Biography
In the booklet notes for Orrin Evans’ second album, Captain Black, recorded in 1998, the pianist, then 23, made a remark that encapsulates the aesthetic he’s followed ever since on his kaleidoscopic artistic journey. “I go head-first for a lot of things,” Evans said. “I like to stretch out. Wherever the music takes me, I’m going there.”
Evans retraces that journey, its challenges and discoveries on the fifth release by his Captain Black Big Band, Walk a Mile in My Shoe, which earned the ensemble its third Grammy nomination. The title’s singular variation on the familiar saying is not a typo; it refers to a malformation of the left foot that Evans has lived with from birth, necessitating several reconstructive surgeries. “I walk with a cane because I was born with neurofibromatosis,” he states. “My musical journey is closely connected to my medical journey, and this record is me opening the door into what I’ve lived with for years.”
Pictured on the album are some of the special shoes Evans needed to wear, each a vivid reminder of his condition and its impact on his early childhood. But there’s a larger point with Walk a Mile in My Shoe: it’s about feeling worthy, about taking ownership of the journey and doing things without waiting for the “perfect” time. Such was the motivation to release the album, sooner rather than later, on Imani Records, Evans’ own flagship label since the early 2000s.
Evans and his wife, Dawn, founded Imani in 2001 as a vehicle for Evans to release leader projects that couldn’t otherwise find a home. The label relaunched in 2018 with a more expansive mission, since releasing albums by Caleb Wheeler Curtis, Tina Raymond, Luke Carlos O’Reilly, Marianne Solivan, Thomas Marriott, Milton Suggs and others.
In 2024 Evans also released his fifth album with Tarbaby, the venturesome and audacious collective trio with bassist Eric Revis and drummer Nasheet Waits – a unit of serious intentions and riotous humor, fervid spirit and fierce intellect, passion and purpose, all of which melds and collides in their provocative and risk-welcoming sound. For the first time in a career marked by collaborations, You Think This Is America (Giant Step Arts) marked the first time that the trio recorded an entire album strictly in piano trio format. Recorded live at New York’s Hunter College for photographer/engineer Jimmy Katz’s Giant Step Arts imprint, the confrontational date mixes originals with wide-ranging covers by Ornette Coleman, David Murray, Andrew Hill, Sunny Murray, and The Stylistics.
These releases add to an ever growing and diversifying catalogue, which now includes six albums for Smoke Sessions, eight self-issued releases on Imani Records, and earlier recordings for Criss Cross, Palmetto and Posi-Tone. Regardless of the setting, Evans is by nature a nurturing, instigative leader, folding each new project and collaborator into “The Village” – his term not only for his familial cohort of fellow musicians, but also to the extended community of fans, supporters and elders that surrounds and embraces them.
Evans guides the creative flow from the piano, showcasing his authoritative mastery of his instrument and deep assimilation of the fundamentals. A deft tune deconstructor, he traverses a broad timeline of the vocabularies of swinging, blues-infused hardcore jazz and spiritual jazz/avant-garde jazz traditions, as well as the Euro-canon, with the intuitive spontaneity of an ear player. He projects an instantly recognizable sound, sometimes eliciting flowing rubato poetry, sometimes evoking the notion that the piano comprises 88 tuned drums. It’s taken a while, but the jazz gatekeepers have finally taken notice – in 2018, Evans topped the “Rising Star Pianist” category in the DownBeat Critics Poll, and his picture graced the cover of the magazine’s November 2024 edition.
Evans’ stylistically polyglot compositions – influenced by the expansive, individuality-first Black Music culture of his native Philadelphia and by a decade playing Charles Mingus’ beyond-category music in the Mingus Big Band – similarly postulate an environment of “structured freedom” that instigates the personnel to push the envelope in all his multifarious leader and collaborative projects.
In addition to the Captain Black Big Band and Tarbaby, those include the Eubanks Evans Experience, a duo pairing Evans with the eminent guitarist Kevin Eubanks; Lisa Fischer featuring the Orrin Evans Trio, a collaboration between the Grammy-winning vocalist and Evans’ agile, soulful working band with bassist Luques Curtis and drummer Mark Whitfield Jr.; and Terreno Comum, a Brazilian-inspired project for which, responding to a commission from the Pittsburgh Jazz Festival, he convened bassist Luques Curtis and drummer Clarence Penn along with Brazilian vocalist Alexia Bomtempo and guitarist Leandro Pellegrino.
“I like to make things happen,” is a key Evans mantra. In creating and operating Imani Records, in organizing bands that navigate streams of expression outside his wheelhouse, in booking venues in his hometown and beyond, Evans drew inspiration from his parents. His father, Donald Evans, was a playwright and educator who self-produced his plays; his mother, Frances, an opera singer who put on concerts in various alternative venues.
Evans has curated concert series at a number of venues, including the Philadelphia rooms Blue Moon (where he ran a Monday jam session from his late teens until early twenties) and South Jazz Kitchen; the D.C. Jazz Festival (which appointed him to a two-year term as its first-ever Artist in Residence); and “Philly Meets New York,” which brought Philadelphia talent to Smoke Jazz Club in Manhattan. Evans applied both his entrepreneurial and curatorial sides during the Covid summer when he set up Club Patio, a series of livestreamed outdoor concerts in front of his Philadelphia home with the likes of Jeff Tain Watts, Buster Williams, Russell Malone and a host of other luminaries.
“It’s simple,” he says. “I love people. And I love community. My door is open. When the pandemic shut things down, I decided to do it on my patio so I could still see people.”
That passion has carried on with Club Patio Jazz Day, a jazz festival that Evans launched in 2024. The concerts no longer take place at Evans’ home, but the same welcoming ethos prevails, convening the artists of Imani Records and other special guests. The festival’s second iteration is planned for Labor Day Weekend 2025, with a headlining performance by the Captain Black Big Band.
During his formative years, Evans – who made his first album, Justin Time (Criss Cross), at 21 – learned about diving into the deep end of the pool in the sink-or-swim milieu of Philadelphia’s jam sessions where world class artists like pianist Shirley Scott, Trudy Pitts and Sid Simmons, bassists Arthur Harper and Charles Fambrough, and drummer Mickey Roker served as de facto mentors. During his early twenties he received similarly illuminating tough love from taskmaster leaders like Bobby Watson, Branford Marsalis and Ralph Peterson. Thus nurtured, he’s displayed reverence for legacy and roots by leaving the nest and creating one of his own.
In addition to teaching on the bandstand, Evans has conveyed knowledge in more formal contexts. For a full year, he curated weekly jazz curriculum in Philadelphia public schools, sponsored by the Kimmel Center for the Performing Arts’ Jazz Standards programming division. For three years he instructed high school students at Germantown Friends School. He’s served on the faculty of Connecticut’s Litchfield Jazz Camp since 2013 (one student was the phenomenal 15-year-old pianist Brandon Goldberg) and the Kimmel Center Jazz Camp, headed by bassist/producer Anthony Tidd (where Evans taught Immanuel Wilkins).
Evans also lends his experience and expertise to jazz-focused institutions as Board President of the Cape May Jazz Festival Foundation and as a board member for educational non-profit The Heart of Jazz and for the Pittsburgh International Jazz Festival.
“I’m learning every day,” Evans says. “If someone calls to ask if I have a Brazilian project, I won’t say no. I’ll dive into it, call some great Brazilian musicians and put together a Brazilian project. If someone asks if I have a big band, I’ll educate myself and try to put a big band together. I don’t know how to sit and wait.”