Gil Evans (Ian Ernest Gilmore Green) was born May 13, 1912, in Toronto, Canada, to Margaret Julia McConnachy; his father died before he was born. As a child, Evans and his mother moved frequently throughout the Pacific Northwest,  where his mother got work as a cook in logging and mining camps in British Columbia, then in the U.S. in Idaho, Montana and Washington. She married a miner John Evans, and the family settled in California when Gil was about 8 years old. Gil attended junior high school in Berkeley. It was there that he received informal piano lessons from a friend’s father, an avid jazz fan. From here on, Gil’s interest in music grew.

The Evans family moved to Stockton, California in 1928, where Gil entered high school as a junior, and started teaching himself about music. He spent many hours practicing the piano at the homes of friends, since he didn’t own one. He also spent a lot of time listening to jazz on records and on the radio. Years later, Evans said: “When I was coming up, radio was the big thing—there were broadcasts from all over the place. Louis Armstrong came on all the time, and so did Duke and the Casa Loma Band…I caught all these broadcasts as... [read more]