“At the time I thought I was inadequate,” Evans continued. We were playing black clubs, and guys would come up and say, ‘What’s that white guy doing there?’ They said, ‘Miles wants him there-he’s supposed to be there.” “The guys in the band defended me staunchly. In addition to the demands of playing in a successful, frequently-engaged ensemble, racial tension arose from his being the sole white member of the band one spectator described Evans as “looking like a Harvard professor on a Harlem street corner.” “It was more of an issue with the fans,” Evans later recalled. But playing in Davis’ group took a toll on Evans. In addition to their mutual interest in modal jazz, Davis and Evans also bonded over a shared love of classical music and composers such as Ravel and Rachmaninoff. Davis was working as well that summer on a new collaboration with Gil Evans, a jazz treatment of the score for PORGY AND BESS. Some members of the group, including Evans and Coltrane, also joined Davis for a Columbia date led by arranger and composer Michel LeGrand. The sextet with Evans on piano was recorded by Columbia in concert twice that year, at the Newport Jazz Festival in July, and again at the Plaza Hotel in New York City in September. Trumpeter Miles Davis performing “On Green Dolphin Street,” with John Coltrane on tenor sax, Cannonball Adderley on alto sax, Bill Evans on piano, Paul Chambers on bass and Jimmy Cobb on drums-from the first studio session featuring Evans in the band, recorded on Davis’ 32 nd birthday in 1958 and released the following year on the album JAZZ TRACK. Miles Davis, “On Green Dolphin Street” ( 9:48) Here, in the studio for the first time, is the group that would eventually make that legendary album, performing “On Green Dolphin Street.” The understated clarion quality of Evans’ piano opening, like a series of small jazz bells being quietly rung, begins to conjure the kind of ethereal sound that Davis would manifest fully on KIND OF BLUE nearly a year later: “The way he approached it, the sound he got was like crystal notes or sparkling water cascading down from some clear waterfall.” “One night I looked up,” Evans later remembered of a gig at the Village Vanguard, “opened my eyes while I was playing, and Miles’ head was at the end of the piano listening.” Evans had been recommended to Davis by jazz composer/arranger and theorist George Russell, an advocate of what would become known as “modal jazz,” a system of improvisation based on scales rather than chords-an approach that would be at the heart of the album KIND OF BLUE. Cobb had replaced the talented but unreliable Philly Joe Jones, while Evans was there instead of longstanding pianist Red Garland because “Bill had this quiet fire that I loved on piano,” Davis wrote several decades later in his autobiography. On his 32 nd birthday, he was back at Columbia’s 30 th Street studio in New York City, with a sextet that included saxophonists John Coltrane and Cannonball Adderley, bassist Paul Chambers, and two new additions-drummer Jimmy Cobb, and pianist Bill Evans. Now, once again, Davis was moving in a different direction. He had made standout small group records for the label as well as a large-ensemble collaborative effort with Gil Evans, MILES AHEAD, that revealed his restlessly inventive musical ambition. He had already accomplished much at that young age-coming to New York City in the mid-1940s and joining saxophonist Charlie Parker’s trailblazing bebop group, playing a primary role in the progressive-jazz sessions that came to be known as the Birth of the Cool, and kicking a destructive heroin habit before signing with Columbia Records in 1955. Trumpeter Miles Davis performing “Stella By Starlight,” with John Coltrane on tenor sax, Bill Evans on piano, Paul Chambers on bass, and Jimmy Cobb on drums… recorded in May 1958 and originally released on the 1959 album JAZZ TRACK….and one of the very first studio recordings that Miles Davis and Bill Evans made together. Miles Davis, “Stella By Starlight” ( 4:43) It’s “Kind Of Two: Miles Davis and Bill Evans”… coming up on this edition of Night Lights. In the next hour we’ll hear some of the music from that album, as well as other recordings that Davis made with Evans and fellow group members saxophonists John Coltrane and Cannonball Adderley, bassist Paul Chambers, and drummer Jimmy Cobb, as we explore the creative alchemy behind KIND OF BLUE. In 1958 trumpeter Miles Davis brought a new pianist named Bill Evans into his sextet who stayed only a few months, but whose influence helped spark one of the most artistically notable and commercially successful albums in the history of jazz. Welcome to Night Lights… I’m David Brent Johnson.
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