Gil Evans - Out Of The Cool (1979 Japanese Impulse! Stereo Vinyl LP)

The Gil Evans Orchestra - Out of the Cool | Vinyl LP - 1979 Japanese Impulse! Stereo Reissue (VIM-5547, Modern Jazz Selection series, Victor Musical Industries)

Out of the Cool is the album where Gil Evans steps out of Miles Davis's shadow. Everyone knew him as the arranger behind Miles Ahead and Sketches of Spain, but this 1960 date, one of the first records Impulse! put out, is his own masterpiece. Evans wrote for an orchestra the way no one else did, using tuba, bassoon and low brass to build dark, shifting colours, and leaving wide spaces for soloists to move through. The centrepiece is "La Nevada", fifteen minutes built from almost nothing, a simple repeated figure that the band slowly fills in while Johnny Coles, Budd Johnson and guitarist Ray Crawford solo across the top. It never rushes and it never sags. "Bilbao Song" reworks a Kurt Weill tune, "Stratusphunk" borrows from George Russell, and "Where Flamingos Fly" is pure atmosphere. Elvin Jones and Charlie Persip lay down the pulse, Ron Carter is on bass, and the whole record has the patient, painterly quality that made Evans one of the great orchestral minds in jazz.

Evans made relatively few records under his own name, and this is the one people return to. It caught him at a peak, with a working band and a producer, Creed Taylor, who gave him room, just before Taylor left to shape Verve and then to found CTI. What Evans does here, holding a large ensemble in a state of calm, unhurried motion, fed everything from film scoring to the ambient end of jazz, and "La Nevada" in particular has been studied and covered for decades.

This copy is the 1979 Japanese stereo reissue on Impulse!, part of the Modern Jazz Selection series, manufactured by Victor Musical Industries, catalogue number VIM-5547.