SNJO and Bill Evans prepare to take An American Journey

The road runs ever on for the Scottish National Jazz Orchestra. Not for nothing is its three-day tour later this month titled An American Journey: its guest, US saxophonist Bill Evans, is a musician of such eclectic experience, from bebop to bluegrass, that this big-band tracing of his personal journey through American music promises an exhilarating road trip.

Bill Evans PIC: Raul Ollo

Evans is no stranger to the SNJO and its director, fellow-saxophonist Tommy Smith. The plangent cry of his soprano sax opened Smith’s powerful Beauty and the Beast suite which Evans performed and recorded with the orchestra a few years ago.

This time, however, the big band will celebrate Evans’s own music and the way his jazz has been shaped by an intriguingly diverse range of associations, from playing in Miles Davis’s band during the Eighties and John McLaughlin’s reformed Mahavishnu Orchestra to excursions into funk, hip-hop and, perhaps most notably, American folk, with his Grammy-nominated fusion band Soulgrass.

With the SNJO he’ll play compositions including Celtic Junction, Dixie Hop and The Hobo, their style ranging from rocked-up reel to stealthy funk, in treatments by such esteemed arrangers as Geoffrey Keezer and Florian Ross, as well as by SNJO figures like Smith, Martin Kershaw and Paul Towndrow.

Speaking from New York, the man in the trademark bandana is enthusiastic at the prospect of a reunion with the Scottish band: “Tommy thought it would be a cool idea to use songs from different periods of my career, so we might start with a couple of hip hop songs I’ve written, then maybe funk-based fusion with more of a Miles Davis influence, and then we move into other material that has more of a bluegrassy edge.

“To do these with a big band will be interesting, because if some of this music, recorded originally with a violin and banjo and other Americana instruments, is to be arranged for big band that will give it a completely different sound.”

For a sample of what Evans sounds like in the company of a jazz orchestra, try his newly released album, The East End, an exhilarating live recording with Germany’s WDR Big Band.

“I love playing in front of a big band,” he says, “and the Scottish National Jazz Orchestra is one of the great big bands. When people come to hear a band like that, it’s like coming to hear a home-town star baseball team or something.”

One thing Smith and Evans won’t be doing together this time around is playing golf. Evans’s approach to golf is apparently as full-on as his music-making, with the result that he required an operation on his left elbow in April and is due another on his right.

When he spoke to me earlier this month, he and an old associate (and fellow SNJO collaborator), jazz-rock guitarist Mike Stern, were in the middle of a week’s residency at New York’s Birdland. Stern suffered a major hand injury three years ago and Evans recounts wryly how the surgeon who treated them both came to one of their gigs, enabling them to thank him from the stage.

They may not be golfing, but he and Smith will be engaging in some lively musical sparring: “I’ve told Tommy that I’d love to have our two saxophones playing off each other, very impromptu and of the moment, so there should be some interesting interactions.”

And his saxes, he says, are the great constant in his music: “Especially in jazz, people ask me why I play so many different kinds of music and I remind them it’s always the same saxophones.

“Being a jazz improviser, I play differently and respond differently when I hear different chords and sounds behind me. But the saxophones don’t change.” Jim Gilchrist

The SNJO with Bill Evans play Edinburgh’s Queen’s Hall on 27 September, Glasgow Royal Concert Hall New Auditorium on 28 September and the Music Hall, Aberdeen on 29 September, see www.snjo.co.uk and www.billevanssax.com