Michel Legrand and Gil Evans: Late 1950's Big-Band Look-Backs at the History of Jazz
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2022 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
This morning, I played through Michel Legrand’s album Legrand Jazz, made in 1958 in three recording sessions in New York City, one of which featured Miles Davis and two of his then-sidemen, Julian “Cannonball” Adderley and John Coltrane (and it’s fascinating to hear Trane in a context where he had to keep his solos short and simple at a time when Miles was frequently upbraiding him for the sheer length of his improvisations; after one particularly extended solo Miles asked him, “Why did you play that long?” and Coltrane answered, “It took that long to get it all in”). The Legrand Jazz album (the title a pun on Michel Legrand’s last name, which means “The Great” in French) is a jazz-history retrospective featuring Thomas “:Fats” Waller’s “Jitterbug Waltz,” Django Reinhardt’s “Nuages,” Dizzy Gillespie’s “A Night in Tunisia,” Count Basie’s “Blue and Sentimental” (with Ben Webster paying a heartfelt tribute to the tragically short-lived Herschel Evans, whose feature this was in the Basie band), Chick Webb’s (and Benny Goodman’s) “Stompin’ at the Savoy,” John Lewis’s “Django,” Louis Armstrong’s “Wild Man Blues,” Earl “Fatha” Hines’s “Rosetta,” Thelonious Monk’s “‘Round Midnight,” Duke Ellington’s “Don’t Get Around Much Anymore,” and a spectacular uptempo reworking oif Bix Beiderbecke’s “In a Mist” that makes it sound like up-to-date 1950’s jazz instead of a piece originally recorded in 1927.
After I got back from walking my husband Charles to the bus stop I looked for a CD that would be similar enough to Legrand Jazz it would make sense as a follow-up, and I found it in the four-LP, two-CD set on Avid Jazz of recording sy – or at least issued under the name of – arranger, composer and bandleader Gil Evans. These include his two albums for the World Pacific label, New Bottle, Old Wine and Great Jazz Standards, and Two albums issued in the early 1950’s on ABC’s Impulse! jazz label, Out of the Cool (a pun on the album title Birth of the Cool under which the Miles Davis small-band recordings for Capitol in 1949 and 1950, on which Evans had been involved, were reissued and collected on LP) and Into the Hot. The confusion arises from the fact that Gil Evans was signed to Impulse! by Creed Taylor, only just after a few months on the job Taylor left for Verve Records and Evans wanted to go with him. Since he still owed one more album to Impulse!, he arranged that for his last contractual commitment he would feature two other arranger/composers, John Carisi and Cecil Talyor. At least Carisi’s charts were big, heavy band arrangements that accorded with what audiences in the early 1960’s would have expected to hear on an album with Gil Evans’ name on the cover. Cecil Taylor’s selections definitely weren’t; though on the last of them, “Mixed” (the other two are called “Pots” and “Bulbs”), Cecil Taylor used a larger ensemble than usual for him, they’re still knotty avant-garde pieces which probably put off most fans attracted to this album by Gil Evans’ name on the cover. (Later, of course, Evans would go headlong into rock and create jazz-rock fusion albums, including a fascinating LP called The Gil Evans Orchestra Plays the Music of Jimi Hendrix.)
Evans’ two World Pacific LP’s were both jazz history retrospectives, and New Bottle, Old Wine (for years Down Beat magazine used the reverse title for their column about reissue LP’s, “Old Wine- – New Bottless”) included Cannonball Adderley as featured soloist in a series of renditions of old jazz and blues songs actually presented in chronological order: W. C. Handy’s “St. Louis Blues,” Jelly Roll Morton’s “King Porter Stomp,” Fats Waller’s “Willow Tree,” Louis Armstrong’s “Struttin’ with Some Barbecue,” Cou9nt Basie’s and Lester Young’s “Lester Leaps In” (which I had for decades on a big-band compilation on World Pacific and Adderley’s fast, almost frantic playing makes a fascinating contrast to Lester’s cool, laid-back but still powerfully swinging work on Basie’s original), Thelonious Monk’s “‘Round Midnight” (the only song on New Bottle, Old Wine that duplicates a selection on Legrand Jazz), Dizzy Gillespie’s “Manteca,” and Charlie Parker’s “Bird Feathers.” In an article about Gil Evans for the magazine Jazz Review, Don Heckman damned New Bottle, Old Wine as a “relative failure” because of “Cannonball Adderley’s disassociation from the context of the arrangement[s].” That’s not how I hear the album at all: I find the disjunct between Adderley’s straightforward, up-front playing and the dense, heavy arrangements actually refreshing.
The next Gil Evans album, Great Jazz Standards, also referenced jazz history, though not in the consecutive, chronological way New Bottle, Old Wine did. The tracks, in order, are Bix Beiderbecke’s “Davenport Blues,” Thelonious Monk’s “Straight, No Chaser” (in which Evans’ piano solo recreates the feel of Monk’s own playing despite using very few of his musical devices), Gary McFarland’s “Ballad of the Sad Young Men” (stunningly recorded by Anita O’Day and Roberta Flack), Clifford Brown’s “Joy Spring,” John Lewis’s “Django” (for which Don Heckman had special praise, singling out “the majesty of the opening brass statement … the delicate obbligato between French horn and flute, and the carefully woven interplay of [Gil Evans’ own] piano and [Steve Lacy’s[ soprano sax, played over a gently strumming guitar”), Don Redman’s “Chant of the Weed,” and Evans’ own “La Nevada,” which he re-recorded in a much longer version on Out of the Cool. Lacy (the first significant musician to play modern jazz on soprano sax, anticipating John Coltrane by at least three years) and trumpeter Johnny Coles are the outstanding soloists on Great Jazz Standards, but it’s so much an ensemble album they don’t really stand out, nor should they. When Gil Evans died in 1987 I was the editor of a short-lived Queer publication called Bravo!, and I wrote an extended obituary for him – and our ad director criticized me for wasting so much space paying tribute to an artist who wasn’t Gay. That seemed incredibly small-minded to me: I regarded Gil Evans as an artist worthy of major coverage regardless of his sexual orientation, and I still love his music, both his amazing collaborations with Miles Davis and his work on his own.
This morning, I played through Michel Legrand’s album Legrand Jazz, made in 1958 in three recording sessions in New York City, one of which featured Miles Davis and two of his then-sidemen, Julian “Cannonball” Adderley and John Coltrane (and it’s fascinating to hear Trane in a context where he had to keep his solos short and simple at a time when Miles was frequently upbraiding him for the sheer length of his improvisations; after one particularly extended solo Miles asked him, “Why did you play that long?” and Coltrane answered, “It took that long to get it all in”). The Legrand Jazz album (the title a pun on Michel Legrand’s last name, which means “The Great” in French) is a jazz-history retrospective featuring Thomas “:Fats” Waller’s “Jitterbug Waltz,” Django Reinhardt’s “Nuages,” Dizzy Gillespie’s “A Night in Tunisia,” Count Basie’s “Blue and Sentimental” (with Ben Webster paying a heartfelt tribute to the tragically short-lived Herschel Evans, whose feature this was in the Basie band), Chick Webb’s (and Benny Goodman’s) “Stompin’ at the Savoy,” John Lewis’s “Django,” Louis Armstrong’s “Wild Man Blues,” Earl “Fatha” Hines’s “Rosetta,” Thelonious Monk’s “‘Round Midnight,” Duke Ellington’s “Don’t Get Around Much Anymore,” and a spectacular uptempo reworking oif Bix Beiderbecke’s “In a Mist” that makes it sound like up-to-date 1950’s jazz instead of a piece originally recorded in 1927.
After I got back from walking my husband Charles to the bus stop I looked for a CD that would be similar enough to Legrand Jazz it would make sense as a follow-up, and I found it in the four-LP, two-CD set on Avid Jazz of recording sy – or at least issued under the name of – arranger, composer and bandleader Gil Evans. These include his two albums for the World Pacific label, New Bottle, Old Wine and Great Jazz Standards, and Two albums issued in the early 1950’s on ABC’s Impulse! jazz label, Out of the Cool (a pun on the album title Birth of the Cool under which the Miles Davis small-band recordings for Capitol in 1949 and 1950, on which Evans had been involved, were reissued and collected on LP) and Into the Hot. The confusion arises from the fact that Gil Evans was signed to Impulse! by Creed Taylor, only just after a few months on the job Taylor left for Verve Records and Evans wanted to go with him. Since he still owed one more album to Impulse!, he arranged that for his last contractual commitment he would feature two other arranger/composers, John Carisi and Cecil Talyor. At least Carisi’s charts were big, heavy band arrangements that accorded with what audiences in the early 1960’s would have expected to hear on an album with Gil Evans’ name on the cover. Cecil Taylor’s selections definitely weren’t; though on the last of them, “Mixed” (the other two are called “Pots” and “Bulbs”), Cecil Taylor used a larger ensemble than usual for him, they’re still knotty avant-garde pieces which probably put off most fans attracted to this album by Gil Evans’ name on the cover. (Later, of course, Evans would go headlong into rock and create jazz-rock fusion albums, including a fascinating LP called The Gil Evans Orchestra Plays the Music of Jimi Hendrix.)
Evans’ two World Pacific LP’s were both jazz history retrospectives, and New Bottle, Old Wine (for years Down Beat magazine used the reverse title for their column about reissue LP’s, “Old Wine- – New Bottless”) included Cannonball Adderley as featured soloist in a series of renditions of old jazz and blues songs actually presented in chronological order: W. C. Handy’s “St. Louis Blues,” Jelly Roll Morton’s “King Porter Stomp,” Fats Waller’s “Willow Tree,” Louis Armstrong’s “Struttin’ with Some Barbecue,” Cou9nt Basie’s and Lester Young’s “Lester Leaps In” (which I had for decades on a big-band compilation on World Pacific and Adderley’s fast, almost frantic playing makes a fascinating contrast to Lester’s cool, laid-back but still powerfully swinging work on Basie’s original), Thelonious Monk’s “‘Round Midnight” (the only song on New Bottle, Old Wine that duplicates a selection on Legrand Jazz), Dizzy Gillespie’s “Manteca,” and Charlie Parker’s “Bird Feathers.” In an article about Gil Evans for the magazine Jazz Review, Don Heckman damned New Bottle, Old Wine as a “relative failure” because of “Cannonball Adderley’s disassociation from the context of the arrangement[s].” That’s not how I hear the album at all: I find the disjunct between Adderley’s straightforward, up-front playing and the dense, heavy arrangements actually refreshing.
The next Gil Evans album, Great Jazz Standards, also referenced jazz history, though not in the consecutive, chronological way New Bottle, Old Wine did. The tracks, in order, are Bix Beiderbecke’s “Davenport Blues,” Thelonious Monk’s “Straight, No Chaser” (in which Evans’ piano solo recreates the feel of Monk’s own playing despite using very few of his musical devices), Gary McFarland’s “Ballad of the Sad Young Men” (stunningly recorded by Anita O’Day and Roberta Flack), Clifford Brown’s “Joy Spring,” John Lewis’s “Django” (for which Don Heckman had special praise, singling out “the majesty of the opening brass statement … the delicate obbligato between French horn and flute, and the carefully woven interplay of [Gil Evans’ own] piano and [Steve Lacy’s[ soprano sax, played over a gently strumming guitar”), Don Redman’s “Chant of the Weed,” and Evans’ own “La Nevada,” which he re-recorded in a much longer version on Out of the Cool. Lacy (the first significant musician to play modern jazz on soprano sax, anticipating John Coltrane by at least three years) and trumpeter Johnny Coles are the outstanding soloists on Great Jazz Standards, but it’s so much an ensemble album they don’t really stand out, nor should they. When Gil Evans died in 1987 I was the editor of a short-lived Queer publication called Bravo!, and I wrote an extended obituary for him – and our ad director criticized me for wasting so much space paying tribute to an artist who wasn’t Gay. That seemed incredibly small-minded to me: I regarded Gil Evans as an artist worthy of major coverage regardless of his sexual orientation, and I still love his music, both his amazing collaborations with Miles Davis and his work on his own.
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