In the late 1940s, Charlie Parker and a young Miles Davis sat on the floor of a cramped basement apartment behind a Chinese laundry in New York, and the man hosting them was a quiet, self-taught former boardinghouse kid named Gil Evans. This episode explains how that arranger engineered the DNA of cool jazz, modal jazz and jazz-rock fusion by treating the entire orchestra as his instrument. Born Gilmore Ian Ernest Green in Toronto in 1912, he followed a miner-turned-railroad-worker stepfather across Canada and the American West, learned music from the radio and records, and by 1939 was writing arrangements for Claude Thornhill that put French horns, tubas and flutes into a big band.

The hosts explain why bassist Bill Crow said Thornhill handed out Evans charts to punish the band, how the basement salon produced the nine-piece Birth of the C ...