des articles à la mémoire de de Miles Davis et le grand compositeur Gil Evans.
Purple hazer: the many lives of Gil Evans
His cool, luminous sound redefined jazz. Then he threw it all in for Jimi Hendrix. Richard Williams on the brilliant and mercurial Gil Evans
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'The best after Duke Ellington' ... Gil Evans with Miles Davis, with whom he recorded three classic jazz albums. Photograph: Michael Ochs Archives. Click to enlarge
It came as a shock to hear, over dinner with Gil Evans in 1978, that in the preceding year he had made only one public appearance. A man who had already done as much as just about anyone to shape the music of the 20th century had performed, unpaid, at a benefit for his children's school in New York. And that was it.
The great man's rueful revelation came a day or two after his long-awaited London debut, in which he and his 12-piece American band had been received with rapture by an audience keen to show its affection and reverence for the man whose collaboration with Miles Davis on a trio of classic albums – Miles Ahead, Porgy and Bess, and Sketches of Spain – had redefined the art of jazz orchestration, while widening the range of the entire idiom.
Had he received anything like the appropriate material reward for his effect on music, Evans would have been able to live like Elton John. Instead, he spent his life – even his later years, when he was rather more in demand for concert tours and film scores – in perpetual economic crisis. Since he functioned primarily as a re-arranger of other people's compositions, he received little in the way of royalties from the recordings to which he made such a profound contribution. Although hundreds of thousands of copies of Sketches of Spain might have been sold in the half-century since its appearance, Evans went home from the sessions with, at most, a couple of thousand dollars in arranging fees. No wonder he followed Davis's example and, in the latter part of his life, courted a younger, bigger audience.
By the time he arrived in London 34 years ago, his repertoire had moved on. Fans hoping for the coolly luminous sounds unfurled on earlier albums were to be disappointed. Instead of the delicate reimagining of pieces by Kurt Weill and Léo Delibes, we were presented with bold, driving versions of Jimi Hendrix songs, taken from Evans's LP devoted to the guitarist's themes, recorded four years earlier. As a conductor, he preferred to sit at the piano, giving occasional cues but mostly allowing the music to form itself.
Evans met Hendrix through Davis, and the guitarist's death thwarted their plan to make an instrumental album together. The LP that eventually appeared bore witness to one of Evans's enduring weaknesses: the painful slowness of his working method. In order to meet the deadline for a Carnegie Hall concert that preceded the recording sessions, five of the eight arrangements were contributed by members of his orchestra, only three coming from his own pen.
His version of Hendrix's Little Wing gets another airing this Sunday at the Queen Elizabeth Hall, London, where the Trinity College of Music Big Band, directed by saxophonist Mark Lockheart, celebrate the centenary of Evans's birth as part of the London jazz festival. The first half of the concert will be devoted to interpretations of the five pieces on Out of the Cool, Evans's great 1960 studio album, with the second featuring material from his later career.
Lockheart, who came to the attention of the jazz world as a founder member of Loose Tubes in the 1980s, heard Evans for the first time at the age of 14. "I was blown away," he says, "and he became a huge influence on me. One of the wonderful things about his music is that it's full of eccentric touches. It never sounds like generic jazz. And everything is very stripped-down: he teaches you not to overwrite."
Was the music Evans made in the final years before his death, in 1988, the equal of his celebrated work in the 1950s and 60s? The trumpeter Henry Lowther – a lifelong admirer who played in Evans's bands during a couple of seasons at Ronnie Scott's, and on a 1980s UK tour – thinks not. "Gil was an absolutely lovely man," says Lowther, who also played on Evans's soundtracks to Julien Temple's Absolute Beginners and Nicolas Roeg's Insignificance. "He was modest and unassuming, but he was terribly disorganised and a chaotic bandleader. It was notoriously difficult to get music out of him. Sometimes, he'd turn up at the studio with a few scraps of paper, and sometimes he wouldn't have anything at all.
"Most of the pieces he gave us were one-chord jams with no organisation. It was a bit of a free-for-all, and musicians tend to take advantage of that to release their egos and thrust themselves forward. That was a bit disappointing, although there's no doubt in my mind that Gil was the most important writer in jazz history after Duke Ellington."
As if to make up for the disappointment, in recent years Lowther has performed in recitals of music from all three early, classic Davis/Evans albums, taking the soloist's role. Such shows are increasingly common and greatly enjoyed, since the original creators performed little of this cherished music live. This summer, too, the Gil Evans Centennial Project found the American bandleader Ryan Truesdell producing a finely executed and well-received CD of some of the unrecorded and more obscure scores from Evans's early career on the fan-funded Artistshare label.
But the last years of a great life in music were not just a matter of one-chord free-for-alls. They contained their share of immortal recordings – Zee Zee from 1971, There Comes a Time from 1974, the 1978 Festival Hall version of Variation on the Misery – often based on no more than a scrap of material coaxed into shimmering, multifaceted life. Perhaps a little of that magic will return on Sunday.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/2012/nov/07/gil-evans-london-jazz-festival
http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/2012/nov/07/gil-evans-london-jazz-festival
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