The Gil Evans Orchestra

Out of the Cool

Gil Evans, Piano
Johnny Coles, Trumpet
Phil Sunkel, Trumpet
Keg Johnson, Trombone
Jimmy Knepper, Trombone
Tony Studd, Bass, Trombone
Bill Barber, Tuba
Ray Beckenstein, Alto Sax, Flute, Piccolo
Eddie Caine, Alto Sax, Flute, Piccolo
Budd Johnson, Tenor & Soprano Sax
Bob Tricarico, Bassoon, Flute, Piccolo
Ron Carter, Bass
Charlie Persip, Drums
Elvin Jones, Drums, Percussion

Produced by

Recorded at Van Gelder Studios
Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey
Rudy Van Gelder, Engineer
Recorded November 18, 30 and December 10, 15, 1960

Catalog Number: IMPD-186
Format: CD
Label: Impulse

The other pieces were a little more arranged. But we didn't get any of them down [as useable takes] until he got whatever it was on "La Nevada" out of his system. That session let the dam loose; he was struggling with the musicality until then. There was nothing to do as far as I was concerned except patiently sit and wait. I knew it was going to happen at some point.

He Fell From a Star: Gil Evans
He was a mysterious man, as elusive and evanescent as his art. He could be maddeningly absent-minded. Yet he could be closely attentive and solicitous, and you never knew quite how much Gil Evans was noticing about you. His childhood is an enigma, and there is even a question about his real name. Tall, lank, professorial of mien, he was kind, self-critical and self-doubting.

…Gil’s musical interests were inclusive, hugely inclusive, not exclusive.

“I go along with the rhythm of the time,” Gil told the Toronto jazz critic Mark Miller in 1984. “Jazz has always used the rhythm of the time, until it becomes formalized… Current jazz, now jazz, uses the rhythm of the time.” But for Gil Evans, a man whose music was never “popular” in the strict sense of the word, the assertion that he wrote popular music borders on the inscrutable. Creed Taylor, who produced a number of Gil’s albums, thinks he meant the popular idiom, not the extent of the sale. “And that was his concept,” Creed said.

…One of Gil’s staunchest admirers was a young and boyish-faced ex-trumpet player and former Marine Corps officer with a degree in psychology from Duke University. Creed Taylor was proving to be one of the most astute record producers in the business, with a knack for getting from musicians performances that were simultaneously of the highest artistic merit and yet had considerable commercial appeal. His “product” usually sold well. And Creed had been following the work of Gil Evans since the Thornhill days. Indeed, Creed saw that band when it played Duke. “I remember standing there with goosebumps,” Creed said. “That was the ’49 band.”

Creed had founded the Impulse label and established the pattern for his career... And one of the artists he now wanted to record was Gil.

The first album that came out of that was Out of the Cool. Gil turned to old associates for two of the pieces. He did a new version of "Where Flamingos Fly" by John Benson Brooks and "Stratusphunk" by George Russell, who had shared arranger credits with Gil on a Lucy Reed album for Fantasy. Gil orchestrated Kurt Weill’s "Bilbao Song" for a third track, and used two of his own pieces, one called "Sunken Treasure" and a new version of "La Nevada." It is interesting to see how the orchestral colors in "La Nevada" differ from those in the same tune in the Great Jazz Standards two years earlier for Pacific Jazz. The same figures from Prokofiev that Gil used in the Helen Merrill album open "Where Flamingos Fly."

Creed Taylor left Impulse to run the Verve label, which had been purchased from Norman Granz by MGM records. Creed was the sole A&R director of Verve. One of the albums he made there was The Individualism of Gil Evans. The original LP contained five tunes. Gil turned again to Kurt Weill for "The Barbara Song," which has a strange and haunting reflective quiescence about it. Gil had an eerie ability to write the sound of quiet. The other tunes included his own "Las Vegas Tango," "Flute Song," and "El Toreador," and "Hotel Me," a co-composition with Miles Davis. The running time of that album is thirty-two minutes and twenty-nine seconds. But for the CD edition, the vaults were searched and a great deal of material that Creed and Gil had abandoned was included, those “special bonus” tracks that flesh out CD reissues. At first I thought Gil and Creed were right about the rejected material, but the more I hear it the more I value it, particularly "Time of the Barracuda," interesting for, among other things, the excellent Wayne Shorter tenor solo. And "Spoonful" has some predictably fiery playing by Phil Woods.

I no longer remember whether it was Creed or Gil who asked me to write the liner notes of that album, but I do remember that Creed set aside an audition room for us and Gil and I listened to the tape together. I wrote at the time:

“Without doubt the most individualistic and personal jazz composer since Duke Ellington, Evans is held in near-reverence by a wide range of composers, arrangers, instrumentalists, and critics. This feeling is only intensified by the fact that he is a rather inaccessible man—not unfriendly, or anti-social; just politely, quietly inaccessible—whose output has been small, and all of it remarkable.”

As we listened to "Las Vegas Tango," Gil said, “It’s a plain traditional minor blues.” There was nothing plain about it. Gil said, “I used this title because it had a kind of open sound like the plains, to me. I grew up in the west.” A gorgeous, big-toned, melancholy trombone solo by Jimmy Cleveland emerges from the orchestration. The melody, in its opening phrase, is so perfectly suited to the composition that I asked Gil if it was written. “No,” Gil said. “That’s his.” One of the most striking things about the track is the way Elvin Jones dances across the cymbals, drawing from them all the varied sounds of which they are capable.

I asked Gil why he so often used Spanish titles for his tunes. He answered: “I don’t know. Perhaps because I can’t find English titles for them. I’ve always inclined to Spanish music, but I didn’t really absorb it from the Spanish. I got it from the French impressionists—and, of course, the Spanish impressionists, like de Falla.”…

George Wein recounted an incident that gives an insight into Gil’s character.

“I’d known Gil for years, but we were never that close. We weren’t buddies.

“I got a serious attack of gout. And I was in pain. It was in my knee. And one night at my apartment, 9:30, there was a knock on my door. Not even a ring from down below. I opened the door and it was Gil.

“I said, ‘Gil! What are you doing here?’

“He said, ‘I heard you’ve got the gout. Cherries are very good for the gout. I brought you this bottle of cherries. Maybe they might help you.’