Gil Evans (13 May 1912 - 20 March 1988) was a jazz musician and an important innovator of big band jazz in the United States as an arranger, composer, band leader, and pianist. He had a seminal role in the development of cool jazz, modal jazz, free jazz and jazz-rock. Gil Evans was born in Toronto, Canada, as Ian Ernest Gilmore Green and early took the family name Evans from his stepfather. The family soon moved to California, where he spent the first decades of his life. ...show more

Gil Evans (13 May 1912 - 20 March 1988) was a jazz musician and an important innovator of big band jazz in the United States as an arranger, composer, band leader, and pianist. He had a seminal role in the development of cool jazz, modal jazz, free jazz and jazz-rock. Gil Evans was born in Toronto, Canada, as Ian Ernest Gilmore Green and early took the family name Evans from his stepfather. The family soon moved to California, where he spent the first decades of his life.

From 1946 onwards he lived and worked in New York City. In 1941-48 he worked as an arranger for the sophisticated Claude Thornhill Orchestra, from 1946 on in New York City. His modest basement apartment behind a Chinese laundry soon became a meeting place for musicians looking to develop the music from bebop, though Charlie Parker himself was among those involved. With Miles Davis, Gerry Mulligan and others Evans collaborated on a band book for a nonet starting in 1948, which had a booking for a week's appearance at the "Royal Roost" as an intermission group on the bill with the Count Basie Orchestra.

Capitol Records recorded the group 12 titles at three sessions in 1949 and 1950; these recordings were reissued on LP-album as Birth of the Cool in 1957. Later, when Davis was under contract to Columbia Records producer George Avakian suggested several potential arrangers to the trumpeter who immediately fixed on the option of working with Evans again. The three main albums constituting their association are Miles Ahead (1957), Porgy and Bess (1958) and Sketches of Spain (1960). Later, another collaboration Quiet Nights (1962) was issued, but against the wishes of Davis, who broke with his then producer Teo Macero for a time as a result. ...show less