Gil Evans Remembered

In 1972 I got a call to play French Horn with Gil Evans for a week at the Village Vanguard in New York City. I expected to be playing classics from “Sketches of Spain” and “Porgy & Bess.” Nope. What I stepped into was a high-energy band with an all-star group of dynamic soloists – Howard Johnson, Lenny White, Joe Beck, Billy Harper, Dave Bargeron, Trevor Koehler, David Sanborn - and Gil was loving it! Later, just getting into synthesizers, I showed him my Minimoog. He told me to just use the Moog, and hired John Clark to play French horn. In time the band morphed into a powerful, acoustic/electric ensemble, culminating in the 1974 album “Gil Evans Plays The Music of Jimi Hendrix.” But Gil always wanted to see where the music could go. So he hired musicians with distinctive styles and let us do our thing. Live, we played Jimi Hendrix and Charles Mingus as well as Gil’s classics. During the next 16 years the band toured the world, recording 3 studio albums and 34 live albums. When we weren’t touring we played every Monday night to a packed house at Sweet Basil in New York City.

In 2014 I assembled a group of alumni from that ‘70s era “Monday Night Band” to do a one-nighter at The Cutting Room in NYC. The band easily fell back into that freewheeling spirit we remembered so well. You can feel it on this recording. Gil’s spirit was with us that night!

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