RECORD REVIEWS

Ryan Truesdell launched his Gil Evans Project in 2012 with Centennial.

- —Thomas Conrad

It contained 10 Evans arrangements, including two original Evans compositions, that had never been recorded. The project was made possible by the fact that Truesdell had been granted access to the Evans family archives. Evans was a towering figure who had been responsible for some of the greatest recordings in the history of jazz, like his own Out of the Cool and Miles Davis's Sketches of Spain. Evans died in 1988, and Centennial was something the jazz world never expected to have again: a brand-new Gil Evans record. Truesdell assembled a large orchestra containing many of the best jazz musicians in New York and used an eminent engineer, James Farber.

After Centennial, every May, Truesdell began playing annual week-long gigs at the Jazz Standard in Manhattan. In 2015, he released Lines of Color, recorded live in the Jazz Standard in May of 2014, with more unearthed Evans charts. Truesdell kept most of the players from Centennial. He also kept Farber. These first two albums by the Gil Evans Project were among the most critically acclaimed recordings of the second decade of the 21st century. They earned a Grammy award and four nominations.

Now there is a third. Shades of Sound comes from the same week in the Jazz Standard as