Miles (and Evans) used a nonet for these recordings–trumpet, trombone, French horn, tuba, alto sax, baritone sax, piano, bass and drums. It’s also commonly called ‘pivotal’ and ‘seminal’, because it pretty much single-handedly established Cool Jazz–the predominant mindset of modern jazz. Critics don’t address the subject very much. And yet, paradoxically, his great music from the 1950s was sweet, poignant, romantic, a monumental marriage of the black jazz tradition with white European music. In the early 1950s he displayed angry Black Pride almost a generation before that mindset gained wide currency. He fought with police and the white music business establishment. In recent years, Gerry Mulligan created a “The Rebirth of the Cool” group the reconstructed scores were released in book form and bands and combos all over the world play the charts regularly. In 1998 they were released together with the (inferior) live performances, called “The Complete Birth of the Cool”. Numerous versions have been released since. The 12 cuts recorded in 3 sessions in 1949 were originally released as 78 RPM singles 8 of them were released on a 10″ record in 1954, 11 of them on a 12″ LP in 1957 under the name “Birth of the Cool”. But over the years this effort became a legend, known as The Birth of the Cool. They were so insignificant commercially that they had no real name (The Miles Davis Group, The Miles Davis Nonet, The Miles Davis Tuba Band). They played a couple of gigs opening for Count Basie, and recorded 12 sides. Evans was the guru, Miles was the driving force, but the music was a group effort according to the many accounts. They exchanged ideas and played together informally. In 1948, Miles was hanging out with a group of young musicians at Gil Evans’ apartment behind a Chinese laundry.
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Here’s Bird’s version of “Anthropology”, here’s Gil Evans’ arrangement. Gil Evans (b 1912), wanted to write an arrangement of a Bird song for Thornhill, and approached Miles to get some help with the charts. Meanwhile, back at the ranch, Claude Thornhill was a dinosaur in the post-WWII years, maintaining a Swing-era style dance band whose distinguishing style was slow, dreamy ballads. But Bird’s penchant for damaging himself and those around him was as great as his genius as a musician, and Miles left him in 1949. Throughout the two years he played with Bird, Miles stayed clear of drugs and booze (though not of women).
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Bird apparently didn’t mind, and Miles was happy to be in the company of the most renowned jazz musician of the era. He had very limited technique, so he stuck to playing select notes in the middle register of his trumpet simply because he couldn’t play as fast or as high as many of his contemporaries. Miles was never the greatest trumpeter around. But Diz refused to play with him any more because of Bird’s impossibly dissolute lifestyle, so Bird gave young Miles his big break. When they finally landed in New York, Charlie wanted to rebuild his old bebop quintet ( here on film with his old playmate Dizzy Gillespie). A tender 18-year old in 1944, he joined the traveling Billy Eckstine big band in which Bird was playing alto sax.
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Much to his father’s chagrin, he took to jazz trumpet. Miles Davis (b 1926) was raised in the very bourgeois home of a St Louis dentist who owned horses. The music that was thriving on 52 nd street was bebop–fast, frenetic, insolent, wild and witty, indulgent, brilliant, and not to be danced to! Charlie (Bird) Parker (b 1920) was The Man whose music and life epitomized freedom – loose, unconstrained abandon. Let’s take 1947 as our starting point, when the WWII swing bands were dropping like brontosauri (all the young folk who had frequented clubs were staying at home nights parenting us baby-boom babies).
Miles davis discography by date series#
This week we’re going to make our first stop in a planned series following Miles Davis’ remarkable voyage through the 1950s.
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Les Double Six–‘ Boplicity‘ ( here’s a whole post on their music)