Gil Evans & Ten: The $18 Audiophile Reissue Collectors Love

Why is Gil Evans & Ten considered an essential jazz record?

Recorded in 1957 and originally issued on Prestige PRLP 7120, Gil Evans & Ten marked the arranger's first session as a bandleader-a pivot from behind-the-scenes architect to front-page visionary. This European reissue, pressed at 45 RPM on 180-gram virgin vinyl using Direct Metal Mastering, delivers Gil's orchestral palette with the kind of dynamic range that makes the original mono pressings feel like listening through a screen door. With a 70-to-21 want-to-have ratio on Discogs, collectors are chasing what sounds like a $200 record for under twenty bucks.

Why is Gil Evans & Ten considered a "Holy Grail" for vinyl collectors?

The original 1957 Prestige mono pressing is a quiet legend-scarce enough that serious collectors treat it like documentation of the moment Gil stopped being Miles Davis's secret weapon and became his own statement. This European reissue, however, rewrites the script: remastered and cut at 45 RPM with DMM technology, it captures the low-end growl of Bill Barber's tuba and the silvery clarity of Steve Lacy's soprano sax in ways the original couldn't. At $18, it's the rare case where the reissue isn't a compromise-it's an upgrade. Check the Discogs master release to compare the dozen pressings and see why this one keeps climbing wishlists.

Quick Stats: The Data Behind the Desire

Tracklist

Side A:
A1. La Nevada (15:33)
A2. Where Flamingos Fly (5:11)

Side B:
B1. Bilbao Song (4:10)
B2. Stratusphunk (8:00)
B3. Sunken Treasure (4:15)

Start the stream. Let the atmosphere settle before we look at the wax.

The Needle Drop: Opening the Sleeve

The jacket arrives with that specific heft-180 grams feels like holding a statement, not a souvenir. Slide the vinyl out and you notice the pressing quality immediately: dead quiet surface, no scuffs, the kind of mirror-black finish that makes you want to wipe your hands before you touch it. Arnold Newman's cover photo shows Gil in profile, shadowed, looking like a man who just figured out how to write what an orchestra feels like instead of what it sounds like.

Cue up "La Nevada." The needle drops. Silence. Then-boom-Bill Barber's tuba anchors the floor like a cathedral organ while Steve Lacy's soprano sax floats above it, clarinet-clean but with that slight edge that says I'm not here to be pretty. The soundstage is ridiculous: you can place every horn, every breath, every stick tap from Elvin Jones. It's not just stereo-it's architectural.

This is the kind of record that pairs with late-night bourbon and low light. The tempo on "La Nevada" sits around 70 BPM, a slow waltz that gives the arrangement room to breathe. It's not background music. It demands you sit still.

The Nerd Sheet: Statistical Proof of Greatness

Let's talk numbers, because that's how you separate hype from history.

The Want-to-Have Ratio: On Discogs, 70 collectors have this record on their wantlist. Only 21 own it. That's a 3.3:1 ratio-high enough to prove demand, low enough to suggest the pressing run was conservative. For a reissue, that's unusual. Most reissues flood the market. This one didn't. Check the Discogs master release and you'll see the price climbing slowly, steadily, the way grails do when word spreads quietly.

The Session Synergy: Gil assembled a roster that reads like a JazzDiscography fever dream. Ron Carter on bass-this was early Ron Carter, pre-Miles Quintet, still proving he could anchor anything. Elvin Jones on drums, two years before A Love Supreme. Steve Lacy on soprano sax, back when soprano was still a novelty instrument in jazz. These guys weren't just sidemen-they were architects in training.

Here's the thing that doesn't get talked about enough: this session happened in 1957, the same year Miles recorded Miles Ahead with Gil arranging. Gil was juggling two careers-ghostwriting for Miles and trying to prove he could lead. This record is proof he didn't need Miles to make magic. He just needed ten musicians who trusted his weird, dense, Debussy-meets-Ellington charts.

The Sample DNA:
Gil Evans isn’t a sampler’s goldmine. His music resists the loop-too orchestrated, too fluid, too fully composed to be chopped into tidy fragments. But his influence lives one level deeper, in how producers think about sound. The stacking of textures. The slow tectonic shifts between bass and harmony rather than call-and-response gestures. Madlib has spoken openly about Gil as a compositional north star, and you can hear that sensibility in DJ Shadow’s “Midnight in a Perfect World”-not as a quote, but as atmosphere, as weight, as patience. Gil didn’t give producers pieces to lift. He gave them a method.

From the Wikipedia Archive: According to the album's Wikipedia entry, this session also features Lee Konitz on alto sax and Jimmy Cleveland on trombone in earlier pressings-a detail that underscores just how fluid Gil's personnel was depending on availability. The 2003 SACD reissue marked the first time the stereo mix was officially released, but this 45 RPM European pressing takes that clarity even further. The original mono had warmth; the stereo reissue has space.

The Educational Deep Dive: What Happened in the Room

The session was produced by Creed Taylor, who would later launch CTI Records and become the king of jazz crossover. But in 1957, Taylor was still at Prestige, learning how to capture orchestral jazz without losing the intimacy. He succeeded.

The "happy accident" on this record is "La Nevada"-a fifteen-and-a-half-minute tone poem that wasn't supposed to be the centerpiece. Gil wrote it as an extended meditation on a Spanish landscape he'd never seen, using Kurt Weill's "Bilbao Song" as a harmonic reference point. The arrangement is dense: flutes, bassoon, tuba, trombone, trumpet-all weaving through each other like a tapestry. When they ran the take, Gil let it stretch. No one stopped him. The result is one of the most ambitious pieces of orchestral jazz recorded in the '50s outside of Duke Ellington's suites.

The Sideman Spotlight: Ron Carter was just 20 years old during this session, fresh out of the Eastman School of Music. He'd go on to become the most recorded bassist in jazz history-over 2,200 sessions. But here, you can hear him finding his voice: the fat, woody tone that Rudy Van Gelder would later capture on Maiden Voyage and ESP. Carter's bass on "Stratusphunk" walks with a confidence that belies his age-firm, resonant, never rushed.

This is the kind of record you buy because you want to study it. Not just hear it-study it. The arrangements are dense enough that you'll catch new details on the twentieth listen. That's not common in jazz. Most records reveal themselves in three or four spins. This one keeps secrets.

Grab your copy of this meticulously remastered pressing at Gil Evans & Ten on MilesWaxey.com-it's priced at $18, which is absurd considering what you're getting.

The Technical Scrutiny: What to Look For

Let's get into the weeds, because this is where the money lives.

The Pressing Details: This is a European reissue, pressed on 180-gram virgin vinyl at 45 RPM. That speed matters. Most LPs are cut at 33⅓ RPM, which compresses the grooves and sacrifices some high-frequency detail. At 45 RPM, the grooves are wider, which means more information per second, which means you hear the room. You hear the air. You hear Bill Barber inhaling before he blows into that tuba.

The mastering used Direct Metal Mastering (DMM), a process that skips the lacquer step and cuts directly into a metal master. The result? Less generational loss, crisper transients, and a soundstage that feels three-dimensional. On "Where Flamingos Fly," the flute and piccolo from Bob Tricarico sit so far left in the mix they sound like they're in the next room. That's not a flaw-that's how Gil wanted it.

Label Variations: Original Prestige mono pressings from 1957 carry the "Bergenfield, NJ" address and a deep-groove label. Those go for $150-$300 depending on condition. The later "New York, USA" label stereo reissues from the early '60s are more common but still fetch $75-$100. This European reissue sidesteps all that scarcity anxiety. You get the music, the clarity, the dynamic range-without the grading paranoia or the auction-house drama.

Sound Description: The soundstage is wide. Charlie Persip's percussion sits far right, almost outside the stereo field. Elvin Jones's drums are dead center, anchoring everything. The horns spread across the middle, layered so you can pick out individual timbres-Tony Studd's bass trombone growls below Jimmy Knepper's tenor trombone, which sits just below Johnny Coles's trumpet. It's orchestral jazz, but it breathes like a small group.

There's minimal floor noise. The pressing is quiet enough that you can hear the tape hiss if you listen for it, but it doesn't intrude. The frequency response is balanced-no hyped highs, no boomy bass. Just honest reproduction of what Creed Taylor captured in 1957.

Mood & Pairing: This is a late-night record. It's for the hour when you've run out of words but you're not ready to sleep. Pour something dark-a peaty Scotch, a heavy red wine, even black coffee if that's your ritual. The music matches that contemplative, slightly melancholic mood. It's not sad, exactly. It's reflective. It's the sound of someone who spent a lifetime figuring out how to make an orchestra think.

Context & Afterlife: The Gil Evans Story

Gil Evans was born in Toronto in 1912 but grew up in California, leading a big band in the late '30s before moving to New York and becoming the arranger behind the Birth of the Cool sessions. By the time he recorded Gil Evans & Ten, he was 45 years old-a late bloomer by jazz standards. Most bandleaders had already made their marks by their mid-thirties. Gil was just getting started.

He'd go on to collaborate with Miles Davis on Porgy and Bess (1958) and Sketches of Spain (1960), two of the most ambitious jazz-orchestra recordings ever made. But this record-Gil Evans & Ten-is where he proved he didn't need Miles's name to sell a vision. He could do it with ten players, five standards, and one original composition.

Gil passed away in 1988 at the age of 75, just as his music was being rediscovered by a new generation of jazz listeners who'd grown up on fusion and were hungry for something with more harmonic depth. His influence echoes in everyone from Maria Schneider to Robert Glasper-arrangers who understand that jazz doesn't have to choose between complexity and soul.

Cultural Afterlife:
Gil Evans doesn’t get sampled the way Coltrane does. No obvious loops. No quotable hooks. But his influence is structural, not surface-level. You hear it in how modern producers think in layers - the slow reveal, the negative space, the way texture carries emotion as much as melody. When Kanye stacks sound into architecture, when Flying Lotus lets arrangements breathe and blur, when Kendrick Lamar uses horns as emotional punctuation rather than solo vehicles—that lineage runs back to what Gil was already solving in the late ’50s. He showed jazz how to be cinematic without becoming grand, how to scale up without losing the human voice. That balance—intimacy inside size—is still the hard part. And most never get it right.

Watch Gil's orchestral vision come to life in this rare performance footage.

Collector's Corner: The Final Audit

Here's the honest truth: if you're chasing an original 1957 Prestige mono pressing, you're going to pay $200-$300 for a VG+ copy with some surface noise and maybe a seam split. That's fine if you're a completist or you need the tactile connection to the original artifact. But if you want to hear the music the way Gil intended-with clarity, space, and zero distortion-this European 45 RPM reissue is 98% of the way there for one-tenth the price.

The only thing you're missing is the original deep-groove label and the bragging rights. Everything else? It's here. The arrangements. The performances. The room sound. The weight.

Bang-for-Your-Buck Analysis: At $18, this is the best value-per-dollar orchestral jazz record you can buy right now. Most audiophile reissues in this quality range run $35-$50. This one is priced like a bargain-bin find but sounds like a premium edition. That won't last. Once the pressing sells out, the secondary market will catch up.

Check the runout grooves when your copy arrives. Look for the DMM stamp-it'll confirm you got the real deal. If there's any question about the pressing quality, reach out to the seller. But based on the Discogs reviews and the community rating (4.0/5.0 from verified collectors), this pressing is clean, quiet, and true to the original stereo master.

Ready to add this to your collection? Grab your copy of Gil Evans & Ten at MilesWaxey.com for $18 before the next restock cycle pushes the price up.

Community Prompt: What's in Your Runout?

Does your copy have the DMM stamp? Any matrix numbers that differ from the standard European pressing? We want to hear about your listening experience-what system are you running, and what details are you catching that streaming missed?

Drop your setup specs and runout photos in the comments. Let's build the archive together.

Final Word: Gil Evans didn't need a big band to think big. He just needed ten players who trusted him. This record is proof that orchestral jazz doesn't have to be stuffy or academic-it can be warm, human, and utterly mesmerizing. At $18, it's one of the smartest pickups you'll make this year. Don't sleep on it.