Gil Evans--A Magnificent Innovator

It seemed more than merely accidental that his name was an anagram of Svengali . Gil Evans was so powerful an influence on the composers who knew and were inspired by his work that they all did his conscious or unconscious bidding.

“If you had a box full of uncut diamonds and threw them all in the ocean,” said Miles Davis, “the one precious jewel you’d want to keep would be Gil. Until he came along, all the movie composers were writing like Ravel.”

“He was the most important influence on my life,” said Johnny Mandel. “He wasn’t just a writer, he was a masterful tonal painter. He knew how to mix orchestral shadings--and in a dance band, Claude Thornhill’s, which was one of a kind in its day. Without knowing it, he showed me how to develop that art of using the colors in all the instruments.”

“Gil was largely responsible,” said Benny Carter, “for the success of some of the greatest albums Miles made--classics like ‘Sketches of Spain’ and ‘Miles Ahead’ and ‘Porgy and Bess.’ He was truly one of a kind.”

“I’d followed him ever since the Thornhill days,” said Neal Hefti. “His death is a tremendous loss.”

Evans, who died last Sunday at 75, was a maverick on several levels. Although he once shrugged and said “I’m just an arranger,” and true though it was that most of his masterpieces were arrangements of other musicians’ works, his orchestral and developmental technique were so brilliant that every arrangement became a de facto Evans original.

He was a largely unknown gray eminence until his mid-30s; he never played an instrument professionally until he turned 40, when he began studying piano. Not until 1957, when he was 45, did he record an album under his own name.

Born in Toronto, he was living in Stockton, Calif., when he first led an orchestra at the age of 21. In 1938, the band was taken over by Skinnay Ennis, a singer, with Evans remaining as arranger until he joined Thornhill in 1941.

During the next seven years, he became part of a nucleus of forward-looking jazz artists, among them Lee Konitz and several other colleagues from the Thornhill band, as well as Miles Davis and Gerry Mulligan.

“I was part of that bunch,” Mandel recalls. “Blossom Dearie, the singer and pianist, took me to Gil’s place one evening, I guess around 1949. He was living in a basement on 55th Street near 5th Avenue, behind a Chinese laundry. John Lewis used to come in there, and Dave Lambert, John Carisi (who wrote “Israel” for Miles) and Miles himself, who helped put some members of the group together into an ensemble and called the rehearsals.”

Out of that literally underground beginning came the three Miles Davis recording sessions later issued in an album as “The Birth of the Cool.” The use of a tuba and French horn on these dates was unprecedented in modern jazz writing. Seven years later, when Davis and Evans reunited to produce “Miles Ahead,” the orchestra was enlarged to 19 pieces and the textural scope greatly expanded.

During the next decade the name of Gil Evans, all but ignored by the critical fraternity until the Davis association, was identified with a long series of adventures. Typically, in an arrangement of “The Barbara Song,” a Kurt Weill melody from “The Threepenny Opera,” he used two French horns, a trombone, tuba, flute, bass flute, English horn, bassoon, tenor saxophone (Wayne Shorter), harp, piano, bass and drums.

As his “Sketches of Spain” masterpiece with Davis revealed, he had a unique affinity for Spanish-tinged music. “I’ve always been inclined to Spanish themes,” he once told author Gene Lees, “but I didn’t really absorb it from the Spanish. I got it from the French Impressionists--and, of course, the Spanish Impressionists like De Falla.”

Gil Evans never achieved the security his reputation merited. At times, he seemed justifiably bitter and frustrated. Though in later years he led orchestras off and on with moderate success, his career failed to move onward and upward.

During the 1970s, there were successful forays in Europe, where he toured with his orchestra and was heard more frequently on radio and TV than he had ever been in his own country. He wrote occasional film scores, received a Guggenheim fellowship in composition and won numerous awards, such as the Down Beat readers’ and critics’ polls.

The friendship with Miles Davis endured, and was perhaps reflected in his own decision to “modernize” his ensemble, even though it meant trading in the rich old colors for synthesizers and other electronic effects. He even recorded some of the works of Jimi Hendrix and Evans and his orchestra perform Hendrix’s “Little Wing” on Sting’s current LP, “. . . Nothing Like the Sun.”

After his death in Cuernavaca, Mexico, his wife, Anita, announced that the orchestra would fulfill its commitments under the direction of their son, whose name, predictably, is Miles.

“I can’t understand what he was doing in later years,” said Johnny Mandel, “but what he accomplished before that established him forever as a magnificent innovator.”

The force that he represented in the world of creative music, the jewels of sound that carved an indelible mark in the artistic history of jazz, are Gil Evans’ monument. Thanks in large part to Miles Davis, with whom he formed one of the most fruitful partnerships in this musical century, he was indeed the diamond that was saved from the ocean.