By: Nat Hentoff from Downbeat.com
Among jazzmen, particularly player-writers, Gil Evans is uniquely admired.
“For my taste,” Miles Davis says, “he’s the best. I haven’t heard anything that knocks me out as consistently as he does since I first heard Charlie Parker.”
Coincident with Miles’ recent tribute, Capitol released a few weeks ago the first complete collection of those 1949–’50 Davis combo sides which were to influence deeply one important direction of modern chamber jazz—Birth Of The Cool.
Evans was perhaps the primary background factor in making these sessions happen, and he wrote the arrangements for “Moon Dreams” and “Boplicity.”
“Boplicity” is listed as the work of “Cleo Henry,” a nom-de-date for Davis, who wrote the melody after which Evans scored the written ensembles. “‘Boplicity,’” declares André Hodeir in Jazz: Its Evolution and Essence, “is enough to make Gil Evans qualify as one of jazz’s greatest arranger-composers.”
Despite these and other endorsements from impressive jazz figures, Evans is just a name to most jazz listeners. In the past few years, he has written comparatively little in the jazz field; but his influence on modern jazz writing through the effect of his work for the Claude Thornhill band of the forties and the Davis sides has remained persistent.
“Not many people really heard Gil,” Gerry Mulligan explains. “Those who did, those who came up through the Thornhill band, were tremendously affected, and they in turn affected others.”
Gil has now decided to return to more active jazz participation and is writing all arrangements for a Davis big band Columbia LP to be recorded at the end of April. He’s also become more interested in creating original material, an area he’s largely avoided up to now.
Evans once again is at a crossing point of his career.
He was born Ian Gilmore Green in Toronto, Canada, on May 13, 1912, and took his stepfather’s name. Gil is self-taught and says, “I’ve always learned through practical work. I didn’t learn any theory except through the practical use of it; and in fact, I started in music with a little band that could play the music as soon as I’d write it.”
Evans first learned about music through jazz and popular records and radio broadcasts of bands. Since he had no traditional European background either in studying or listening, he built his style entirely on his pragmatic approach to jazz and pop material.
Sound itself was his first motivation. “Before I ever attached sound to notes in my mind, sound attracted me,” he says. “When I was a kid, I could tell what kind of car was coming with my back turned.”
Later, “it was the sound of Louis’ horn, the people in Red Nichols’ units, like Jack Teagarden and Benny Goodman, Duke’s band, the McKinney Cotton Pickers, Don Redman. Redman’s Brunswick records ought to be reissued. The band swung, but the voicings also gave the band a compact sound. I also was interested in popular bands. Like the Casa Loma approach to ballads. Gene Gifford broke up the instrumentation more imaginatively than was usual at the time.”
Gil led his own band in Stockton, California, from 1933 to 1938, playing accompaniment-rhythm piano and scoring a book of pop songs and some jazz tunes. When the band was taken over by Skinnay Ennis, Gil remained as arranger until 1941.
“I was also beginning to get an introduction to show music and the entertainment end of the business,” Evans recalls. “We used to play for acts on Sunday nights at Victor Hugo’s in Beverly Hills, and the chance to write for vaudeville routines gave me another look at the whole picture.”
Thornhill had also joined the Ennis arranging staff, and the two wrote for the Bob Hope radio show while the Ennis band was on the series. The radio assignments gave Evans more pragmatic experience in yet another medium.
“Even then,” Evans remembers, “Claude had a unique way with a dance band. He’d use the trombones, for example, with the woodwinds in a way that gave them a horn sound.”
In 1939, Claude decided to form his own band. Evans recommended the band for a summer job at Balboa, and he notes that Claude was then developing his sound, a sound based on the horns playing without vibrato except for specific places where Thornhill would indicate vibrato was to be used for expressive purposes.
“I think,” Gil adds, “he was the first among the pop or jazz bands to evolve that sound. Someone once said, by the way, that Claude was the only man who could play the piano without vibrato.
“Claude’s band,” continues Evans, “was always very popular with players. The Benny Goodman band style was beginning to pall and had gotten to be commercial. I haunted Claude until he hired me as an arranger in 1941. I enjoyed it all, as did the men.
“The sound of the band didn’t necessarily restrict the soloists,” Gil points out. “Most of his soloists had an individual style. The sound of the band may have calmed down the over-all mood, but that made everyone feel very relaxed.”
Evans went on to examine the Thornhill sound more specifically: “Even before Claude added French horns, the band began to sound like a French horn band. The trombones and trumpets began to take on that character, began to play in derby hats without a vibrato.
“Claude added the French horns in 1941. He had written an obbligato for them to a [Irving] Fazola solo to surprise Fats. Fazola got up to play; Claude signaled the French horns at the other end of the room to come up to the bandstand; and that was the first time Fazola knew they were to be added to the band.
“Claude was the first leader to use French horns as a functioning part of a dance band. That distant, haunting, no-vibrato sound came to be blended with the reed and brass sections in various combinations.
“When I first heard the Thornhill band,” Gil continued, “it sounded, with regard to the registers in which the sections played, a little like Glenn Miller, but it soon became evident that Claude’s use of no vibrato demanded that the registers be lowered. Actually, the natural range of the French horn helped cause the lowering of the registers. In addition, I was constantly experimenting with varying combinations and intensities of instruments that were in the same register.
By: Nat Hentoff from Downbeat.com
