Gil Evans & Ten = The "Mystical Number Eleven"

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“This album should not be evaluated alongside those Gil did with Miles, rather, it should be viewed as the first document of Gil's work on his own. In it he was liberated from the exigencies of writing for Claude Thornhill, the constraints imposed by various singers, and the ambitious challenge of creating a "setting" for Miles Davis.”

- Stephanie Stein Crease’s - Gil Evans: Out of the Cool 

Some musicians make Jazz through a particular instrument; others prefer to “play it” by combining a number of instruments into an arrangement - by playing band, so to speak.

Enter Gil Evans. [1912-1988]

Although Gil is most widely known through his association with trumpeter Miles Davis, with whom he made a number of LPs for Columbia in the late 1950s, when the opportunity allowed, Gil also recorded his own projects the first of which was Gil Evans & Ten [Prestige P-7120; OJCCD 346-2].

As Ira Gitler recounts in his notes: “This album is an important first for it presents Gil at the helm of his own recording group in a set of his own arrangements.”

Gil’s recordings with trumpeter Miles Davis - Miles Ahead, Porgy and Bess and Sketches of Spain - would overshadow Gil Evans & Ten which was released in 1957.

Indeed, until the notoriety associated with the Miles projects came his way, Gil’s position in the Jazz world is neatly summed up in the following statement by Richard Cook and Brian Morton from their Penguin Guide to Jazz on CD 6th Ed.:

“His name is famously an anagram of Svengali and Gil spent much of his career shaping the sounds and musical philosophies of younger musicians.”

Major characteristics of Evans’ arranging style as noted by Cook and Morton include “oblique and intelligent modern jazz with scores that have a floating feel; immediacy and elasticity, relaxed sophistication that is typically built upon quite simple materials that are well-paced.”

Nothing sounds forced in Gil’s music, it just seems to unfold. It’s the aural equivalent of a mural one which guides the listener through a series of panoramic highlights.

Here are Ira Gitler’s insert notes to Gil Evans & Ten which offer a further delineation of the textures [sonorities] contained in Gil’s music as well as a description of the musicians who appear on the recording.

This is followed by the relevant sections from Stephanie Stein Crease’s definitive biography - Gil Evans: Out of the Cool - which provide more background on how the recording evolved and its significance in Gil’s career.

“With the maturation of the modern idiom during the late Forties came a new awareness in the area of sound. While this was fostered by the sounds of new, individual instrumentalists, due, in part, to improvement in playing technique, the main impact was registered through the efforts of arrangers. Foremost as an influence among them was Gil Evans, first with the orchestra of Claude Thornhiil and then in the historic Miles Davis nonet of 1949-50.

Orchestration is Gil's forte but he is not merely an orchestrator; he is a composer-arranger of magnitude. Gil states, "Orchestration is one of the elements of composition. You might say that it is the choice of sound units and their manipulation as part of expressing a musical idea."

It is Gil's genius as an orchestrator which binds all the elements of his work into the beautifully integrated whole that it is. Both his skill in voicing and ability to notate with a feeling for the individual, as well as the ensemble, are strong reasons for his high value.

Gil relates that there are three basic approaches to orchestration. One is to pre-determine the instruments to be used; second is to select them after the composition is completed; third is the simultaneous method of incorporation as the ideas grow out of one another. Evans, who has used all three, knows that instrumentation is what can make an idea come across. The same arrangement can sound very different with a dissimilar instrumental format.

In the Thornhill band, Gil was given an unusual instrumentation to work with. As he has stated before, the use of French horns and tuba were Claude's innovations but it was what Gil did with them then and later, in an even more personal manner, on the Davis recordings, that was important.

Gil has operated as a free-lance arranger in the Fifties; his connections with jazz were, up until 1957, more tied in with people mentioning his name then

with actual activity. This album is an important first for it presents him at the helm of his own recording group in a set of his own arrangements.

It is also his recording debut as a pianist, a lesser known role but one which he has followed in conjunction with his arranging career. He appeared at various times with the Thornhill band in the Forties; in the Fifties he played with Gerry Mulligan at Basin Street and in a duo with Nick Stabulas in a Greenwich Village club. His style is a singular one, spare, uncluttered, dotted with grace notes and oft-times sounding like a modern Count Basie.

Some of the personnel is made up of men who were associated with Gil before. Trumpeters Louis Mucci, Jake Koven and altoist "Zeke Tolin" (anyone for anagrams?) were all with Thornhill in the 1946-48 period and trumpeter Johnny Carisi was one of the composer-arrangers for the Davis session. The trumpeters all have been active in studio work; Mucci has also appeared with John La Porta and at several concerts at Cooper Union and Brandeis University. Koven is with the Broadway musical Bells Are Ringing and Carisi is still active as a composer-arranger. "Tolin" continues to be an important solo voice with groups of his own and more recently with Gerry Mulligan. His is a supporting role in this album.

The remainder of the brass is handled by trombonists Jimmy Cleveland, Bart Varsalona and French hornist Willie Ruff. Cleveland, formerly with Lionel Hampton, has been with Johnny Richards during 1957. He is one of the brightest solo voices on the trombone today; he reiterates this in his solos here. Varsalona, of the bass trombone, is well remembered for his work with the Stan Kenton orchestra while the versatile Ruff is regularly heard on both French horn and string bass with pianist Dwike Mitchell in the Mitchell-Ruff Duo.

Filling out the reeds are soprano saxist Steve Lacy and bassoonist Dave Kurtzer. Lacy, who has brought himself as a young, dedicated jazzman with a highly promising future, is one of the main soloists here. Steve can also be heard with his own quartet in Soprano Sax (Prestige 7125). Kurtzer, who has been heard on baritone sax in many of the leading Latin bands (Tito Puente, etc.) plays an effective supporting role on the double-reeded, bassoon in this set.

The rhythm section is manned, for the most part, by Paul Chambers and Nick Stabulas. Paul, bassist with Miles Davis for the past two years, is equally effective in support and solo. Stabulas, heard in the combos of George Wellington, Phil Woods —Gene Quill and Zoot Sims, shows his capabilities in the context of a larger-sized group with Evans. Grand old veteran, Jo Jones, is on Remember.

- notes by IRA GITLER recording by Van Gelder supervision by Bob Weinstock

Gil Evans Out of the Cool His Life and Music - Stephanie Stein Crease

“Back then you didn't have to be paid to play, and you didn't have to pay to get in to hear other people play. That was a golden age. Music was accessible and all the giants were on the scene, and there was a truth—the menu was much smaller than now. Everybody—all the different schools of players were active and in their peak. I worked with people from New Orleans, from Chicago, from Kansas City. These people were in their 50s and 60s, and then there were the young radicals, the experimentalists, and the traditionalists. You couldn't get away with any funny business. If there was a new bass player in town all the other bass players would come check him out. Everybody knew who could play and who couldn't. Now it's just a sort of flim-flam going on—most of the giants are gone really. But back then, it was a very beautiful time.”

-STEVE  LACY

“While Gil worked on his masterpieces with Miles, he continued to attract a growing cadre of musicians and artists as friends and collaborators. He had his own corner at Charlie's Tavern at 55th Street and Seventh Avenue, where friends congregated to shoot the breeze or talk music or shop. His marriage to Lillian, calm and stable on the surface, began to grow stormy. Friends who knew them as a couple perceived that Lillian in fact had a difficult time living with Gil the artist—a person so rapt in his work, who needed to spend endless hours at the piano, whether he had arranging jobs to complete or not.

Gil stayed in touch with his old West Coast friends, the Carpenters, who had also befriended Lillian. Pete was now an established studio arranger in Los Angeles, and in the spring of 1957 the Carpenter's son graduated from high school. Gil wrote them a cheerful letter for that occasion, and, true to form, did not get around to actually sending it until mid-September.

Dear Pete and Maybeth:

Petie's graduation announcement was unbelievable— Please tell him that upon request, or even not upon request, I will gladly pass along to him any of the worldly wisdom I have picked up during my (ahem) 40 years on this globe. For example: 'New ways to prepare the lowly minor seventh chord' and other related formulas are his for the asking, so please tell him to feel free—

All the very best to all of you from us here in the Apple, Gil

Also true to form, Gil doesn't bother to mention his own accomplishments, the imminent release of Miles Ahead, or the fact that, just days before, he had finally recorded his first album as a leader.

Gil Evans & Ten was recorded September 10, 1957, at Rudy Van Gelder's studio in Hackensack, New Jersey, for Prestige. For this project, Gil created a wholly different sound environment than that of Miles Ahead. He had to scale back to using eleven musicians again, a number that took on almost mystical significance for him; eleven was the maximum number of musicians hired for a tight-budget recording that aimed at a big sound. Gil eluded the strictures of this adeptly and viewed the number limit on personnel as a creative challenge. Evans lined up an unusual combination of five brass and three woodwinds (plus rhythm—piano, bass, and drums): two trumpets, trombone, bass trombone, French horn, soprano sax, alto sax, and bassoon.  The resulting sonorities are startling and lush, with the extremes of the bass trombone and the upper reaches of the soprano sax creating a spacious breadth.

The album features a fresh-sounding instrumentalist: Steve Lacy, a twenty-three-year-old soprano saxophonist (three years before John Coltrane repopularized the instrument). Gil hired him after hearing him only once, five years before, playing with a Dixieland group on the radio on the Major Bowes Amateur Hour. Gil was so dazzled by Lacy's sound—-he played in a style inspired by jazz pioneer Sidney Bechet—that he called the station on the spot to ask his name. When Gil began thinking about his new album, he remembered Lacy and decided to give him a call.

Lacy was then eking out a living in Greenwich Village with various Dixieland bands while artistically committed to exploring an emergent "free jazz" with pianist Cecil Taylor. Though a well-schooled musician who had been professionally active in New York since he was a teenager, Lacy did not know everybody in town. When he received a phone call from someone who identified himself as Gil Evans, he had no idea who that was. The phone call began a profound musical and personal friendship that lasted, like Gil's friendship with Miles, until Gil's death.

In Gil Evans & Ten, Evans broke away from the star-centered approach of Miles Ahead. Lacy was often the soloist, but trombonist Jimmy Cleveland was featured as well, and the individual voices and surrounding textures enhanced one another in a shifting series of focal points. Gil mixed and matched not just unusual combinations of instruments but strong musical personalities. Lacy said, "He knew how to combine certain people that would never have played together, old and young and different styles, different schools— He had Jimmy Cleveland next to this old bass trombone player, me and Lee Konitz, and Jake Koven and Louie Mucci. These were unheard of combinations but they worked." Evans paired Cleveland, a young post-bop trombonist with a gorgeous sound, with Swing Era veteran trombonist Bart Varsalona; Mucci and Koven were paired similarly. Their differences, expressed through phrasing, intonation, and the use or lack of vibrato in their sound, created a richness in the mix.

Lacy also appeared as the lead voice in several ensemble passages, an unusual role for soprano sax. The quasi-piercing cry of his instrument cut through the ensemble, feeding off the arrangements. Gil took a risk letting the twenty-three-year-old loose. This was one of Gil's strong tendencies, both as a bandleader and collaborator. He trusted those he hired to come up with the right stuff—be it as a strong improviser, unique instrumental personality, or, in his late career, assistant arranger (Maria Schneider became Evans's assistant right out of graduate school, in 1985). In this case, he trusted Lacy to carry much of the album.

Lacy had no idea his role would be so large or that the music would be so challenging. "At that point I couldn't read music very well, and I was the worst one in the band. They had to do things over and over again because I kept messing up the reading. It wasn't that the notes were so very hard, it was the rhythms—they were very precise and very subtle, they were like speech rhythms. The other guys in the band were very accomplished readers, and that experience forced me to learn to read as fast as I could.

Another fresh instrumental voice on the album was Evans's own—he was heard prominently on piano for the first time on record. Technically he was no rival of modern jazz piano masters such as his idol Bud Powell or his friend Jimmy Rowles. Still, Evans's playing, as a soloist or accompanist, expresses all the beauty, economy, and individualism of Basie's or Ellington's. Like them, he's a helmsman. By playing certain harmonies, or melodic or rhythmic riffs, he steers the music in the direction he wants the ensemble to go; one can also hear his conception of the music in its entirety. Evans's playing confounded his low opinion of himself as a player, which some friends thought bordered on neurotic.

The compositional sources for this album are all American and African American. Evans's arrangements pay tribute to the work of Irving Berlin, Leadbelly, Leonard Bernstein, Rodgers and Hart, Cole Porter, and Tadd Dameron. Also included is a new arrangement of Evans's own "Jambangle," expanded to great effect from the McKusick recording of the previous year. (The opening bars of "Jambangle" were reworked in the late 1960s by the rock group the Doors as a main motif for "Light My Fire.")

Two key things inspired Gil's selection of thematic material for his arrangements: the emotional quality and the "sound" element—how he envisioned the sound of the piece as played by a particular musician or group of instruments. He was always attracted to a certain melancholy, pieces that had an inherent "cry," such as Kurt Weill songs or the Charles Mingus tunes he wrote arrangements for later on ("Orange Was the Color of Her Dress, Then Silk Blue" and "Goodbye, Pork Pie Hat"). He loved the songs of strong melodists like Rodgers and Hart, and the quirky angular melodies of Thelonious Monk. He was inspired by folk music, ethnic music, and twentieth-century composers. At this stage in his career, his thematic choices also had to align with his vision of the album as a whole—how moods and textures would vary through the course of an album, as well as an individual arrangement. Jimmy Cleveland once said that Evans always called him to make sure he liked the tunes on which he would be featured; this was true of other musicians as well.

Gil typically took liberties with the material, Berlin's "Remember," originally in 3/4 time, is now in 4/4. Leadbelly's blues, "Ella Speed," turns into a modern jazz swing number with an arco passage by Paul Chambers. One can hear Gil's love of bass sonorities: his rich voicings for low brass, conspicuous use of bass and tuba, and duets for trombone and bass trombone. He played with textures that he would reuse and expand in Porgy and Bess. This is particularly apparent in his treatment of "Nobody's Heart."

The producer constantly pressured Gil about time and money in the making of the album. Years later, Evans said:

You'd have thought it was the most expensive album in the world. It cost $2500 at the time, but Bob Weinstock thought that was a lot. He was used to having groups come out in a van, and every time they'd practice a little bit, he'd get so uptight. He'd say, "Okay now, play a blues!" In one afternoon, he'd expect to get a record out.

We went out there with a 10-piece band, and after the sessions were over, he wouldn't even let me take the time to clean it up. So what happens — years later I start getting statements from the Bahamas, because they don't have anything in New York anymore, that the album cost $2500 in 1957 and I still owe them $800!

Evans's innovations on this record — his unusual choice of instruments and couplings, his scrambling of tempos and themes, and his elongated phrasing — are obscured by the album's blithe spirit and breezy swing. This album should not be evaluated alongside those Gil did with Miles, rather, it should be viewed as the first document of Gil's work on his own. In it he was liberated from the exigencies of writing for Claude Thornhill, the constraints imposed by various singers, and the ambitious challenge of creating a "setting" for Miles Davis.”