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on Gil Evans


Bandmember Lew Soloff: "People would come to see us and hear all his unisons and say, 'Why isn't he writing something?' They didn't understand that he wrote unisons with a flair -- and believe me, at rehearsals, he got pretty tough with those unisons. Because it wasn't as if he wanted you to play like a machine or a perfect band playing a unison chart. That wasn't what he was after at all. He was after the particular people he hired singing this thing together in their own very individual manner."

Bandmember Warren Smith: "Gil's lines and phrasing were really difficult. He would write something but wanted it to sound more like the human voice -- he'd want fall-offs and shakes and all kinds of fluctuations of time and pitch. You'd have to wait until he sang it for you and imitate that. He molded the sound like it was this elastic piece of clay instead of a chart."