Gil Evans: Four Classic Albums (AVID Jazz AMSC 1077)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2022 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

The Gil Evans CD contained four LP’s, only three of which were actually by Gil Evans. In 1960 he signed a contract with World Pacific for two albums, New Bottle, Old Wine and Great Jazz Standards, both of which reflected Evans’ interest in the jazz of the past. In fact, New Bottle, Old Wine counts as a virtual capsule history of jazz, starting with W. C. Handy’s “St. Louis Blues” and Jelly Roll Morton’s “King Porter Stomp” and moving through Fats Waller’s “Willow Tree,” Louis Armstrong’s “Struttin’ with Some Barbecue,” Count Basie’s and Lester Young’s “Lester Leaps In,” and then moving into the modern realm with Thelonious Monk’s “‘Round Midnight,” Dizzy Gillespie’s “Manteca” and Charlie Parker’s “Bird Feathers.” This album was dismissed by Don Heckman in Jazz Review as a “relative failure” because it featured Julian “Cannonball” Adderley as soloist and Heckman felt Adderley’s “dissociation from the context of the arrangement[s].” Adderley certainly didn’t fit into Evans’ world the way his friend and former collaborator Miles Davis had (there was so much mutual respect between Evans and Davis that Evans even named his son “Miles Evans”), but I like this album precisely because of the contrast between Cannonball’s straight-ahead blowing and the softer, subtler backgrounds of Evans, particularly his love of massed brass choirs.

Great Jazz Standards includes, well, great jazz standards, though they aren’t sequenced in chronological order the way they were on New Bottle, Old Wine. The LP opens with Bix Beiderbecke’s “Davenport Blues,” with a beautifully played trumpet solo by Johnny Coles, and then leads into Monk’s “Straight, No Chaser,” a haunting song by Tommy Wolf and Fran Landesman called “Ballad of the Sad Young Men” (first recorded by singer Tani Seitz and later covered by Rod McKuen – of all people – Anita O’Day, Roberta Flack and Rickie Lee Jones), Clifford Brown’s “Joy Spring,” John Lewis’s “Django” (his memorial tribute to Django Reinhardt), Don Redman’s theme “Chant of the Weed” (and given Redman’s background and the 1931 date of his original recording, you don’t need two guesses as to what “weed” was being referenced in the title), and an original Evans composition then simply called “Theme” but later expanded as “La Nevada.”

In 1962 Evans signed for two albums with producer Creed Taylor for the fledgling Impulse Records, the jazz imprint of ABC, but shortly after the release of Evans’ first album for the label, Out of the Cool (an interesting pun on the title Capitol Records had slapped onto the reissue of Miles Davis’ nine-piece recordings for them in 1949 and 1950 on which Evans had worked, Birth of the Cool) Taylor quit the company to join Verve Records and Evans wanted to follow him. Out of the Cool contained five songs – an expanded version of “La Nevada,” “Where Flamingos Fly,” “Bilbao Song” (written by Kurt Weill and Bertolt Brecht for their 1930 opera The Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny, and a suitable vehicle for Evans’ massed-brass style and the world-weariness it conveys), “Stratusphunk” (a premonition of the turn Evans’ style would take in the 1970’s, in which he embraced rock music and even made a cover album of the songs of Jimi Hendrix) and “Sunken Treasure.” Not wanting to make another album for Impulse without Creed Taylor to produce, Evans decided instead to recruit two other musicians he enjoyed working with, John Carisi and Cecil Taylor.

The album was called Into the Hot (“out of the cool and into the hot,” get it?) and it alternated three tracks by Carisi – whom Evans had known for decades and who had contributed the song “Israel” to the Miles Davis Birth of the Cool nonet – and three by Taylor, whom Evans knew barely if at all but who used a larger ensemble than usual to give his musical contributions to Into the Hot a larger, bigger sound. At least Carisi’s opening song, “Moon Taj,” which was a literal depiction of the Taj Mahal by moonlight, offered the sounds a 1963 record buyer would have expected to hear off a Gil Evans album: massed brass choirs and an overall “heavy” sound at a slow tempo. The other Carisi songs were “Angkor Wat” (continuing his Orientalism) and the one uptempo number, “Barry’s Tune.” The Cecil Taylor sides, “Pots,” “Bulbs” and “Mixed,” represent a sort of road-not-taken approach for Taylor, who later became a musical instructor at Antioch College, where he organized a student big band which, alas, did not record. The Taylor tracks on Into the Hot are loud, massive, heavy not in the sense of Carisi’s or Evans’ own work but continuously dissonant, stretching the sense of what jazz ought to be in ways that would become Impulse’s stock in trade. Remember that Impulse Records advertised itself as, “The New Wave of Jazz Is On Impulse!,” and that became especially true when John Coltrane (another Creed Taylor signing, though unlike Evans he stayed with Impulse when Taylor left and worked with his successor, Bob Thiele) not only joined the roster himself but recommended other, similarly advanced players to the label.