Orrin Evans: Truth, Justice & Love

Interview, From the Magazine, Orrin Evans

By Suzanne Lorge I Dec. 12, 2024

“A lot of people now see me walk with a cane, and they think it’s me being hip,” Orrin Evans said. “But it’s a combination of me being hip and needing a cane.”
(Photo: Christopher Kayfield)

Pianist Orrin Evans wants to have a word. “I’ll be 50 in March, and I have been doing this for 30 years,” he said in a remote interview with DownBeat from his hometown of Philadelphia. “I’m really so glad to be on the cover, but at the same time, I’m wondering, why now?”

His question is both rhetorical and loaded. Evans knows that he has the musical muscle to carry a big career in jazz, the kind of career that gets industry attention. And he knows what kind of doggedness it has taken to persist in that career despite the inconstancy of that attention. His concern runs deeper than whether or not he snags the brass ring, however. It’s more about who gets to ride the merry-go-round in the first place.

“After 30 years and now getting wider recognition — it’s a thin line between being ungrateful and a story that needs to be told,” he continued. “There are so many well-known artists out there that we all love, but who can’t get booked [in certain clubs]. Why not? These questions need to be brought up.”

To understand Evans’ chagrin, it helps to start with the breadth of his accomplishment. Since 1995, the player/composer has turned out more than 30 albums as a leader, many of them on his own imprint, Imani Records. He’s established several long-standing ensembles of various sizes, from duo to big band, and two releases by the latter — Presence (2016) and The Intangible Between (2019) — have earned Grammy nominations. He’s gigged regularly with members of the jazz topline, such as Kurt Rosenwinkel, Kevin Eubanks and the Mingus Big Band. And, most famously, he was tapped to replace Ethan Iverson, a founding member of The Bad Plus, when that pianist left the trio in 2017. (That band was on the April 2018 cover of DownBeat. Evans himself moved on after three years, and the popular group has since reconfigured without a pianist.)

Lately he’s been especially prolific, with two launches just weeks apart this past summer. He recorded the first, the live album You Think This America, with his Tarbaby trio (Evans, bassist Eric Revis and drummer Nasheet Waits), one of his mainstay ensembles since 2006. This is their first recording as just a trio; each of the previous four releases featured collaboration with prominent guest artists, like altoist Oliver Lake and trumpeter Ambrose Akinmusire.

With or without guests, however, the group coalesces around a larger notion, suggested by its moniker. Taken from an Uncle Remus fable, the trio’s name alludes to Br’er Rabbit’s struggles to extricate himself from a ruse dummy made of tar, with all of the discomfiting connotations attributed to the original story. This allusion is intentional, Evans asserts, providing as it does an apt metaphor for the “sticky discussions” about race in the United States today.

“With Tarbaby, we are adhering to, and being connected to, all of the things that we see as important to represent this music,” he said. “It’s great if you hear bebop in our music, or post-bop or avant garde. It’s great if you hear all these things. Tarbaby is about embracing all elements of the music.”

He goes on to point out the richness and variety of the Black American musical sources on the new album, which includes a bouncy, sometimes jangly version of “Dee Dee” alongside a somberly conversational “Comme Il Faut,” both by Ornette Coleman; a tenderly romantic take on the Stylistics’ hit “Betcha By Golly Wow” (by Linda Creed and Thom Bell); and Evans’ own “Red Door,” flush with irrepressible vigor, and “Blues (When It Comes),” a happy, improvisational jaunt. One doesn’t have to listen for too long to comprehend the group’s orientation toward the fable: It isn’t the menace of the trap that matters, but Br’er Rabbit’s clever escape and subsequent exhilaration at finding freedom.

One can infer a similar message of resilience from Evans’ second 2024 album, Walk A Mile In My Shoe, recorded with his Captain Black Big Band and released via Imani in August. This album’s title refers to the neurofibromatosis that has affected Evans since birth; the congenital neurological condition hindered his ability to walk and required several surgeries to remedy. Through this ongoing experience, Evans has developed an understanding of the value of tenacity in facing down a problem — a lesson that he brings to his career. As always, he talks about it with humor.

“A lot of people now see me walk with a cane, and they think it’s me being hip. But it’s a combination of me being hip and needing a cane,” he said. “It’s also a story I have really never told, and I got to tell that story through the record.”

Evans formed the Captain Black Big Band in 2009, now at 11 chairs from its original 17. It’s this smaller group that earned the recent Grammy nominations, for records released via Smoke Sessions. (The ensemble had a long-standing Monday night gig at that famed New York jazz club.) This time out, though, Evans brought four vocalists into the fold, each an extraordinary talent — Lisa Fischer, Bilal, Joanna Pascale and Paul Jost — along with trumpeter Nicholas Payton and organist Jesse Fischer.

True to its Philly roots, Evans’ large ensemble occupies a more soulful space than do most jazz big bands. Listen to Fischer’s gorgeous back-phrasing against the group’s subtle pulse on “Overjoyed”; Bilal’s deft vocal interpolations over the shifting tempi on “Save The Children”; Jost’s throaty growls in response to the band’s improvisations on “Dislocation Blues” (with fleet-fingered soloing by Jesse Fischer); Pascal’s feeling glides on the more traditional “Sunday In New York”; and Payton’s delicate, whispery intro on “All That I Am,” the album’s opener. Throughout, the ensemble skillfully navigates these tight grooves and earthy feels in a clear challenge to any preexisting ideas of what a big band can do.

“It’s one of the most fluid big bands out there, and by that I mean we’re able to go wherever we need to go,” Evans said. “We have a tribute to Charlie Parker in our book, a tribute to Monk, a tribute to Sun Ra. There are so many ways that this band can go.”

Besides these two successful releases, Evans has another pair of albums teed up for launch in 2025. He will return to Tarbaby and its guest format on an as yet untitled studio album highlighting the contributions of spoken word artist Ursula Rucker and saxophonists Bill McHenry and JD Allen. And he will release Even Now (Imani), the debut album from his Brazilian quintet Terreno Común, a newer venture formed during the pandemic (with vocalist Alexia Bomtempo, bassist Luques Curtis, drummer Clarence Penn and guitarist Leandro Pellegrino).

By most measures, such output is remarkable. This point is not lost on Evans, who is quick to stress that his concerns about the state of the jazz business today do not stem from bitterness. Rather, they reflect his testimony, as a de facto elder in that world, to a shift in how today’s young musicians come up.

“When I first moved to New York [in 1993], the thing was, ‘Let’s get a record deal through this label.’ ‘Let’s go on the road with this artist.’ ‘I want to meet Betty Carter.’ ‘I want to meet Art Blakey.’ All of those things were happening. I was catching the tail end of that then. Now, getting a teaching spot is the new record deal. These teachers are great, and I’m one of them. But what’s happening in the streets has drastically changed.

“[Today we have] a world of bastard jazz children floating around. These are the artists that don’t need or seek out the attention and support of older musicians. When I came to New York, my phone was ringing almost every morning with a call from Hamiet Bluiett, just to tell me about a new record or song we were going to try. We kept ourselves surrounded by the elders of this music. That isn’t happening in New York now.”

To be fair, Evans stands in a rare spot for a jazz musician. He’s from a transitional generation of players, those old enough to benefit from both the street — the community surrounding the originators of Black American music, with its oral tradition and hands-on learning — and the university system, with its genre codification and related aesthetic guardrails. (Evans trained under Kenny Barron at Rutgers University, where he now teaches.) From this straddling perch, Evans can perhaps more readily observe the contrasting values of freeform creativity and standardized excellence at the center of these competing musical environments. It’s an uneasy marriage, though, and he feels the rub even in the way we talk about the music.

“I’m not a fan of the word jazz all the time, because I think the word is limiting,” he said. “It comes with a lot of assumptions and implications.

“[For instance], I’m amazed at how many people have come up to me and said, ‘Who’s Lisa Fischer?’ We’re talking about somebody who has jumped all over between genres, from touring with the Rolling Stones, to doing her own trio, to doing her own [Grammy-winning] music in the ’90s. She’s done so much music, but there’s a big, long line of people who don’t know her because someone put a title on what she does.

“I say we need to talk about it differently moving forward. It’s not that I don’t like the word ‘jazz.’ It’s that I don’t like what people think it is. So I say, let’s just reshape this. Let’s call our music what we want to call it. And even if we don’t change the name of it, let’s not put boundaries on ourselves.”

The same limiting understanding that the language implies seems to run all throughout the jazz world, Evans holds, from the clubs to the labels to the media to education. What such limitations mean is that some of the most hard-working, creative musicians — the very sort who resist easy classification — are going to get overlooked. To the extent that he is one of these overlooked musicians, Evans seems bothered. But as one who’s found a way to do music on his own terms? Not at all.

In this context, Evans’ contributions as an entrepreneurial musician take on added significance. Foundational to this effort is the Imani Records label, a joint undertaking with his wife, singer Dawn Warren Evans. Founded in 2001, the label began as a vehicle for Evans’ own recording projects, but over the years, as his influence as a bandleader and producer has grown, so has the number of artists the label represents. Notably, even as a label owner, Evans’ approach to artist representation is about freedom of expression.

“Imani is more of a collective — we all work together to help each other. It’s not just my wife and I,” he said. “Our goal is to put out products that the artist really wants to stand by and not just what the label wants. I’ve been on record labels for years, and it’s been about branding the label and not the artist. That’s one of the things I’ve been enjoying with Imani. Watching each artist come in with their vision, and I sit there and say, ‘OK.’”

Under the auspices of his label, Evans has also managed to expand his creative reach into a wealth of related endeavors. He began hosting a weekly jam session with players from the label to give local musicians a chance to test their mettle alongside established instrumentalists like Revis and Waits. He started Club Patio, a live-streamed concert series, during the pandemic, with support from like-minded musicians such as Christian McBride, Jeff “Tain” Watts, Buster Williams and the late Russell Malone. And when the pandemic ended, he oversaw the evolution of Club Patio into Imani Records Club Patio Jazz Day, a larger outdoor jazz festival with two stages and 11 ensembles this year. Evans plans to make this an annual event.

Beyond these endeavors, Evans works closely, and seemingly indefatigably, with other regional festivals. Consider that in September, after the close of Club Patio Jazz Day, he set off for the Pittsburgh International Jazz Festival on The Jazz Train — a seven-hour ride via Amtrak from New York to Pittsburgh featuring live jazz performances, with Evans leading. Then, once in the Steel City, he joined the Captain Black Big Band on stage for a set. The next day he was in Mexico to kick off a West Coast tour with Tarbaby.

Evans also serves on the board for the Exit Zero Jazz Festival, a twice yearly event in Cape May, New Jersey. This October the Imani Records All-Stars — a revolving, ad hoc group from the label’s roster — claimed several spots in the festival’s fall lineup. This festival also supports an adjacent organization, The Heart of Jazz, a nonprofit that furthers jazz education through scholarship and performance opportunities. Evans sits on its board of this organization, too.

It’s hard to imagine that Evans could take on more, but that’s his intention. He’d love to start a jazz camp, he says. And to own a jazz club. And for sure he’s starting a podcast, where he can address some of the music-related issues that cause him concern.

“We were never taught about our spheres of influence and how to promote our music,” he explained. “So now, the biggest thing for me is to adjust the way that we’re thinking. And that has to be in the position of education, by creating an energy and an environment for some of the other stories that you don’t normally hear.

“So, my way to change the impression of what this music is would be as a gatekeeper. To be involved in how this information is being portrayed to the students, so that we don’t just keep it in the schools. We need to help the students out by putting them on stages, because we’re not out in the street anymore. We’re in the schools, so we need to bring the street inside.”

And the way to bring the street inside, if Evans has his druthers, would be to fling open the gate to the many beloved artists who stand just beyond the realm of mainstream attention.

“We need to remember that we’re not a bastard jazz society,” he said. “We need to keep our fathers and mothers in the music. We’ve lost so many. We’ve lost Geri Allen, but Joanne Brackeen is still here. We’ve lost John Stubblefield, but George Cables is still here. Eddie Henderson is still here. Kenny Barron is still here. We need to create those connections so that we see both worlds together. Both are important — the new and the old.” DB