Collection: Gil Evans

Gil Evans spent most of the 1950s working in relative obscurity, arranging for singers and radio shows, before re-emerging as one of the most significant orchestrators in jazz history. His basement apartment on 55th Street had already become an informal salon for young musicians working out bebop's next steps, Miles Davis among them, and Evans's unusual instrumentation for Davis's 1949-50 nonet sessions, French horn and tuba alongside the standard horn lines, became "Birth of the Cool". The real partnership came later. Davis brought Evans back for "Miles Ahead" (1957), "Porgy and Bess" (1958) and "Sketches of Spain" (1960), three records on which Evans's dense, impressionistic scoring is as essential to the result as anything Davis played, even though all three were marketed under Davis's name alone. Evans's own albums under his own name, "Out of the Cool" (1960) and "The Individualism of Gil Evans" (1964) in particular, are less widely known but stand as some of the most ambitious big band writing of the era. By the 1970s he'd moved toward rock instrumentation and had begun planning a collaboration with Jimi Hendrix, derailed by Hendrix's death in 1970; the arrangements eventually surfaced on "Plays the Music of Jimi Hendrix" (1974). What you'll find here spans both the Davis collaborations and Evans's own orchestral records.