Wednesday's centenary tribute to Gil Evans was always likely to be a more sober affair than the time the great arranger-composer brought his Monday Night band to the Queen's Hall and unleashed guitarist Hiram Bullock on an unsuspecting audience and, indeed, the balcony.
With the festival unable to source suitable charts for one of the advertised attractions, The Individualism of Gil Evans album from 1964, the first half was devoted to a more general Evans survey, although his individualism still shone through.
Arrangements of Anthropology and Donna Lee, written for the Claude Thornhill Orchestra, took us back to the earliest, even prototype, bebop big band days in the 1940s, with much fast fingering required and a fine rich orchestral colour produced by a big band augmented by French horns and tuba. Tenor saxophonist Michael Buckley's vibrant solo stood out on the later Waltz and an engagingly rowdy Jelly Roll managed to link its subject's New Orleans roots with the kind of guitar licks, courtesy of Malcolm MacFarlane, that Evans championed to some controversy from the late 1960s onwards.
Changes in personnel and instrumentation followed as Sketches of Spain showcased Evans' classic setting of oboe, bassoon and concert harp alongside more standard jazz instrumentation for Miles Davis' trumpet. With director Tim Hagans taking the Davis role with confident muted and open horn playing, this was a rarely performed classic delivered with superb skill and attention to detail, its playful The Pan Piper and the quiet military snare drum-driven Saeta complementing Evans' introductory adaptation of Rodrigo's Concierto De Aranjuez to closely resemble the original recording's restrained magical atmosphere.
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