I think that it's safe to say that Gil Evans's music is an obsession of mine, but I took something of a disjunct path to get to that point. A few years after I stumbled onto jazz, I bought the Miles Davis albums Miles Ahead, Porgy and Bess, and Sketches of Spain because I knew that they were important discs. I gave them a shot, but at the time I just didn't care for big band music, which I felt lacked the interplay of a trio, or the rawness of, say, one of Mingus's records. Frankly, I thought that the Sammy Nestico school of arraning was hackneyed, and that was what I thought all big band music consisted of.
A little later, I bought Michael Brecker's Wide Angles, an album with arrangements by Gil Goldstein for a fifteen-piece ensemble. Goldstein's handiwork really blew me away and I had to hear more, so I started looking around and soon realized that he was a protégé of Gil Evans. I quickly put on Sketches of Spain followed by the other collaborations with Miles, and I realized how incredible those projects are. Although I had previously dismissed Miles Ahead and Porgy and Bess as just big band music, I now sat in awe of the vividness and intricacy of Evans's scores. I knew that I wanted to write music like this, but I had no clue what was going on. Flash forward several years, and I can't claim to be any kind of a master at arranging. However, I've spent a fair amount of the intervening time learning about the basics of jazz arranging in general, and Evans's music in specific. In fact, I recently completed my graduate thesis at the University of the Arts with Gil's music as my topic. It's from this paper that the bulk of this post is drawn.
I wanted to research Gil's music in depth because there's surprisingly little written about the technical aspects of his work; most of what's available boils down to descriptive prose. But what made his charts different? Obviously there's the aspect of instrumentation. How many other jazz arrangers convincingly used French horns, tuba, bassoon, oboe, and harp on a regular basis? Then again, even when he lacked these instruments, he was able to elicit refreshingly colorful textures from his ensembles. Important? Yes, but not the whole story. Nor is the ensemble size, as Evans's arrangements on Birth of the Cool ("Moondreams" and "Boplicity") still sound unique despite the fact that they were written for a nonet. Miles Ahead, on the other hand, boasts a nineteen piece orchestra. Large band or not, Evans was doing something different.
While I don't want to downplay these or any other elements of Evans's music as being important to his style, I believe that his harmonic concept, and especially how he approached and controlled dissonance, is one of the defining factors of his writing. Often in his music, one can find material that can be easily classified by conventional harmonic terms, but which is constructed in unorthodox ways. This is key, because by doing this, he often evoked surprisingly vibrant sounds from otherwise standard material by using voicings which were deliberately made more dissonant through the ordering of the chord-tones, and these extra dissonances were used to intensify otherwise familiar harmony.
To be more specific, Evans injected more dissonance into his harmonies by ordering the pitches so that they created minor ninths or minor seconds that do not occur in traditional voicings. In his arrangement of "If You Could See Me Now," for instance, he doubled the root of the BbMaj7 in m. 19 and placed it next to the seventh, creating a minor second which is generally avoided. This extra tension adds urgency to the background figure. Evans recorded this on his own Gil Evans and Ten.
He sometimes used clusters in a similar way, such as the one seen in the following voicing extracted from "Gone" (from Davis's Porgy and Bess).
Gil boldly and creatively used dissonant intervals. It's not uncommon for arrangers to take advantage of major or minor second grinds, but Evans emphasized these clashes by daring to placing them at the top of a voicing; sometimes he even reconfigured them so that the highest voice created a minor ninth. Look at his famous arrangement of "Moondreams." In it, you can find multiple places where the melody is placed only a second away from the next lowest voice. Due to the slow tempo and, in some cases the long note durations, the dissonance is laid bare and emphasized.
Also, Gil didn't always resolve the collisions as one would expect, as seen in Ex. 3. On the upbeat of beat one in m. 15, a major second occurs between the melody (trumpet) and the French horn and lasts for two and one-half beats. It, however, is approached and resolved with contrary motion, unlike the whole-step found between the trumpet and the French horn in m. 16 on the upbeat of beat three. This clash is approached by similar motion and moves in parallel to the same interval on the first beat of m. 17, before finally being resolved through contrary motion when it moves to the next chord.
Evans's unorthodox chord-tone ordering and his bold use of dissonance often led to unconventional voicings. However, his crafting of these moments, and the carefulness with which he used them, made them to work. Rather than sounding out of place or forced, they always seemed to be fitting to the music.
On the next post, I'll provide a look at how I've incorporated a little of this concept into my own writing. This in turn will bring up some aspects of Gil's music that I'll use as the basis for even more postings.
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