Orrin Evans Has Been Playing Jazz for Years. So Why Is He a Rising Star?

[ad_1]

Mr. Evans was born in Trenton, N.J., in 1975, and moved to Philadelphia as a child. His mother, Frances Gooding, was an opera singer, and his father, Don Evans, was a well-known playwright and professor. In grade school Orrin took lessons from musicians around Philadelphia, then spent a couple of years studying jazz at Rutgers University, but eventually dropped out.

He was interested in a liberated approach, unconcerned with the divide between the free-improvising avant-garde and Philadelphia’s more soul-adjacent straight-ahead-jazz world. He never quite found a teacher who could give him the full spectrum, so he went his own way.

“Some of the older people I met in Philly, they were very supportive, but they also didn’t know how to deal with me. I understand that now, because I was on a different track,” he said. “I always had a drive not only to compose but to be a bandleader.”

He added: “If it wasn’t for my mother and particularly my father, I don’t know if I would have continued down that track.”

By the mid-1990s, when he began releasing records under his own name on the Criss-Cross imprint, Mr. Evans’s style had cohered into something commanding and distinctive. On early albums like “Captain Black” (a small-group effort, not with the big band) and “Deja Vu,” he offered magnetic up-tempo compositions and plangent ballads, usually with a hint of melancholy at every speed.

At first, it can be easy to hear his playing and think you’re listening to a mainline jazz musician — perhaps a close acolyte of the post-bop doyen Cedar Walton. But that’s missing Mr. Evans’s vast library of personal innovations. One signature is his way of riding a fast swing feel, bustling to the point of bursting, its momentum built of weight more than speed. Often he’ll land on an ostinato pattern, repeating an insistent phrase until it becomes its own song. Then there’s his way of lacing harmonies together, giving a subtle emphasis to a single note within each chord. By shining a light on particular tones, he makes his juicy-red clusters of harmony feel crisp and narrative.

[ad_2]

Source link