Gil Evans Orchestra - Featuring John Coles

 

Straight No Chaser

Gil Evans Orchestra

Great Jazz Standards Featuring John Coles

A Richard Bock Production

Cover Design by Armand Acosta

Photos by Richard Bock

World Pacific Records WP-1270

1959

Personnel:

Chant Of The Weed

Joy Spring

Balland Of The Sad Young Men 

Theme

Johnny Coles - Trumpet

Louis Mucci - Trumpet

Danny Stiles - Trumpet

Jimmy Cleveland - Trombone

Curtis Fuller - Trombone

Rod Levitt - Trombone

Earl Chapin - French Horn

Bill Barber - Tuba

Ed Caine - Woodwinds

Steve Lacey - Soprano Sax

Budd Johnson - Tenor & Clarinet

Ray Crawford - Guitar

Tommy Potter - Drums

Gil Evans - Piano

Davenport Blues

Django

Straight No Chaser

Johnny Coles - Trumpet 

Louis Mucci - Trumpet

Allen Smith - Trumpet

Curtis Fuller - Trombone

Bill Elton - Trombone

Dick Lieb - Trombone

Bob Northern - French Horn

Bill Barber - Tuba

Al Block - Woodwinds

Steve Lacey - Soprano Sax

Chuck Wayne - Guitar

Dick Carter - Bass

Dennis Charles - Drums

Gil Evans - Piano

From from the back cover: Born in Toronto and moving as a boy to Stockton, California, Gil Evans, without any formal musical training, formed his own band in 1933, which, under the direction of Skinnay Ennis, later moved en masse to the Bob Hope radio show. Emigrating in 1941 to New York to join the band of Claude Thornhill, who had also served as an arranger for Ennis, Gil remained until 1948, with time out for a stay in the Army. It seems, in retrospect, a natural thing for a sound-aware arranger of an orchestra employing French horns, tuba, and a basically soft-voiced lyric approach, to begin expanding his textural consciousness, especially while thinking in terms of developing the immediate and alive musics of such men as Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, and Lester Young within such an organization. After 1948, Gil remained in New York, freelancing as an arranger. His achievements in connection with the monumental Miles Davis small-band sides on Capitol, which resulted in his wholehearted acceptance as a "musicians arranger," seemed to go unnoticed by the entire recording industry, and aside from occasional highly individual and sensitive vocal backgrounds or representation as composer or arranger of single tracks on still more occasional jazz albums, Gil seems forgotten by the jazz audience, or relegated to "whatever happened to..." status.

However, with the release of the similarly influential series of related concerto sketches that marked his reunion with Miles on Columbia's "Miles Ahead" and his own Prestige "Gil Evans Plus Ten," a sudden upswing in Evans stock began to take place in late 1957, one which has extended and continued to grow through the present, marked by such milestones as his "Porgy And Bess" with Miles and the Cannonball Adderly-Evans collaboration for World-Pacific, "New Bottle Old Wine." With the formation of a sometime full-time working band, which has already visited Birdland, its book still growing and developing, Gil's continued recognition seems permanently assured.

In balancing the solo voices within the band represented here, Gil has made use of several highly individual styles and approaches to his music, in each case blending the soloist's and his own band voice, amalgamating the two individual approaches to create a third blended musical personality. Against his developing cushions of sound, Gil features Budd Johnson, whose talents have encompassed as many schools of jazz as are to be heard, the trombones of Jimmy Cleveland and Curtis Fuller, Ray Crawford's guitar, the trumpet and soprano sax of Johnny Coles and Steve Lacy, and the exciting rhythmic drive of Elvin Jones' drums,

As in his earlier "New Bottle Of Old Wine," Evans has made use of significant jazz themes, cutting across the "school" lines and drawing his material from jazz as a whole, irrespective of stylistic or temporal limitations or associations. I think it especially fitting that the lovely 1931 "Chant Of The Weed," essentially an arranger's triumph which the Don Redman Orchestra used as its Cotton Club theme, has been revitalized here. Johnny Cole's treatment of the 1927 Bix Beiderbecke "Davenport Blues," and the echoes of similar feeling in his work on the twenty-six-year younger "Django," made on the same date, indicate the depth of his talent. The magnificent contributions made by Johnson, whose muscular tenor of "Theme," Gil's only original on the album, written at Birdland, and magnificent Fazola-flavored clarinet on "Chant," serve to underline what so often has amounted to the terrible wast of resources, in the person of musicians no longer "official" in contemporary recording circles. The brief echo of Clifford Brown's "Joy Spring," first recorded while the young trumpeter was in the west solidifying his newly-formed alliance with Max Roach, stands as Evan's elegiac tribute to the extent of the trumpeter's achievements in so short a span.

Theoloneous Monk's "Straight No Chaser," originally recorded with Milt Jackson and Saihib Shibab in the early fifties, with the cymbal in Gil's hands becoming almost another piano sound, features both Lacey's soprano and Fuller's gifted trombone; as in his "'Round Midnight," Gil captures much of the composer's original feeling, but in a decidedly unionistic manner. John Lewis's "Django" has much more of the flavor and aura of the orchestral version recorded by the composer for Norman Granz than the Modern Jazz Quartet treatment, but carries the spirit of true reverence of the original. Tommy Wolf's "Balland Of The Sad Young Men" from Broadway's "The Nervous Set," features Clevelands' rich trombone against the brass, retaining a feeling of depth and sombre tones throughout.

Says Gil, "I selected the tunes because I liked them. The featured numbers I played for Coles, Cleveland and Johnson to make sure they would like to play them.

Replying to a first draft set of notes, Gil neatly summed up: "I don't like being compared with Ellington. There never has been, there isn't, and there never will be another Duke Ellington. I love him, his men, and his music madly, I own them all plenty, and I'm on my own way. And, incidentally, I am not self-taught. Everybody who ever gave me a moment of beauty, significance, excitement has been a teacher. I have made a partial list. It's enormous, but I'll send it on request." – Ed Michel

From Billboard - September 21, 1959: Evans with a flock of West Coast jazz artists has an interesting LP. Sound is applied to a group of inventive arrangements for highly effective results. The writing is imaginative, and the execution is tops. The selections of tunes is thoughtful and varied, comprising selections by several top jazz writers and artists.