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Bob Dylan: The Bootleg Series Volume 21: To Be Likened Later, Spring 65: The Forgotten Gil Evans Sessions
by Mike Jurkovic
Veteran producer Tom Wilson was never a man known to shun aside inspiration. Prior to finding himself at the eye of the Bob Dylan hurricane, Wilson had not only founded Transition Records, but gave the world Sun Ra's unruly, post-bop big band debut Jazz by Sun Ra (Transition, 1957), Cecil Taylor's defiant and quixotic Jazz Advance (Transition, 1957) and Donald Byrd's initial live set By rd Jazz (Transition, 1955) So when Wilson, in a bar on a break ...
read moreThe Gil Evans Orchestra: Live At Fabrik
by Ian Patterson
By the time Gil Evans led the Gil Evans Orchestra at the Hamburg Jazz Festival in 1986, it had been holding down the Monday night slot at Sweet Basil for the previous three years. The majority of the GEO's regular musicians were with him for this performance at Fabrik, a 19th century machine-parts factory converted into a glass-roofed cultural centre in 1971. Not for nothing does the sixteen-piece ensemble sound so organically attuned—to the charts and to each other—on this ...
read moreBig Bands of the 1950s (1950 - 1957)
by Russell Perry
Woody Herman disbanded the Second Herd in 1949 and, while Stan Kenton and Duke Ellington managed to keep a big band on the road through the 1950s, Count Basie disbanded his band at the start of the decade but assembled a new one in a few years. Generally this was a tough period for large ensembles. This, however, didn't dampen the urge for musicians and composers to hear music in large forms and find ways to make it real. In ...
read moreGil Evans: Old Bottle New Wine
by Patrick Burnette
Arranger / pianist Gil Evans did not record extensively as a leader, and he only released a few albums in the “classic" mode established by his collaborations with Miles Davis. New Bottle Old Wine (originally released on Pacific Jazz in 1958) is perhaps the best regarded—due to the vibrant presence of Julian “Cannonball" Adderley as the featured soloist, and the killer line-up of tunes from jazz's past, which Evans transformed into modern, third-stream-leaning music with all the wit of his ...
read moreGil Evans: The Gil Evans Orchestra Plays the Music of Jimi Hendrix
by Sacha O'Grady
Out of all the myriad of tribute albums dedicated to Jimi Hendrix, this would have to be the most authentic and genuine. Evans and Hendrix had spoken on numerous occasions about working together, Jimi having even asked the legendary jazz arranger to teach him how to read and write music, thus liberating the guitarist from the burden of having to record everything on tape. But their friendship might never have happened were it not for producer Alan Douglas, who had ...
read moreGil Evans: The Complete Pacific Jazz Sessions
by Hrayr Attarian
How do you summarize the history of jazz on a couple records? Ask Gil Evans. His two records New Bottle Old Wine (1958) and Great Jazz Standards (1959), originally released on World Pacific, have been reissued on one CD entitled The Complete Pacific Jazz Sessions. Each of the fifteen tracks is a chapter in the music's history from the start to the years when these recordings were made. From Jelly Roll Morton and W.C. Handy to Monk and Charlie Parker, ...
read moreGil Evans: The Complete Pacific Jazz Sessions
by Greg Camphire
While perhaps best remembered for his landmark Miles Davis collaborations, arranger/bandleader/pianist Gil Evans' work with his own ensembles is notable in its own right. This reissue of The Complete Pacific Jazz Sessions combines two crucial Evans albums from 1958 and 1959: New Bottle, Old Wine and Great Jazz Standards. The fifteen overall performances capture Evans' expansive harmonic palette, painted by an all-star ensemble of colorists, offering an advanced reinterpretation of the great jazz tradition that still shines with a modern ...
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