Centennial – Newly Discovered Works of Gil Evans ArtistShare****

Projects “rediscovering” the work of dead musicians can often amount to the worst kind of musical necrophilia, perpetrated by big record companies with money on their minds, but this reclamation of previously unrecorded Gil Evans scores is the very opposite. Funded by fans (including Evans’s protégé, Maria Schneider) and featuring some of New York’s finest, Centennial is an act of pure devotion by musicians with a deep understanding of the great arranger’s music, informed by his own sketches and notes supplied by the Evans family.

Producer and arranger Ryan Truesdell has avoided nostalgia and instead has put authentic charts before the sort of contemporary musicians that Evans might have chosen himself. As a result the shivers down the spine one feels as Evans's gorgeous, big band sound lives once more in pristine digital sound can be enjoyed without remorse. gileveansproject.com