Saturday, 10 September 2011
This photograph was taken in Gil Evans flat on the upper West side of New York. It wasn’t too far from the John Lennon's old apartment in the Dakota Building but a million miles away in terms of its accoutrements and interior decor.
He was a very, very sweet man but he did seem a little sad, and he’d certainly taken Quentin Crisp’s advice on housework to heart. He told me that he owned a big house down in Greenwich Village but one of his ex-wives was living in it. He handed me a cup of tea in something that looked like it was last washed when Roosevelt was in the White House. It also seemed to have unidentifiable things floating in it. On the basis that Miles Davis might once have drunk out of the same cup, I drank it anyway.