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A Friday set at the Standard left little doubt
about that. Before a packed house, the band—
20-strong, including French horns, a tuba, a
viola and a singer—offered an electrifying hour,
from the opening chords on the Willie Dixon
blues “Spoonful” (pianist Frank Kimbrough later
tagged his account of Evans’ angular clusters a
“call to arms”) to the waning bars of “Concorde,”
an intricate exercise in linearity. Both tunes had
appeared on 1964’s The Individualism Of Gil
Evans.
This set at the Standard, covering Evans’ middle
period (the late ’50s through the mid-’60s), followed
three nights in which a band of 22 drew
solely on Evans’ complex earlier arrangements
for Claude Thornhill’s orchestra—arrangements
favoring rapid and frequent internal shifts that
Kimbrough said often obviated comping.
“If you were to put chord changes in,”
Kimbrough explained, “they would be changing
every eighth note.”
As it happened, a desire for change—writ
large—has emerged as central to Evans’ sensibility.
Truesdell, 34, said Evans’ archival scores revealed
him to be a man who was “constantly searching
for something, some new sound.” This sentiment
was amplified by Noah Evans, Gil’s older
son, who, caught between sets at the Standard,
said that when it came to his charts, his father was
“incapable of leaving well enough alone.”
Evans’ drive is reflected in the heavily markedup
pencil scores, or copyists’ cleaned-up versions—often
hastily rendered—that Truesdell has
been mining for the better part of a decade. Amid
the scores, Truesdell said, he has searched for wayward
accidentals, missing bars and some larger
“scientific equation” by which he could identify
patterns revealing Evans’ underlying intentions.
Those intentions could prove elusive; when the
trail grew cold on a particular score, he would ink
it and pass it on to the players.
“I could then pencil in things we might
change, like phrasings and articulations,” he
explained.
In Truesdell’s apartment, evidence of his
efforts abounded. Photocopied scores from Drury
University’s Thornhill archive sat piled under
photos of Evans that lined a wall. Scores painstakingly
transferred to PDF format, many from the
Evans family, filled pages on Truesdell’s computer
screen. All told, Truesdell said, he had compiled
nearly 250 charts, about 70 of which had never
been recorded.
Pinned to his corkboard was a fragment from
one such tune, “Laughing At Life.” The fragment
showed how Truesdell had untangled Evans’ idiosyncratically
compressed notation by expanding
it to three staves from two. The tune, a vocal
arrangement from 1957, had been introduced to
the world in the Friday set, Truesdell said, adding
that he had initially doubted the score would ever
see the light of day.
“I was afraid the band was going to veto it
because it’s crazy hard,” he said.
Like many of Evans’ arrangements, “Laughing
At Life” features unconventional coloration
arrived at through unorthodox means—namely,
trombone and tuba parts that plumb the uncomfortable
upper reaches of their ranges in briskly
paced passages executed in unison with the alto
and tenor saxophones.
“Gil wanted to hear not just a note,” Truesdell
emphasized. “He wanted to hear the person
behind that note—the pain-and-suffering aspect
of playing.”
Plenty of similar maneuvers from the Evans
playbook will be on display both onstage and
on record in the coming months. In November,
Truesdell will lead a group of 37 musicians
on the Zankel Hall stage of Carnegie
Hall. And in February of next year, the new
album will be released.
As Truesdell works his way through the 16
hours of music recorded in May, he will be balancing
a number of factors in deciding which
tunes make the cut. For all his attention to detail,
though, a note-perfect performance will not necessarily
be at the top of the list.
“The vibe is more important,” Truesdell
said. “And I think Gil would have said
the same thing.”
DB