticing sooner.

Such an all time classic.

i wish more people would listen to those Live At The Public Theater albums. Two volumes. I love those so much. If you like sprawling shaggy pot-smoking big band records they are hard to beat. but i kinda like it all. love the sweet basil live sets too.

skot otm

also both volumes of Live at Umbria Jazz

My entry to Gil - other than the Miles stuff - was via Woebot's mix for Blogariddims. Barbara Song destroyed me and still does. From there I went to Individualism, Birth of the Cool and a couple of the later live albums. Will check the Umbria live stuff for sure.

That Woebot mix is ace, and on Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/user/jwheare/playlist/5PKt17yVZ6LJpmgrTAmnJR

there should really be a live bootleg series of orchestra shows over the years. like dick's picks only i would buy them.

there were always japanese guys in the corner recording when i would go see him at sweet basil. must be tons of audio out there.

THANK YOU for the tip on these Live At The Public Theater albums! So funky!

Paris Blues with Steve Lacey is a hell of a lovely piano/sax duo album. I especially love the mellow Fender Rhodes flourishes and very open interpretation of standards.

Here's a brief Interview with Noah and Miles Evans about growing up with Gil and a little about the new album they've released as the Gil Evans Orchestra, which revisits Sweet Basil material -- it sounds good!

Playing this one in the office this AM,
https://www.discogs.com/The-Gil-Evans-Orchestra-Feat-George-Adams-Little-Wing-/release/6058355

Really fantastic and fun... I need to dig into Gil quite a bit more than I have thus far.

oh yeah, and that reminds me, always liked The British Orchestra, with Ray Russell soloing on "Little Wing," and a lot of other UK musos I hadn't heard---story of that British tour, also subsequent DVD of Gil w Russell's group at Montreux! https://stuartnicholson.uk/gil-evans-the-british-orchestra-classic-modern-albums/

this revive made me dig through my dusty iTunes library to find both these albums -- treasure I forgot I buried

it's a little disheartening to look at https://www.discogs.com/artist/255137-Gil-Evans and https://www.discogs.com/artist/59659-Gil-Evans-And-His-Orchestra and see a lot of titles that have never had a digital release ... I don't really do vinyl, but I bought the Little Wing LP and a few others just to rip them myself

The first Gil I bought was There Comes A Time, in 1975. Loved it, prob did some shrooms to it, then took it to a party where my friends were probably playing Neil Young, Miles, Mott The Hoople, P-Funk, Patti Smith, and Gil got a pretty good reception: one friend said it sounded like the Tonight Show Orchestra on acid, which seemed fair enough---we just really had no other referent (except shrooms).
It was also the first or second CD I bought, in 1988, before I even owned a player---got my sister, who worked for a theater, to get a sound engineer to dub a cassette (so esoteric a procedure did it seem). She said he loved the results, as did I. Not all the same track list on both, and some that did make the cut, or at least the titles did, are very different, revelations, even (was no longer on the shrooms, but none were necessary). Get both.
oh yeah, and in 1987, he did the fairly cosmic noirCollaboration with vocal stylist Helen Merrill, thirty years after their first, Dream of You, which I still need to get. Any other albums with vocalists? Tony Williams Tony-sang on the title track of There Comes A Time:
There comes a time, to wake up to what's happenin', I love you more than what's happenin', I love you more...

Oh well OK, finally thought to look at her Wiki, which claims that Gil's arrangements on Dream of You led to his work w Miles, also that Collaboration has the same tracks, with "fresh" arrangements---won't spoil what it says about her son's song (though I've read it before on ILM)---looks like she did some other albums worth checking out, incl this century: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helen_Merril

Out of the Cool was my intro to Gil and still slays me.

Any other albums with vocalists?

Satin Doll, Kamiko Kasai with Gil Evans Orchestra

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zpnt4GCoGJw&list=PLmkPvOigXA2pyUuwfkMYdA2pBa_X89L6a

ehhhh

the album is on YouTube as a playlist

Thanks, hadn't heard of that one. The only Gil I haven't liked (also haven't listened in forever) is another from the late 80s, Golden Hair, with Laurent Cugny's Big Band Lumiere. "Glacial" and then some, putting me right to sleep as escape. Waking up long enough to know it's still playing. But 3 stars from Allmusic, so hey.

her Wiki, which claims that Gil's arrangements on Dream of You led to his work w Miles

miles and gil had been collaborating since the mid/late '40s. the cited allmusic review says this:

In the picturesque arrangements one also hears the seeds of Evans' own future collaborations with Miles Davis.

which is really saying something different, regardless of whether or not one agrees

Sorry! You're right. Anyway, if you like Gil with Miles, you'll like him with Helen Merrill.

if you haven't listened to any gil evans in a while, i think today is a fine day to remedy that.

out of the cool definitely one of the more significant albums of the 60s. i want to poll it. gil in those days was just about as godlike as it gets, i reckon.

scott unsurprisingly otm—

i play guitar forms - the album he made with kenny burrell - a bunch after all these years.

this is some deepness...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gerLli270Zg

kenny burrell "lotus land" (1965)

outside of this, miles, and that one astrud gilberto did he do any other full album collaborations?

also the essentials are on spotify (mostly verve material) but what a bunch of disappointment otherwise. 90% of his catalogue is in purgatory.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kDOIfdvHIh0

Yes, Loftus Land of that one is an exquisite piece of music. Also Gil Evans was a marvel and his 50's/60'a albums were out of this world.

kenny burrell "lotus land" (1965)

outside of this, miles, and that one astrud gilberto did he do any other full album collaborations?

Satin Doll, Kamiko Kasai with Gil Evans Orchestra

Hadn't heard this Burrell album! 'Lotus Land' could easily fit on *The Individualism Of* album, and there's no higher praise. That and *Out of the Cool* are both genius records.

xpost more collabs: Also, several favorable mentions on here of Paris Blues, his duet album w Steve Lacey, which is good, though Gil asks that we excuse his "arranger's piano," which does sound like rusty bedsprings for Steve's soprano sax acrobatics, but I enjoy that affect.
Otherwise,

The only Gil I haven't liked (also haven't listened in forever) is another from the late 80s, Golden Hair, with Laurent Cugny's Big Band Lumiere. "Glacial" and then some, putting me right to sleep as escape. Waking up long enough to know it's still playing. But 3 stars from Allmusic, so hey.
--dow

Yeah, grab a coffee and listen.

individualism been getting some extra love recently since wayne shorter passed. not that it wasn't always great, just surrounded by some heavier hitters.

thanks for stuff to look into. struggled w/steve lacy in the past, but perhaps reappraisal with a better attitude is needed.

this is a fucking bop icymi-
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XH7JdtXrWQM
astrud gilberto arr by gil evans - "maria quiet" (1965)

she's one of the best terrible singers ever, lol. love her voice.

Good point.