Brussels Jazz Orchestra brings jazz legend Gil Evans to life

The legacy of jazz king Gil Evans is being brought to life by the Brussels Jazz Orchestra and conductor Ryan Truesdell, who has been digging through the master arranger's archive.

"He could walk into a room and as though he were royalty, all the conversations would hush, and those same magical, mystical qualities that attracted everyone to him – call it his sixth sense – are also in his music." Orchestra conductor, arranger, and composer Ryan Truesdell doesn't have a bad word to say about his great idol Gil Evans, who was perhaps the most defining figure in jazz history.

As an arranger, Evans, who was born in Toronto on 13 May 1912 as Gilmore Ian Ernest Green (but took his stepfather's surname), collaborated with Miles Davis for many years. But his sphere of influence was much broader, as is clear from his sessions with Louis Armstrong, Jimi Hendrix, and Sting. If he were still alive today, Truesdell thinks that he would be hanging around with rappers or even, and why not, Lady Gaga.

Evans made his breakthrough in the 1940s as the arranger of Claude Thornhill's bebop orchestra and would later become the leader of the whole New York scene from his apartment on 55th Street. In an interview with All About Jazz, Truesdell once told the anecdote that Miles Davis, Charlie Parker, and a half dozen other jazz pioneers met at Evans's place because he was the only one with a library card.

Improvisation
That is how he integrated the music of Stravinsky and other contemporary classical and world music sounds into jazz. Conversations about how to reproduce the sound of Claude Thornhill and his Orchestra using as few instruments as possible resulted in Birth of the Cool (1957), with a nonet by Miles Davis. The synergy between Evans and the famous trumpet player reached their highest pitch on classics like Miles Ahead (1957), Porgy and Bess (1959), and Sketches of Spain (1960).

The arranger then started experimenting with improvisation – see Out of the Cool (1961) and The Individualism of Gil Evans (1964) – and, the more he worked with small ensembles and soloists, his arrangements became more spontaneous and less structured.

Chicken wings
It was not on 55th, but on 27th Street in New York that Ryan Truesdell expressed his fascination for Gil Evans, who died in Mexico in 1988. In 2011, the young conductor, arranger, and composer and 35 top musicians from the New York scene met at the Jazz Standard, a typical American jazz club where you can not only see the jazz resident of the week, but also get an oversized serving of chicken wings.

Together they recorded the Grammy-winning album Centennial: Newly Discovered Works of Gil Evans. Since then, Truesdell has returned every year with his Gil Evans Project, which continues to dig through the master arranger's archive. As the guest of the Brussels Jazz Orchestra in Bozar, Truesdell will present standards and lesser-known material in Brussels, but also some milestones like 'Miles Ahead' and 'So What'.

> The Music of Gil Evans - Brussels Jazz Orchestra feat. Ryan Truesdell. 23/02, 20.30 (19.00: introduction & encounter with Ryan Truesdell), Bozar, Brussels