[...]... member of Gil s first working band in 1929, playing for high school dances and parties Gil was very fond of Leroy’s mother, who was musical herself He spent a great deal of time at the Judds, at the piano or hunkered over their phonograph copying music from records Gil s five-piece band often used the Judd’s basement to rehearse, and a couple of years later, so did his ten-piece band Gil and his friends... appeal—that fall he and his band were booked for their most prestigious engagement to date, at the St Francis Hotel in San Francisco But the word was out Jurgens’s musicians started coming to hear Gil s band rehearse, and on their nights off they came to hear all of Gil s “specials.” Between the rats, the rafters, and endless requests for the summer’s hit songs, Gil and his band transformed themselves into... a body of artistic work of unparalleled force, whose freshness only increased as he got older Writing the biography of a jazz musician is a difficult balancing act: one must discuss the person’s life, the history of jazz, and the cultural context of the music without overplaying or unduly reducing any of these components The story of any one musician has to be woven into an account of the ever-evolving... Russell, and Miles Davis The Miles Davis Nonet and the “Birth of the Cool” scores of the 1950s were the outcome of the nonstop musical discussions at Evans s place; so were Evans s and Davis’s later trailblazing collaborations Miles Ahead, Porgy and Bess, and Sketches of Spain, which indelibly changed the course of modern jazz arranging, instrumentation, and conceptualization and brought out new facets... returned, the two young bandleaders of cially joined forces and became the Briggs Evans Band They rehearsed at the Briggs’s and the Judds’ homes in Stockton, and Gil wrote virtually all the band’s arrangements Abby Mattas, a fellow schoolmate from Stockton High who joined the band in the early summer of 1932, remembered that Gil organized the rehearsals like any diligent bandleader The band met around... the shoulder of the road, and they all piled out They walked about a quarter of a mile back up the road and found the curve where the trailer had come unhitched It was overturned, with a tangle of instruments, cases, and music spilling out over the embankment Their dreams for this important day 16 G I L E V A N S: O U T O F T H E C O O L faded as the wind swept sheets of music farther into the ravine... note, Evans went on to lead his own high school dance band at the end of the 1920s Within a few years, Gil Evans and His Orchestra became popular with the college crowd in southern California, and he and some of his musicians went on to work in Hollywood By 1941 Evans was an assistant arranger for Claude Thornhill’s Orchestra, whose sound, style, and instrumentation veered off from most of the big bands... Sunday and Monday nights off) they had to carry their instruments the hilly half-mile from the boathouse up to the hotel to play for dinner and then haul everything back again to play for dancing They also had their regular share of youthful mishaps Gil, who loved sunbathing, once got so sunburned he couldn’t make it to work And on one night off, Gil and five of his band members rented a boat with an outboard... repacked the instruments, and resumed their trip (without their fastidiously copied music) Remarkably, the day was not a total disaster They actually played through the entire gig from memory For once, the musicians were thankful that Gil was so insistent about putting in a lot of rehearsal time In the summer of 1934, the band had a still more important gig Gil Evans and His Orchestra was hired to be the. .. hotel-type band, that schmaltzy kind of thing I went from Ned’s band to Gil s band, and then Ned went to Gil s band We played mainly for all the young people from school who had grown up together, so everybody knew each other The band was friends with the customers and the customers were friends with the band It was just a hometown thing, and that’s as far as we thought we would ever go Most of us . Lewis, Johnny Carisi, Gerry Mulligan, George xi Russell, and Miles Davis. The Miles Davis Nonet and the “Birth of the Cool scores of the 195 0s were the outcome of the nonstop musical discussions. collaborations with Miles Davis. Stephanie Stein Crease masterfully illuminates Evans s music, and brings the man himself out of hiding.” —Francis Davis, author of Like Young and The History of the Blues “At. generation of performers and collaborators. The band he maintained for the rest of his life was a hotbed of strong musical personalities: virtuosic avant-gardists alongside the best studio musicians,