Cedar Rapids Gazette
Les Zacheis : 07/02/1961

I also very much like the playing, the scoring and the recording job of the Gil Evans orchestra on a little label called Impulse.

Pianist Evans, a modernist with a substantial and fertile mind for scoring, runs his most-sized orchestra through 5 well-considered arrangements.

He leaves plenty of elbow room for improvising and fills out his orchestra with good men who know how to go. He also employs both string bass and tuba.

The excellent folder sleeve contains a geographical floor layout of the orchestra that jazz enthusiasts will find helpful.

The set is titled, Out of the Cool!

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Charlotte News
Jerry Reece : 02/04/1961

There’s a band leader on the jazz scene these days who’s taking up where Stan Kenton and the Sauter-Finnegan band have left off. He’s been known primarily (until recently) as an arranger, but he and his band have a new album just out.

The name is Gil Evans and if you haven’t heard it get used to the sound, because you’re going to be hearing it more and more.

Gil’s first claim to fame with the jazz world at large was as the arranger of a couple of Miles Davis albums (Porgy and Bess and Sketches of Spain).

But if his album is a true sample of things to come, look for his fame as a leader to soar.

The album is titled Out of the Cool and is one of four new releases on a new jazz record label called Impulse.

The album is not exactly a new approach as it takes an almost classical attitude but the effects are something very different.

The fine musical hand of Mr. Evans is apparent throughout and the off-beat percussion, minor-key brass and soulful reeds are really “out of the cool.”

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Oakland Tribune
Russ Wilson : 02/19/1961

Out of the Cool introduces the 14-piece Gil Evans‘ Orchestra in an engrossing display of the leader’s fascinating arrangements. One of the masterful writers in jazz, Evans, like Ellington, uses his orchestra as a means of personal expression. Where Flamingoes Fly is one of the most beautiful pieces of music I have ever heard while Stratusphunk, for all its unusual written devices, is still a blues. If you like jazz that stresses tone colors, don’t miss this one.

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Oklahoma City Advertiser
Earl Thomas : 04/20/1961

Another of the avant-garde arrangers, Gil Evans continues to prove his supremacy with the Jazz-score and big-band. Gil Evans once was one of a very small number authorized to teach a method of composition and arranging known as the “Schillinger System” – a method based quite strongly on mathematics, graphing paper and patterns thereon superimposed, transposed, inverted and rhythmically altered according to numerical and pictorial plan. For all this a-musical appearance, Gil Evans’ writing has always had consonant beauty, soul and much-much beat. His influence on the jazz-arranging that has been exported from the east (and west) during the past ten years is immeasurable.

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San Francisco Chronicle
Ralph J. Gleason : 03/12/1961

I continue to be amazed at how great Gil Evans is when he has a Miles or a Cannonball to work with, and how interesting but not exciting he is when on his own as in this album. Without Miles it is more or less Claude Thornhill. Miles and the other great soloists such as Cannonball give Evans an authenticity jazz-wise that he cannot seem to achieve without them.

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Down Beat : 05/25/1961
John S. Wilson : 5 stars

Here we see Evans plain – not concerned with creating suitable settings for Miles Davis, not reworking old jazz standards, but expressing himself with his own band. And it’s quite a musical sight. For Evans is a full-fledged member of that select group of jazz composer-arrangers who have completely distinctive musical personalities – a group in which Duke Ellington still remains head man and which includes, at the very least, Jelly Roll Morton and John Lewis.

Evans has put together a varied program – two of his own pieces: Sunken Treasure, an atmospheric bit, and La Nevada (previously recoded in a shorter version on World Pacific as Theme), a long, loose, swinging piece resplendent with excellent solos by Coles, Studd, Carter and, particularly, Crawford; a ballad, Where Flamingos Fly, that is set as a beautifully conceived, superbly executed solo vehicle for Knepper; George Russell‘s avant garde Stratusphunk; and the newly popular Kurt Weill tune, Bilbao Song, which Evans gives a fascinatingly brooding treatment.

The band he leads is, except for the addition of Jones and Barber, the exciting group he had for several weeks at the Jazz Gallery in New York in the fall of 1960. They respond to the Evans idiom brilliantly.

One of the charms of this set is Evans’ use of soloists as contributing elements to the over-all arrangement instead of as ends in themselves. This approach adds immeasurably to the total effect (since a total effect is actually possible under these circumstances) and makes the role of the soloists much more effective.

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Liner Notes by Tom Stewart

This is the Gil Evans Orchestra that made its initial appearance at the Jazz Gallery in New York City toward the end of 1960. After having experimented with many different instrumentational formats, Gil has settled on this one as affording the most flexible outlet for his musical ideas. His taste for developments in all music is evidenced by his choice of material, his selection of personnel and by his compositional style. While some composer-arrangers in the jazz field tend to overwrite in proportion to the time they spend and the techniques they learn, Evans seems to be headed in the opposite direction. Always aware of the importance of the improvised solo, his supporting material is never overbearing. Indeed, a considerable portion of the scores he has written for this present group have been virtually nothing more than sketches (La Nevada is a prime example in this album). Sometimes an idea will come to fruition at the recording session itself. The slap-tongued saxophones (Stratusphunk) and the opening rubato section of Bilbao came about in this matter.

La Nevada (Snowfall, in Spanish) is based upon a simple four-bar theme which Gil has used before. It moves back and forth from G minor seventh to G major in the melody but remains in G minor throughout the solos, much in the same way that a single chord (the dominant seventh) is often used as a base for improvisation in some Latin-American dance music. This performance is wholly improvised with the exception of the theme, which is notated for the trombone section and then the entire ensemble. The long opening is a vamp-like section with the rhythm entering individually. Gil makes use of the maracas here to reinforce the basic cymbal figure. Fragments of the theme are stated by muted trumpets and flute and then piano. The complete theme follows and sets the pattern for extended solos by John Coles (trumpet), Tony Studd (bass trombone), Budd Johnson (tenor), Ron Carter (string bass), and Ray Crawford (guitar). A restatement of the theme ends the performance. This is a fine example of Evans’ approach to striking a balance between the written and the improvised.

Where Flamingos Fly is a lovely piece by John Benson Brooks which features the solo trombone work of Jimmy Knepper. Notice the haunting four-note figure (played by piano, flute and guitar) which recurs throughout over a three-note tuba, string bass pattern. The use of the tambourine in the middle improvised section shows Gil’s penchant for varied rhythmic, as well as harmonic, textures.

Kurt Weill‘s Bilbao comes from the production Happy End, which apparently is not well-known in this country. The last eight bars of the melody are played by unison trumpet, guitar and soprano saxophone in rubato fashion. Some degree of tension is achieved as this line moves down in half-steps against a tonic pedal point (C) and a sustained E in the flute. The complete melody then appears as a string bass solo. A second chorus gives us another example of Evans’ rich ensemble style of scoring. A novel percussion instrument will be heard in this section. Devised by Bill Loughborough of Sausalito, California, it produces five tones (B-C#-E-F#-G# and the octave B) and is played with mallets made of small rubber balls. The effect sounds somewhat like a string bass being fingered in the upper register and having its strings hit with a drum stick instead of plucked.

George Russell‘s Lydian Concept as applied to the twelve-bar blues comes out here as Stratusphunk. The bass line is introduced first on bass trombone then switches, almost imperceptibly, to string bass part-way through the second chorus. The theme appears next (actually it is slap-tongued by the saxophones in the second chorus, a technique of fingering the notes and otherwise going through the motions, but without producing the sound). In the fourth chorus a third figure is introduced to produce a fine “walking” effect like a jazz march. Solos by Ray Crawford (guitar) and John Coles (trumpet) follow. The takeout choruses assume the pattern of the opening four in reverse.

The thematic material for Sunken Treasure is harmonic and rhythmic. John Coles supplies the melodic content in his improvised solo over a background of low-voiced triads in the trombones.