Willis Conover Interviews Gil Evans

Possibly taped in February 1968 but broadcast on May 16, 1968, this is a short, informal chat between the DJ Willis Conover and jazz composer/arranger Gil Evans." Here, Evans mentions working on a new recording with Miles Davis which is most likely the one known as The Falling Water sessions (released only decades later in the Evans/Davis Columbia set.) Evans sounds laid-back but not very candid. There's an interesting reminiscing by Conover about a meeting between Harold Arlen, Evans and Friedrich Gulda (at 5') but even more interesting is Conover's mentioning of a screening of The Sound of Jazz (feat. Miles Davis/Gil Evans) in Russia which he had personally attended a year before.

The source is here.

London Jazz Festival: Celebrating Gil Evans

Gil Evans' arrangements in jazz are like Michelangelo Antonioni's landscapes and cityscapes in cinema: they are suspending spaces, inhabited and lost, in time. Cold, estranged and wintery, even if it is set in Africa (The Passenger), or in Evans' case, it is an arrangement for a classic like Summertime. Arrangements aside, his writings are even more fascinated with abstractness and low-register sounds of odd instruments (tuba, French horn, many trombones) which depicts the lower, or hidden corner's of its composer's sad soul, a Californian from Irish-Scottish origins whose apartment's door on West 52nd Street was open to revolutionaries of jazz and new sounds of surprise in the 40s and 50s.

Last night's concert at the Queen Elizabeth Hall, a tribute to Evans the writer and Evans the arranger, was a proof of still how vivid and valid is his music, more than half a century after its creation, unlike many of the modern big band and classical-oriented compositions of that period which seems heavy and stuffy today, in another word, dead and gone. Ironically, Gil's orchestration of bleakness has stayed more vivacious than his contemporaries.