Miles Davis

This is the record that brought Miles Davis to Columbia and introduced the first great quintet to the wider jazz audience. The version of "'Round Midnight" that opens it became one of the definitive recordings of Thelonious Monk's most famous composition: Miles plays the melody with a muted trumpet that makes the theme feel like it is coming from somewhere deep inside the night, and Coltrane's entrance behind him turns it into a dialogue between two completely different ways of thinking about the same material. The contrast is extraordinary.

The rhythm section had been working together for almost a year by this point, and the familiarity shows. Red Garland's block chords have a joyful authority, Paul Chambers moves with melodic intelligence, and Philly Joe Jones shapes the energy of every performance from behind. These four musicians made Miles sound better than he had ever sounded, and they did it by listening to him the way musicians rarely listen to a bandleader.

The rest of the program, standards and a few originals, confirms that this was a group at the peak of its chemistry. "Bye Bye Blackbird" is taken at a medium swing that makes it feel completely modern despite the familiar melody, and Miles's solo has that quality he was perfecting of saying a great deal by playing very few notes. This record made his name, and it deserved to.

The thing that gets you first on Miles Ahead is the texture. This is not a jazz combo album dressed up with strings. This is an entirely different kind of music, something Gil Evans had been working toward with his own nonet arrangements for years: a sound where the lines between Miles's flugelhorn and the nineteen-piece orchestra blur to the point where you can't always tell where one ends and the other begins. Miles plays flugelhorn instead of trumpet here, and the choice matters. The flugelhorn is warmer, rounder, less cutting. It blends into the orchestra like watercolor into wet paper.

The famous opening notes of "Springsville" float in from nowhere, surrounded on all sides by French horns and low woodwinds, and you realize within the first thirty seconds that this is not going to sound like anything you've heard before. The suite format helps: rather than distinct tracks with gaps between them, the ten pieces flow into each other as a continuous program, the way a film score works. "The Duke" is luminous, a tribute to Ellington that manages to have its own identity entirely.

This is the album people cite when they talk about jazz and classical music meeting on equal terms. What makes it work is that neither language compromises for the other. It is jazz in its rhythmic freedom and its improvisational breathing, and it is orchestral in its weight and its patience. Both things, fully, at once. The collaboration between Miles and Evans had been building since the Birth of the Cool sessions, and here it reaches its first, almost impossibly perfect conclusion.

Louis Malle locked Miles Davis in a Paris studio in December 1957, ran the film on a screen, and let him improvise to the picture. One night. No charts, no rehearsal, no second takes. What came out was one of the most perfectly atmospheric records ever made, and one of the most quietly influential film scores in the history of cinema. The film itself is a tight French noir about a man trapped in an elevator while the murder he committed begins to unravel. The music is extraordinary.

Miles plays into the darkness of the screen, and what he finds there is something he had never quite found before: a sound that is suspended, hovering, aware of its own loneliness. The open space in these recordings is not emptiness. It is weight. The rhythm section had been working with Miles in Paris in the months before this session, and they had the rapport to follow him into silence and back out again. Barney Wilen plays with a French cool that suits the material perfectly.

There are tracks here that last under two minutes, little mood fragments that drift across a scene and disappear. There are longer pieces where Miles sustains a tone for so long it starts to feel like a question with no answer planned. The whole record works this way: holding tension without resolving it, creating atmosphere without explaining it. It is the album to put on late at night when the city outside is quiet and you want something that sounds the way darkness feels.

The marathon October 1956 Prestige session produced four albums worth of material from the first great quintet, fulfilling Miles's contract before he moved exclusively to Columbia. Of the four, Cookin' is widely considered the best, and the case is easy to make: "My Funny Valentine" alone, played at an achingly slow tempo that strips the standard of every trace of sentimentality, would justify the record's reputation. Miles plays the melody so carefully and so slowly that each note becomes its own event.

The up-tempo performances show the quintet working with a freedom that the more controlled Columbia recordings sometimes filtered. "Tune Up" moves at a pace that demands absolute command from everyone involved, and the rhythm section responds to that demand with something close to joy. Philly Joe Jones in particular sounds like he is having the best night of his life, and his enthusiasm is contagious enough to push Coltrane into some of the most adventurous playing of his early career.

These four Prestige albums together document a band that had reached a kind of collective perfection before the world really knew it existed. Cookin' is the one to start with: it has the broadest range, the most memorable individual performances, and that version of "My Funny Valentine" that nobody who has heard it once ever entirely forgets.

Two sessions from 1954, six months apart, with entirely different groups behind Miles. The June date pairs him with Sonny Rollins and Horace Silver, and the music is lean and hard-swinging: "Airegin", "Oleo", and "Doxy" are all Rollins compositions, and the young tenor plays them with an authority that announces his arrival as a major voice. Silver's piano has the percussive, bluesy drive that would soon define hard bop. These are some of the finest small-group recordings either man made in 1954.

The December session is the famous one: Miles, Milt Jackson, and Thelonious Monk, with the story of Monk refusing to comp behind Miles's solos becoming one of jazz's most repeated anecdotes. Whether exactly that happened or not, the tension is audible, and it is the best kind of tension: productive, charged, two strong personalities coexisting on the same bandstand. The two takes of the title track, Jackson's blues, are both essential, and "The Man I Love" is taken at a slow, pensive tempo with Monk's eccentric chording as the harmonic anchor.

The combination of these two sessions on one album gives it an unusual breadth. The Rollins-Silver date is extroverted and swinging; the Monk-Jackson date is tense and searching. Miles holds his own in both contexts with characteristic quiet authority. This is essential material for understanding where Miles stood in the months before the first great quintet came together.

From the same October 1956 marathon session as Cookin', this volume has the slightly looser feel that the title promises. The quintet sounds like it has settled into the recording session and is playing from a place of total comfort with each other. "If I Were a Bell" has become one of the definitive quintet performances: Miles on open horn, which he used more rarely than his muted work, playing with a brightness that the ballads rarely allowed him. The melody unfolds at medium tempo with a conversational ease that sounds effortless.

Red Garland's solo on "If I Were a Bell" is worth the price of the record on its own. He takes the changes with a block-chord approach that manages to be simultaneously bluesy, elegant, and completely his own. Garland was one of the most underrated pianists of the period, and performances like this are why his reputation has only grown in the decades since.

Paul Chambers gets an extended bass solo on "Oleo" that is one of the finest moments in the Prestige catalog: lyrical, swinging, and technically accomplished without ever calling attention to the technique. He was twenty years old when this session happened. The whole record has that quality of easy excellence, a band so comfortable with what it does that the music comes out looking effortless even when it isn't.

This is the bridge between the hard bop quintet and the modal revolution of Kind of Blue. Adding Cannonball Adderley to the group created the sextet that would record Kind of Blue a year later, and the difference his alto makes to the ensemble texture is immediate and significant. He has a joyfulness that balances Coltrane's intensity, and the three-way horn conversation, Miles floating above, Coltrane pushing forward, Cannonball swinging irrepressibly, is one of the great ensemble sounds in jazz history.

The title track, Miles's own composition, is the first extended modal piece he recorded for Columbia: built on two scales rather than chord changes, it gives the soloists a kind of harmonic freedom they had not had before. The difference between this and the Prestige recordings is not dramatic, but it is real: you can hear the musicians thinking differently, using the space differently, looking for melodic rather than harmonic complexity. It points directly toward where they were all going.

The standards on the album, "Billy Boy" and "Straight, No Chaser," are hard-swinging, joyful performances that show the band at its most relaxed. "Milestones" is the future. The rest of the album is the best version of everything Miles had already built. The combination makes this one of the great transitional records in the jazz canon.

The second Miles-Evans collaboration takes on Gershwin's opera and does something remarkable with it: Evans's arrangements are so thorough a reimagining that by the time they are finished with the material, it no longer sounds like it belongs to anyone but them. "Summertime" becomes something heavy and nocturnal, stripped of its folk simplicity and rebuilt as a slow procession of color. "It Ain't Necessarily So" has a swagger that the original hardly hinted at.

Miles plays more trumpet than flugelhorn here, which gives the record a brighter, more cutting edge than Miles Ahead. The contrast between his sharp trumpet tone and the soft warmth of Evans's low brass writing is one of the things that makes the record work so well: it is music that contains its own tension, the tension between the individual voice and the ensemble that surrounds it, and the record never fully resolves that tension. It keeps living in it.

"I Loves You, Porgy" is the most intimate moment on the record, Miles playing with a muted trumpet over the sparse, careful accompaniment Evans designed for it. At its best, this record sounds like the two collaborators are in complete telepathic contact, and at its very best it sounds like music that could not have been made by anyone else, in any other way, at any other moment in the history of jazz.

The best-selling jazz album ever recorded, and it deserves every bit of that reputation. On March 2, 1959, most of these musicians walked into the Columbia 30th Street Studio with almost no prior knowledge of what they'd be playing. Miles handed out sketches: not full charts, just scales and loose compositional ideas. They recorded it almost entirely in first or second takes. What came out was So What, Freddie Freeloader, Blue in Green, All Blues, and Flamenco Sketches. That's the record.

Modal jazz wasn't invented here, but nobody had done it quite like this. Instead of improvising over chord changes, the musicians were working from scales, and that shift gave everything a different quality: longer, more meditative, less frantic. Coltrane sounds like he's discovering something in real time. Cannonball sounds like he's in the best mood he's ever been in. Bill Evans, on four of the five tracks, plays with a stillness that still sounds modern decades later.

So What opens with Paul Chambers and Bill Evans trading a quiet introduction that barely prepares you for the bass line that follows. That two-note motif lands and suddenly you're inside something that feels inevitable. Miles's solo is relaxed to the point of almost being casual, but there's not a wasted note in it. If you've somehow never heard this record, there's no better place to start with jazz.

The last of the four albums from the October 1956 Prestige marathon contains one of the most beautiful performances in the entire Miles Davis catalog: "It Never Entered My Mind," a Richard Rodgers ballad played at an almost impossibly slow tempo with Miles on muted trumpet and Red Garland comping with a restraint that amounts to pure sympathy. Miles plays the melody once, and then he plays around it, and then he plays through it, and the whole time you are aware of how much control it takes to play this slowly and this quietly without losing the thread entirely.

The rest of the record swings hard in contrast. "Trane's Blues" is Coltrane at his most relaxed and most bluesy, playing in a mode that prefigures the hard bop work he would do on his own Prestige records. The entire session has the quality of musicians who have played the same repertoire together long enough that the arrangements have become second nature, and what's left is pure improvisation with a kind of comfort behind it.

The four Prestige volumes together constitute one of the great bodies of work in hard bop, and Workin' is where the project ends, with a record that looks both forward and back: the ballad playing points toward the reflective Miles of the Columbia orchestral years, and the hard swinging points at nothing, because it was the best it was ever going to be. You don't improve on Philly Joe Jones driving this rhythm section through this material. You just try to hear it clearly enough.

The third and last of the great Miles-Evans collaborations is also the most ambitious, and the fact that it works as well as it does is a minor miracle. Taking a Spanish classical concerto, Rodrigo's Concierto de Aranjuez, and adapting it for jazz orchestra was an idea that could easily have produced something pompous or synthetic. What Evans actually did with the material was more radical: he did not jazz it up. He absorbed it, found the emotional core of it, and then built arrangements around that core that have their own logic entirely.

Miles plays the slow movement of the Rodrigo with an emotional directness that is unlike anything else in his catalog. He does not decorate the melody or improvise freely around it; he plays it with a kind of reverence that suggests he understood exactly what was at stake. The flamenco pieces that fill out the record, folk material Evans transformed into jazz compositions, have a hypnotic quality that comes from the repetition of rhythmic patterns under Miles's long, searching lines.

Not every listener comes to this record immediately. It requires patience and a willingness to accept that jazz can move this slowly and still be completely engaged. But the payoff, when the music opens up, is enormous. This is the record where the Miles-Evans partnership achieved something genuinely unprecedented: a jazz improviser embedded so deeply in orchestral composition that the line between the two became impossible to locate.

The fourth and last of the Prestige marathon volumes, released in 1961 when the first great quintet had long since broken up, is in some ways the most revealing of the set. By 1961 both Coltrane and Miles had moved far from the hard bop idiom of these recordings, and hearing them here, in the full bloom of what they were doing in October 1956, has a slightly elegiac quality. You are listening to a band at its peak, recorded before anyone knew it was at its peak.

"Surrey with the Fringe on Top" is the showpiece: a show tune that the quintet treats as a vehicle for extended improvisation, each soloist taking it somewhere different. Miles plays with a relaxed swagger that he brought to up-tempo material, Coltrane pushes into the changes with more harmonic adventurousness than anything else in the Prestige catalog, and Red Garland produces one of his most joyful solos of the entire run.

The Prestige albums taken together are one of the great documentary projects in jazz: a band playing its working repertoire in a single day, unaware that the recordings would be parceled out over five years and become the primary record of what it sounded like. History sometimes preserves things better than the people involved could have arranged on purpose. This is one of those cases.

By 1961 Coltrane had left the band, and this is the first record with the transitional sextet that would eventually lead to the second great quintet. Hank Mobley fills the tenor chair for most of the record, and while he is not Coltrane, he is a genuinely excellent musician who plays with a warm tone and a lyrical sensibility that suits the material. Coltrane appears on two tracks as a guest, and the contrast between the two tenors on the same album is instructive: Mobley is comfortable, Coltrane is searching.

The title track, the Disney waltz transformed into a slow, gorgeous jazz ballad, is one of the finest ballad performances of Miles's career. Wynton Kelly at the piano is the ideal complement to Miles's muted trumpet: he plays with a blues feeling that grounds the melody without anchoring it, and the interplay between them has the quality of two musicians who have been listening to each other long enough to anticipate every move.

The album also includes one of the most striking cover photographs in the Columbia catalog: Miles's wife Frances Taylor on the cover, beautiful and direct. The cover was controversial at the time and has been discussed ever since. The music itself is somewhat overshadowed by what came before and after it in Miles's Columbia run, but taken on its own terms it is a very good record by one of the best working bands in jazz.

The San Francisco recordings from the Blackhawk club in April 1961 captured a working quintet in its natural habitat and the result is one of the most enjoyable live documents of Miles's early Columbia period. These are not formal studio recordings with second takes and edited performances; they are a working band playing the repertoire they played every night, and the looseness and energy of that context gives the music a warmth that the studio sessions sometimes lacked. Wynton Kelly swings irrepressibly, Chambers locks in with him perfectly, and Jimmy Cobb keeps everything flowing.

Hank Mobley had the misfortune of occupying the tenor chair at a moment when audiences were still measuring every Miles sideman against the memory of Coltrane, and the comparisons were not always fair to him. On this record he plays well: his tone is warm and his ideas are interesting, and the interplay with Miles has a conversational quality that the formal studio setting sometimes suppressed.

The great value of live recordings like this one is that they preserve the music as it actually existed in real time, with all the risk and energy that implies. Miles's muted trumpet on the ballads sounds different in this context, more intimate and direct, because the room was small and the audience was close. This is the Miles Davis experience as his audiences in 1961 actually had it.

This is the transition record, the album where the second great quintet takes shape. The Los Angeles sessions feature a different rhythm section, but the New York dates from May 1963 have the lineup that would define the next four years: Herbie Hancock, Ron Carter, and a seventeen-year-old Tony Williams on drums. Williams is the revelation. He plays with a freedom and intelligence that was completely outside the norm for any drummer at the time, let alone a teenager, and his presence changes the character of the music around him in ways that are immediately audible.

George Coleman on tenor is an underappreciated part of this transitional period. He is a highly accomplished musician playing in the post-bop idiom, and his work on the title track and "Basin Street Blues" is excellent. He does not have Coltrane's harmonic adventurousness or Wayne Shorter's compositional imagination, but he plays with authority and swing, and the quintet with Coleman is a genuinely fine band.

The title track, Miles's own composition, is the best new material here: a fast, angular theme that gives the rhythm section room to show what they can do, and they show it. The transition from the first great quintet era to what was coming next required a bridge, and this record is that bridge. You can hear the music changing shape in real time.

The fourth Miles-Evans collaboration is the most compromised of the set, and both men knew it. Columbia pushed for a bossa nova album to capitalize on the genre's commercial moment, the sessions were spread over a year and never completed to either man's satisfaction, and producer Teo Macero compiled the released version from incomplete material over Miles's explicit objections. The album that exists is not what either collaborator intended, and that context matters when you listen to it.

Given all of that, what is actually on the record is still quite beautiful in places. "Corcovado" and "Once Upon a Summertime" are fully realized performances where Evans's bossa nova-inflected writing wraps around Miles's flugelhorn with the same kind of seamless integration that characterized the three previous collaborations. The problem is brevity: the album runs under thirty minutes, and just as the music gets interesting, it ends.

The relationship between Miles and Evans would continue informally for years, but this was their last formal studio collaboration. Given the quality of what came before, Quiet Nights is inevitably a slight disappointment, but slight disappointment from the Miles-Evans partnership is still worth your time. The incomplete sessions have since been issued more fully, and that material helps explain what the finished record might have been.