Arranger and Piano | 1912-1988

Gil Evans changed what a jazz orchestra could sound like without ever being the loudest voice in the room. Working largely in obscurity through much of the 1950s, arranging for radio and for singers, he kept a 55th Street apartment that became an informal gathering place for young musicians, including a young Miles Davis. His unconventional voicings for French horn and tuba shaped "Birth of the Cool" (1949-50), and the partnership deepened when Davis brought him back for three landmark Columbia albums, "Miles Ahead" (1957), "Porgy and Bess" (1958) and "Sketches of Spain" (1960), all marketed under Davis's name but built on Evans's dense, painterly orchestration. His own albums, particularly "Out of the Cool" (Impulse!, 1960) and "The Individualism of Gil Evans" (Verve, 1964), demonstrated a writer pushing big band jazz somewhere stranger and more textured than anyone else was attempting at the time. He spent his final two decades moving toward rock instrumentation, planning a collaboration with Jimi Hendrix that ended with Hendrix's 1970 death, and later working with Sting in the years before his own death. Evans died in Cuernavaca, Mexico, on 20 March 1988, aged 75.