Evans’s composition provided an eerie seabed for Coles’s fastidious and plaintive improvisation We did it all in one take
Posted in General on 12. Aug, 2010
Evans’s composition provided an eerie seabed for Coles’s fastidious and plaintive improvisation “We did it all in one take,” he told me with pride. The album in which it is found, one of the most magical jazz collections, was called Out of the Cool on the Impulse! label, and its six tracks brought out Coles’s most effective work on disc. You’re going to play it right anyhow.” He left me a bit mystified, you know.The 1960 “Sunken Treasure”, one of the most haunting performances in all jazz, best illustrates the inspired perfection of the partnership. I remember once asking Gil how he wanted me to play something and he said, “Don’t worry about it. In retrospect this proved to be the ultimate setting for his work. When I interviewed him in 1973 he told me:Gil Evans’s composition was easy to read, but it was the interpretation of it which made the music. Although Vinson played the rhythm-and-blues so popular at the time, he was in fact a sophisticated modern jazz musician, and his band also included future giants of music in the pianist Red Garland and the tenor saxophonist John Coltrane.Coles continued to work amidst a mixture of contemporary jazz and rhythm- and-blues during the first half of the Fifties when he played for the drummer Philly Jo Jones, the singer-saxophonist Bull Moose Jackson and, from 1956 to 1958, the tenor saxophonist James Moody.He first came to the notice of jazz fans with his remarkable solos with the Gil Evans orchestras between 1958 and 1964.
He was basically a self-taught musician who developed his playing by working in a military band.The diminutive trumpeter joined a sextet called Slappy and his Swingsters when he was 19, and in 1948 became a member of the band led by the blues- singing alto player Eddie “Cleanhead” Vinson. The similarities clouded the fact that Coles’s inventions were completely original and that he barely borrowed from Davis at all. Both Coles and Davis had the ability to express themselves powerfully using a minimal number of notes. “He plays things with such sheer beauty that I wonder where it’s coming from.”
Johnny Coles would perhaps have been regarded as one of the jazz greats had he not been so close to Miles Davis in his sound and style. He died on the eve of the 20th anniversary of the death of another great legend, Charlie Chaplin..
Johnny Coles, trumpeter: born Trenton, New Jersey 3 July 1926; died Philadelphia 21 December 1997. “Johnny moves by the moment,” said pianist Herbie Hancock. He still worked occasionally, though he was developing Alzheimer’s disease.Toshiro Mifune is still “World-wide Mifune”, for he is the one Japanese that everyone readily recognises and remembers. He was ailing, and his first wife, whose divorce had been a particularly painful affair, returned to look after him until she died of cancer a few years ago. The samurai movies made with Kurosawa during the 1960s were now most often associated with him, but he was also in great demand from foreign directors, playing dignified but stereotyped Japanese in John Frankenheimer’s Grand Prix (1966), John Boorman’s Hell in the Pacific (1968) and Steven Spielberg’s 1941 (1980) among other less worthy movies, like Terence Young’s Red Sun (with Alain Delon and Charles Bronson) in 1971.He finally had the open set at Setagaya torn down and built a luxurious block of apartments in its place. But it was too long and static, and was not a success.Mifune’s only film made for his own production company was not a success, so he built an open set on waste land in Setagaya Seijyo and concentrated on television films, in many of which he acted.