Wednesday, February 13, 2013

RYAN TRUESDELL PRESENTS CENTENNIAL: NEWLY DISCOVERED WORKS OF GIL EVANS WINS GRAMMY AWARD

Renowned composer, producer, and conductor Ryan Truesdell's highly acclaimed CD Centennial: Newly Discovered Works of Gil Evans (ArtistShare) has won a posthumous Grammy Award for Gil Evans in the category of Best Instrumental Arrangement (How About You) in the 55th annual GRAMMY Awards. This arrangement of How About You was written in 1947 for the Claude Thornhill Orchestra and is Gil Evans' first GRAMMY win for arranging. Evans had 11 prior nominations and two wins.

Truesdell, who accepted the award on behalf of Evans, says: "I'm so thrilled for Gil's music to receive this great honor. Thanks to everyone who made it possible to bring this never-before recorded music into the spotlight: the Evans family - Anita, Miles and Noah - who gave me access to his archives, the amazing musicians, engineer James Farber, and of course the many ArtistShare participants who helped to make this project a reality. Mainly, I'd like to thank Gil for creating this unique sound and voice that he had in his music."

Centennial, which brings to light new music from jazz luminary Gil Evans, has been widely heralded as one of the most important CDs of the year. It earned one of France's highest honors: LES COUPS DE COEUR from the Académie Charles Cros, and accolades as "one of the most significant releases of 2012." - JazzTimes. "An extraordinary album." - Nate Chinen, New York Times. "Truesdell deserves our gratitude for throwing light on scores unearthed from the archivesŠ One of the jazz releases of the year." - Clive Davis, Sunday Times of London. "Editor's Pick: Recording of the Month: 5-stars." - Tom Conrad, Stereophile. "As majestic and richly textured as you would expect." - Patrick Jarenwattananon, NPR A Blog Supreme. "Record of the Month" - Jazz Magazine (France). "10 out of 10 stars. If you don't like this, you don't like music." - Liam McManus, PopMatters.

Released by ArtistShare® on May 13, 2012 (www.GilEvansProject.com) and recorded by the Grammy award-winning engineer James Farber, Centennial features thirty-five top musicians, including Lewis Nash, Donny McCaslin, Steve Wilson, Frank Kimbrough, Greg Gisbert, and Marshall Gilkes performing previously unheard works written by Evans throughout his decades-long career.

Prior to Centennial, Truesdell was best known for co-producing Maria Schneider's Sky Blue in 2007 and her 2004 Grammy award-winning Concert in the Garden. He is the first person outside of the Evans family to be granted full access to the musical archives. "I saw thousands of pages of manuscript, and each new box offered up a score or sketch of one of Gil's pieces that I've admired for years."

Truesdell, one of the foremost Evans scholars, began to grasp the significance of the material he was uncovering when he realized many of the manuscripts were unfamiliar to him. Schneider, former assistant and protégé of Evans', says of Truesdell's discovery, "It's like finding the impossible: imagine you buy an old house and discover a box of lost Beethoven manuscripts in the attic-scores that have never been heard before. That's exactly what's happened here. It's been something that I've wished for, for decades now-something that so many of us have wanted and it's here, it's incredible; it's an amazing opportunity to hear this music uncovered."

www.RyanTruesdell.com

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