Gil Evans

Early Life

Gil Evans was born to Margaret Julia McConnachy. Little is known about his biological father, who died before Evans was born. He took his surname from his stepfather, John Evans, who was a miner. As a child, the Evans family moved frequently — wherever and whenever his stepfather found work. They lived in Saskatchewan, British Columbia, Washington, Idaho, Montana and Oregon. When Evans was in high school, his family settled in Stockton, California.

Canadian jazz critic Gene Lees once wrote of Evans: “His childhood is an enigma, and there is even a question about his real name.” Lees once called Evans a “mysterious man, as elusive and evanescent as his art.”

Education and Early Career

A self-taught musician, Gil Evans independently studied piano and music arranging as a teenager. He later said that “radio was the big thing — there were broadcasts from all over the place. Louis Armstrong came on all the time, and so did Duke and the Casa Loma Band… I caught all these broadcasts as much as I could and it was a wonderful education.” His earliest influences included Duke Ellington, Louis Armstrong and Fletcher Henderson.

Evans graduated from high school in 1930. He founded his first jazz big band, Gil Evans and His Orchestra, in 1933 while attending the College of the Pacific in Stockton, California (though he soon transferred to Modesto Junior College). He arranged all the music for this nine-piece group, which became the house band at the Rendezvous Ballroom in Balboa Beach, California.

By 1935, Evans’ reputation as the “Prince of Swing” was growing. In 1937, he took the band on its first tour. They played in clubs up and down the Pacific Northwest, from northern California to Oregon and Washington. Eventually, they landed a regular gig in Hollywood performing on Bob Hope’s radio show in 1938.

Mid-Career and Hollywood Nights

In the mid- to late 1930s, Gil Evans befriended pianist and fellow arranger Claude Thornhill, who was hired as the chief arranger on Bob Hope’s radio show. The pair struck up a personal and professional relationship that lasted decades. It was after meeting Thornhill that Evans began incorporating elements of classical orchestras — namely French horn, tuba and flute — into the more traditional big band jazz format. Evans’s arrangements were often so sophisticated and challenging to play that Thornhill would make the band play them as a form of punishment.

When the United States entered the Second World War, many big dance bands broke up, including this budding partnership. Evans was drafted into the US Army and Thornhill joined the US Navy. When the war ended, Evans settled in New York City and joined Thornhill’s band as an arranger.

During the late 1940s, Evans wrote many scores with Thornhill’s orchestra that were never publicly released. These tapes were later found and released posthumously in celebration of what would have been Evans’s 100th birthday on the album Centennial: Newly Discovered Works of Gil Evans (2012). The album also included works by Evans up to the 1970s.

Collaborations with Miles Davis

Gil Evans’s most famous collaborations were with legendary trumpet player Miles Davis. They started to informally play together at Evans’s basement apartment in Manhattan in the late 1940s. These jams led to their first official collaboration in 1949–50, when Evans co-wrote “Boplicity” and arranged two other songs that eventually appeared on Davis’s landmark album The Birth of Cool (1957) — regarded as the beginning of “cool jazz.”

Evans worked with Davis again on a trio of albums: Miles Ahead (1957), Porgy & Bess (1958), and Sketches of Spain (1960), which won a Grammy Award. According to jazz scholar Ian Carr, these three albums “rank with the finest orchestral music of the 20th century.” In the words of Encyclopedia Britannica, Evans “created luminous, impressionistic arrangements whose appeal lies in the richness of their textures and harmony and in their musical subtleties.”

1950s and 1960s

During the late 1950s and early 1960s, Columbia Records producer George Avakian recommended Gil Evans as an arranger to other artists. Evans also worked extensively in radio and television as a composer and arranger for such singers as Tony Bennett, Peggy Lee and Johnny Mathis.

Evans’s first record under his own moniker was Gil Evans and Ten (1957). This was followed by New Bottle Old Wine (1958), Out of the Cool (1961) and The Individualism of Gil Evans (1964), which was nominated for a Grammy Award.

Evans was drawn to the new soundscapes of the psychedelic rock era of the late 1960s and early 1970s. He especially admired Jimi Hendrix, whom Miles Davis had introduced him to. Evans had made plans to collaborate with the Hendrix before his overdose death in 1970. Instead, in 1974, Evans paid homage to Hendrix with a tribute concert followed by the release of Gil Evans’ Orchestra Plays the Music of Jimi Hendrix. He also began to incorporate electric guitars and synthesizers into his orchestras beginning in the late 1960s.

1980s and The Monday Night Orchestra

Starting in April 1983, the Gil Evans Orchestra was booked at the Sweet Basil jazz club in Greenwich Village by club owner and jazz producer Horst Liepolt. This regular gig led to the live recording Gil Evans and the Monday Night Orchestra, which was recorded in 1984 and released in 1985.

In 1987, Evans released a live album with Sting, Last Session: Live at Perugia Jazz Festival July 11, 1987. That same year, Evans added some arrangements to Sting’s sophomore solo release, Nothing Like the Sun.

Film Scores

In 1986, Gil Evans produced and arranged the soundtrack for the film adaptation of Colin MacInnes’ novel Absolute Beginners (1986). He also worked as the orchestrator for the music on Martin Scorsese’s The Color of Money (1986), which was composed by Robbie Robertson.

Personal Life

In 1949, Gil Evans married Lillian Grace; they divorced in 1961. In 1963, when he was 50 years old, Evans married for the second time, to Anita Cooper. The couple had two children: Noah and Miles.

On 20 March 1988, at the age of 75, Evans died from peritonitis while recuperating in Cuernavaca, Mexico, following prostate surgery.

Awards and Honors

• Guggenheim Fellowship (1968)
• Honorary Doctorate, New England Conservatory (1985)
• Jazz Masters Fellowship, National Endowment for the Arts (1985)
• DownBeat Jazz Hall of Fame (1986)
• Canadian Music Hall of Fame (1997)

Grammy Awards

• Best Jazz Composition of more than Five Minutes Duration (“Sketches of Spain” with Miles Davis) (1960)
• Best Jazz Instrumental Performance, Big Band (“Bud & Bird” with the Monday Night Orchestra) (1988)
• Best Historical Album (Miles Davis & Gil Evans: The Complete Columbia Studio Recordings) (1997)
• Best Instrumental Arrangement (“How About You” on Centennial: Newly Discovered Works of Gil Evans) (2012)