GIL EVANS — Out of the Cool (review)

Album · 1961 · Progressive Big Band

4.5/5 · 2012-03-29
Sean Trane

Obviously, this is the pendant of the Into The Hot, but we’re definitely in a different class of album altogether, a totally different beast. You’d have expected the OOTC album to be recapitulative résumé, and the Into The Hot album to be the groundbreaking new start, but actually, it’s quite the opposite. One of the key ingredients to this album’s success is the presence of Mingus’ usual suspect Jim Knepper on trombone, and Ron Carter’s excellent presence on the contrabass. With a cool artwork (for the times), and produced by future label owner Creed Taylor, OOTC is certainly of two landmarks in Evans’ non-Miles career.

Opening on the awesome 15-mins+ La Nevada piece, you just know that Evans left the cool and the bop to venture into much more adventurous songwriting. Indeed, in the first minute, the electric guitar and the electric piano ostinato (we’re in 61, dude!!), pulsing like an electronic beat give you a good idea that the album is anything but “standard” jazz. As a matter of fact, with this track, Evans might just be further ahead than Mingus’ seminal Black Saint album, as there are some obvious similarities between Charles and Gil’s songwriting, and you can find an obvious hint of this in the low-brass instruments’ arrangements. Awesome stuff, really!! The following slow-starting moody and broody Where Flamingos Fly is a great piece that could be easily translated in a classical music format.

On the flipside, the bigger-band-styled Bilbao Song is very Mingus-ian in the low-brass arrangements and Carter’s slow but inevitable bass, again with the trombone (4 of them) and tuba section led by Knepper’s science, often put to work for Charles; the song being a bit reminiscent of Gil-Miles’ Spanish Sketches (and far away from the usual Ellington-big-band-type of composition) but unfortunately it ends in a fishtail. The following Stratusphunk is another low-brass and bass dominated tune filled with bonhomie and medium goofiness, despite Coles’ excellent trumpet and Crawford’s cool guitar solos. The closing Sunken Treasure is another deep, slow, moody, broody and dramatic Evans composition that takes its time to develops, but unfortunately it could’ve been at least three minutes longer. Awesome arrangements once more. It’s a bit of a downer that the remastered version judged useful to add a happy and semi-boppy Sister Sadie that kind of ruins’ the album’s cohesiveness.

Strangely enough, there would be an almost three-year silence after a very busy 61, until the Individualism album would finally show up in the racks. Funny how people cursed and threatened of Judas the good old Miles for going electric, but nobody ever said a word about Crazy-Canuck Gil Evans’ electric piano or electric guitar in the present album a few years sooner. Anyway, Out Of The Cool might just claim a top-5 all-time post-bop spot, alongside SoS, KoB, ALS and BS&tLS, battling it out with Brubeck’s Time Out; so you’d better run for this album while it’s still available as a disc. No wonder this album was released on the always adventurous label Impulse!