Читать книгу The Mojo Collection - Various Mojo Magazine - Страница 15

Record label: Capitol

Produced: Pete Rugolo

Recorded: New York; January–April 1949 and March 1950

Released: February 1957

Chart peaks: None (UK) None (US)

Personnel: Miles Davis (t, ar); Kai Winding, J J Johnson, Mike Zwerin (tb); Junior Collins, Sandy Sielgelstein (French horn); Bill Barber (tb, ar); Lee Konitz (as); Gerry Mulligan (bs, ar); Al Haig (p); John Lewis (p, ar); Joe Schulman, Nelson Boyd, Al McKibbon (b); Max Roach, Kenny Clarke (d); Kenny Hagood (v); Gil Evans (ar)

Track Listing: Move; Jeru; Moon Dreams; Venus De Milo; Budo; Deception; Godchild; Boplicity; Rocker; Israel; Rouge; Darn That Dream

Running time: 35.57

Current CD: Capitol Jazz 5301172

Further listening: Miles Ahead (1957); Porgy And Bess (1958); The Complete Birth Of The Cool (1998)

Further reading: Miles Davis (Ian Carr, 1999); www.milesdavis.com

Download: emusic; iTunes

In the late ’40s, Miles Davis was the trumpeter in the Charlie Parker Quintet in New York. Although in awe of the bebop genius of Bird, Miles was uncomfortable being a lesser instrumental virtuoso than his boss; bop’s default style was that of Dizzy Gillespie, Parker’s former partner, who Miles idolised but whose attack, speed or range he couldn’t get near. Also, he was tiring of the theme-solos-theme structure of much bop and his ears had been tuning into Gil Evans’ adventurous, unorthodox arrangements for the Claude Thornhill Orchestra, Anthropology and Thriving From A Riff.

Evans was something of a mentor to a New York group of young modern musicians (including Gerry Mulligan, John Lewis and John Carisi) and when he approached Davis to be allowed to arrange his tune Donna Lee, Davis asked to see the charts and became a regular part of the circle that gathered at Gil’s flat to theorise and experiment. Recognising the ideas of Evans and Mulligan as an ideal vehicle for him to ‘solo in the style that I was hearing’ – a nine-piece band with modern harmonic voicing and light textures – Davis ‘cracked the whip’, as Mulligan put it; he organised rehearsals, got a live engagement at the Royal Roost and, crucially, got Capitol (not a company particularly disposed toward modern jazz) to record the band. Released as singles in 1949 and 1950 and finally gathered as an album in 1957 (when the sides were first named Birth Of The Cool), the eleven original instrumentals (plus one vocal) featured a seamless integration of the arranged and the spontaneous; warm, dense ensembles unusually underpinned by tuba and French horn open up into characterful, smoothly-phrased improvised solos by Davis and the 19-year-old altoist Lee Konitz. The miniature masterpieces include Mulligan’s perky but luminous Venus De Milo, minor blues Israel and the mysterious harmonic pea-souper that is Evans’s Moon Dreams.

Though the band existed for mere months, the recordings were immeasurably influential on orchestral jazz and the West Coast cool school movement, cerebral and (to some) anaemic music played mainly by white musicians that Davis was quick to distance himself from. This was the first of several times in the coming 30 years that Miles Davis projects would profoundly affect the development of jazz.