Still Miles Ahead

In the long, colorful history of jazz, a history filled with odd alliances and unusual collaborations, Miles Davis and Gil Evans were among the most unlikely of musical partners.

Davis, the trumpeter: compact, stylish and self-possessed, for many the very image of the charismatic jazzman, never hesitant to bluntly express his candid opinions in a peculiarly raspy-toned voice (a sound so different from the dark, introspective quality of the music emanating from his horn).

Gil Evans, the arranger: tall, fair-haired and gangly, an eccentric, self-taught Canadian with a constantly curious mind, searching for elusive combinations of never-before-heard-of sounds, 13 years Davis’ senior and a musical father figure to a generation of emerging jazzmen.

The Davis-Evans connection--an intimate friendship, actually--began with their collaboration (along with Gerry Mulligan, John Lewis and others) on the classic “Birth of the Cool” sessions in 1949-50. The recordings, which featured a nine-piece band with an unusual instrumentation that included French horn and tuba, were not especially successful in a commercial sense, but the music’s subtle textures, dissonant harmonies and laid-back manner had an impact upon composers and arrangers that lasted for decades.

Joined by a comparable creative view, Davis and Evans remained close (Evans’ son, Miles, was named after Davis) until the arranger’s death from peritonitis in 1988. Davis was devastated by the passing of the man he considered his “best friend.”

“A person is lucky if he’s got one Gil Evans in his life,” Davis recalled in his informative autobiography (“Miles,” written with Quincy Troupe, published by Touchstone/Simon & Schuster), “someone close enough to you to pull your coattail when something’s going wrong. Because who knows what I would have done or become if I hadn’t had someone like Gil to remind me?”

Their work found its greatest fruition in the period between 1957 and 1960, when three landmark recordings--”Miles Ahead,” “Porgy and Bess” and “Sketches of Spain”--forever preserved the vital importance of the pair’s creative collaboration.

And now that work is the centerpiece of “Miles Davis & Gil Evans: The Complete Columbia Studio Recordings,” a six-CD boxed set from Columbia that will be in record stores Tuesday. The set, which has been the subject of nearly a year of announced release dates and subsequent postponements, includes the three primary recordings, the less well received “Quiet Nights” (“If it had been left up to me and Gil,” Davis wrote, “we would have just let it stay in the tape vaults”); music for a Laurence Harvey play, “The Time of the Barracudas”; and two discs devoted to alternate takes, edits and rehearsals (see review, Page 77).

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The music in the boxed set represents the creative high point of a relationship that began around 1947, when Evans sought out Davis for a copy of the trumpeter’s now-familiar bebop line, “Donna Lee.” Evans was writing for the Claude Thornhill Orchestra, a popular ‘40s dance band that was producing some surprisingly provocative music (primarily the result of arrangements by Evans and Mulligan and the alto saxophone work of Lee Konitz). And he was already known as something of an offbeat character.

“Gil and I hit it off right away,” wrote Davis. “Here was this tall, thin, white guy from Canada who was hipper than hip. I mean, I didn’t know any white people like him.

“When I first met him, he used to come to listen to ‘Bird’ when I was in the band. He’d come in with a whole bag of ‘horseradishes’--that’s what we used to call radishes--that he’d be eating with salt. I was used to black folks back in East St. Louis walking into places with a bag full of barbecued pig snout sandwiches and taking them out and eating them right there. But bringing ‘horseradishes’ to nightclubs and eating them out of a bag with salt, and a white boy? Man, he was something else.”

The Davis-Evans personal connection became closer in the late ‘40s, when Evans’ small, dark apartment (where “you didn’t know whether it was night or day,” Davis wrote) on Manhattan’s West 55th Street became a kind of funky salon, a gathering place for some of the most adventurous, envelope-stretching jazz musicians of the time--Mulligan, Lewis, John Carisi, composer George Russell, singer Blossom Dearie, composer John Benson Brooks and others, including on occasion Charlie “Bird” Parker.

The “Birth of the Cool” ensemble was a direct product of the musical dialogues that took place in Evans’ apartment. And his role in those dialogues was crucial.

“Gil was like a mother hen to all of us,” continued Davis in his autobiography. “He cooled everything out because he was so cool. And we loved being around him because he taught us so much, about caring for people and about music. . . .”

But musically the Davis-Evans connection dimmed somewhat in the early ‘50s.

The “Birth of the Cool” recordings had a greater impact upon other musicians than they did upon Davis’ own career. West Coast jazz, popular in the ‘50s, picked up on the recordings’ chamber music style, the contrapuntal melodic lines, and the cool, smooth-edged timbres. Davis, as he so often did in his career, moved on to other, more edgy music. But he was not pleased that the benefits of the “Birth of the Cool” sound were going to others. (“White musicians who were copying my “Birth of the Cool” thing were getting the jobs,” he wrote. “Man, that . . . hurt me to the quick.”)

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Although the quality of Davis’ playing during this period never diminished, his personal life became dominated by the problems of drug addiction.

When George Avakian, a leading producer for Columbia, considered signing Davis to a contract in 1955, he had serious reservations about the wisdom of the move.

“He had no manager or booking agent,” Avakian explains in the album’s program notes. “Moreover, he had just come off 4 1/2 years of heavy heroin addiction and the rate of recidivism among jazz musicians was not encouraging.”

Still, Avakian adds, “Miles was playing as well as ever. His early promise as the new generation’s most distinctive trumpet voice was approaching fulfillment.”

So Davis was signed to a Columbia contract. The initial Davis small group albums for Columbia--notably the breakthrough “Round Midnight,” in which the title tune was arranged by Evans--were musically and commercially successful, but Avakian felt he needed an attention-getting outing to enhance Davis’ visibility with the wider musical audience. Intrigued by composer Gunther Schuller’s advocacy of “Third Stream,” as a blending of classical music and jazz, he decided to record Davis with a large instrumental ensemble.

Although Schuller was briefly considered as the album’s orchestrator-composer, Avakian and Davis quickly turned to Evans--principally because of his important contributions (along with Mulligan, Lewis and Carisi) to the “Birth of the Cool” recordings.

Avakian saw the project as an extension of the sound Evans had gotten from the Thornhill band and--by extension--from the “Birth of the Cool” ensemble. He told Evans to “expand the sound, rich, fat brass with tuba, French horns, woodwinds. . . .”

Evans’ immediate reaction was to ask the size of the budget. Avakian responded by taking a deep breath before replying, “Whatever it takes, but let’s keep it reasonable.”

“Gil started listing instruments. I stopped counting at 16. Another deep breath. ‘You got it, Gil.’ ”

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The album’s program annotator, composer Bill Kirchner, associates Davis-Evans with Duke Ellington-Billy Strayhorn and Frank Sinatra-Nelson Riddle as the “three partnerships that have been most influential in this century’s American music.”

But Ellington and Strayhorn were composers, working together jointly in a fashion that seamlessly joined their individual creative output. And Riddle, as an orchestrator, was concerned with providing suitable musical settings for a performer who was a pop-culture icon.

In the case of the Davis-and-Evans partnership, the connection is neither specifically compositional nor is it simply a matter of an orchestrator showcasing a soloist--even though each of those elements is present. What makes the music on “Miles Ahead,” “Porgy and Bess” and “Sketches of Spain” so utterly unique is the manner in which the interaction between Davis and Evans, two very distinct personalities, stimulated both artists to reach peaks of collective creativity. The sound, substance and style of Davis’ trumpeting (and fluegelhorn playing, in some cases) impacted the way Evans constructed his uncommon musical timbres, and--appropriately--the sound of Evans’ orchestrations urged Davis into a realm of solo expression rarely revealed in his earlier work.

The passionate eloquence of Davis’ playing, especially in “Porgy and Bess” and “Sketches of Spain,” where Evans provides him with the support of ravishing orchestral textures, is gripping, among the most listener-involving music Davis ever produced. And in brilliant, declamatory passages such as the stunning “Saeta” and “Solea” (from “Sketches of Spain”), his trumpet breaks through its instrumental character to become a keening, vocalized supplication.

Interestingly, in a kind of creative full circle, the solos resonate with Davis’ overview of the sounds he and Evans were looking for as early ago as the “Birth of the Cool” sessions in the late ‘40s. “I said,” Davis wrote in his autobiography, “[the ensemble sound] had to be the voicing of a quartet, with soprano, alto, baritone and bass voices. . . . I wanted the instruments to sound like human voices, and they did.”

As with so many other aspects of the Davis-Evans partnership, the echoes from the “Birth of the Cool” underscore the extent to which the “Miles Ahead,” etc., music represents a true meeting of minds and hearts.

There are few people whom Davis--who was better known for his criticism than his commendations--ever spoke of as highly as Evans. And, despite their obvious differences, Davis and Evans also were very similar in many respects. Both worked hard to maintain their continuing friendship. Both were dedicated, above all, to the music--toward the thoroughness of its examination, the steadfastness of its exploration and the honesty of its expression. “We heard sound the same way,” Davis wrote of Evans.

It’s difficult, in fact, to come up with any jazz association, in terms of longevity and musical compatibility (the Ellington orchestra aside, perhaps) that can compare to the Davis-Evans collaboration.

Some critical opinion to the contrary, it’s even more difficult to deny the importance of that collaboration. One can argue endlessly about whether Davis, who died in 1991, or Evans made the major contribution.

But ultimately it is the singular character of the Evans-Davis interaction, rather than their individual contributions, that gives the music of “Miles Ahead,” “Porgy and Bess” and “Sketches of Spain” its qualities of timelessness.

And the singularity of that interaction was enriched--from beginning to end--by a powerful mutual admiration for each other’s work.

Evans--quiet, epigrammatic in his comments--rarely spoke about the closeness of his friendship with Davis. It was, for him, a given, and one that needed no public discussion. But he was unhesitating in his admiration for Davis’ talents.

“Miles is a leader in jazz,” Evans told writer Nat Hentoff in 1959, “because he has definite confidence in what he likes and is not afraid of what he likes. A lot of other musicians are constantly looking around to hear what the next person is doing and worry about whether they themselves are in style . . . Miles has confidence in his own taste, and he goes his own way.”

Davis’ respect for Evans was equally unreserved.

“He never wasted a melody,” he said after Evans’ death. “He and Duke Ellington changed the whole sound. There’s no way to describe it, because there’s nobody on this earth that can do it anymore. What he did to the texture of an orchestration, what he did with pop songs, was like writing an original piece. Students will discover him. They’ll have to take his music apart layer by layer. That’s how they’ll know what kind of a genius he was.”