Arranger and composer Gil Evans brought an extraordinarily sophisticated palette to jazz, injecting new compositional possibilities into the big-band format that inexorably changed modern jazz, particularly through his fruitful partnership with Miles Davis. Evans was born in Toronto in 1912 and became enamored of jazz as a youngster, when he learned piano. His family moved frequently and eventually ended up in Stockton, California, where he formed his first band in 1933; when they later performed on Bob Hope’s radio show, Evans was helped with arrangements by bandleader Claude Thornhill. Evans returned the favor, writing elegant, often gauzy arrangements for Thornhill’s proto-cool jazz orchestra between 1941 and 1948. In 1947 Evans met and began working with Davis, helping to form the paradigm-shifting nonet whose three sessions between 1949 and 1950 ended up on the classic Birth of the Cool in 1957. He wrote arrangements for three more Davis albums, Miles Ahead (1957), Porgy and Bess (1958), and Sketches of Spain (1960). In 1957 Evans made his first recordings as a leader, with an orchestra trafficking in unusual pastels and airy counterpoint. After making a couple of classic albums in the early 1960s, he largely dropped out of the scene until later in the decade, re-emerging with a modernized sound informed by rock. He recorded sporadically thereafter, and led a superb residency at Sweet Basil’s in New York City from 1983 until his death in 1988 at age 75.