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Miles Ahead
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Miles Ahead
Miles Davis
1. Springsville (3:27) C, D, E
J. CARISI
2. The Maids Of Cadiz (3:53) A, D
L. DELIBES - ARR: G. EVANS
3. The Duke (3:35) A
D. BRUBECK 3:35
4. My Ship (4:28) B, D
I. GERSHWIN/K. WEILL
5. Miles Ahead (3:29) B, E
M. DAVIS/G. EVANS
6. Blues For Pablo (5:18) C
G. EVANS
7. New Rhumba (4:37) C, E
A. JAMAL
Medley:
8. The Meaning Of The Blues (2:48) D
R. TROUP/L. WORTH
9. Lament (2:15) D
J.J. JOHNSON
10. I Don't Wanna Be Kissed (By Anyone But You) (3:05) D, E
H. SPINA/J. ELLIOTT
*11. Springsville (REMAKE TAKE 7) (3:14) D
J. CARISI
*12. Blues For Pablo (TAKE 1) (3:28) C
G. EVANS
*13 Medley (REHEARSAL): (5:08) D
The Meaning Of The Blues
R. TROUP/L. WORTH
Lament
J.J. JOHNSON
*14. I Don't Wanna Be Kissed (By Anyone But You) (3:12) D
H SPINA/J. ELLIOTT
*Bonus Track Not On Original LP
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A: Miles Davis (FLG), Gil Evans (ARR, COND) Ernie Royal, Bernie Glow, Louis Mucci, Taft Jordan, Johnny Carisi (TP), Frank Rehak, Jimmy Cleveland, Joe Bennett (TB), Tom Mitchell (B TB), Willie Ruff, Tony Miranda (FR H), Bill Barber (TU), Romeo Penque (FL, CL, B CL, OBOE), Sid Cooper (FL, CL), Lee Konitz (AS), Danny Bank (B CL), Paul Chambers (B), Arthur Taylor (D)
Produced by George Avakian
Assisted by Cal Lampley
Recording Engineer: Harold Chapman
30TH STREET STUDIO, NYC, MAY 6, 1957
B: Miles Davis (FLG), Gil Evans (ARR, COND) Ernie Royal, Bernie Glow, Louis Mucci, Taft Jordan, Johnny Carisi (TP), Frank Rehak, Jimmy Cleveland, Joe Bennett (TB), Tom Mitchell (B TB), Willie Ruff, Tony Miranda (FR H), Bill Barber (TU), Romeo Penque (FL, CL, B CL), Sid Cooper (FL, CL), Lee Kanitz (AS), Danny Bank (B CL), Paul Chambers (B), Arthur Taylor (D)
Produced by George Avakian
Assisted by Cal Lampley
Recording Engineer: Harold Chapman
30TH STREET STUDIO, NYC, MAY 10, 1957
C: Miles Davis, (FLG), Gil Evans (ARR, COND) Ernie Royal, Bernie Glow, Louis Mucci, Taft Jordan, Johnny Carisi (TP), Frank Rehak, Jimmy Cleveland, Joe Bennett (TB), Tom Mitchell (B TB), Willie Ruff, Jimmy Buffington (FR H), Bill Barber (TU), Romeo Penque (FL, CL, B CL, OBOE), Sid Cooper (FL, CL), Lee Konitz (AS), Danny Bank (B CL), Paul Chambers (B), Arthur Taylor (D).
Produced by George Avakian
Assisted by Cal Lampley
Recording Engineer: Harold Chapman
30TH STREET STUDIO, NYC, MAY 23, 1957
D: Miles Davis (FLG), Gil Evans (ARR, COND), Ernie Royal, Bernie Glow, Louis Mucci, Taft Jordan, Johnny Carisi (TP), Frank Rehak, Jimmy Cleveland, Joe Bennett (TS), Tom Mitchell (B TB), Willie Ruff, Tony Miranda (FR H), Bill Barber (TU), Romeo Penque (FL, CL, OBOE), Eddie Caine (FL, CL), Lee Konitz (AS), Danny Bank (B CL), Wynton Kelly (WHERE NOTED) (P), Paul Chambers (B), Arthur Taylor (D).
Produced by George Avakian
Assisted by Cal Lampley
Recording Engineer: Harold Chapman
30TH STREET STUDIO, NYC, MAY 27, 1957
E: Miles Davis (FLG)
OVERDUBBING TO PREVIOUSLY RECORDED SECTIONS BY THE ORCHESTRA
Produced by Cal Lampley
Recording Engineer: Fred Plaut
30TH STREET STUDIO, NYC, AUGUST 22, 1957
About Miles Davis how this album came to be: Of all the young musicians who came out of the immediate post-war jazz period, Miles Davis is perhaps the most lyrical and most instantly communicating.
In certain contexts, he has proved to be an artist of enormous appeal to people who know nothing about jazz.
This album, while deliberately "significant" from the musical point of view, is also an album which we feel is a delight to anyone who simply wants to hear good music, beautifully and richly performed.
Recognized today as one of the giants of the modern jazz era, Miles Davis first came to New York in 1945 to study at the Juilliard School of Music. He had met Dizzy Gillespie and Charlie Parker when they had passed through St. Louis with the Billy Eckstine band; these two took a personal as well as musical interest in the 19-year old trumpeter, and helped him grow as a musician to the point where Miles was soon working in Parker's small combo on 52nd Street. Miles has always had unusual and strong ideas of his own, and the nine-piece band referred to by Andre Hodeir made a profound impression on his fellow musicians; it has been described as the most important group in the development of new tonal colors and in the freeing of the jazz arranger. The present album represents, in a way, a summation of the developments inaugurated by that original Davis band, while at the same time pointing still more new directions in the treatment of the jazz orchestra.
When Miles Davis signed with Columbia, we found in each other a mutual interest in furthering the ideals of the nine-piece band. What direction this desire would take was uncertain, beyond the conviction that Gil Evans was the arranger we wanted. A series of discussions with Gil followed, out of which grew the basic conception (largely Miles') of this album; within the framework he wanted, Gil developed the details which produce the remarkable texture of a large jazz orchestra, a texture unique in tonal quality and breaking away from the roots which are to be found in the Davis group of the late Forties. The Music For Brass album (CK 64929), in which he appeared as a soloist, had created a deep impression on Miles; without it, the budget for the present album might have been much smaller (but perhaps its sound might have been less exciting!).
Perhaps what makes for the best in jazz (or any other kind of music) is a blending of talents and a conviction concerning the end toward which one strives. Whatever else is in this album, it is something we all believed in and saw through to a conclusion which time will weigh-weigh, we believe, in terms of a keystone in orchestral jazz of the past and of the future.
- George Avakian
+19
However high the quality of some of the albums Miles Davis has recorded with small groups during the last few years (up to his recent 'Round About Midnight, CK 40610), one finds oneself occasionally missing the extraordinary effort dating from 1948 to 1950 and still associated with his name that renewed the language of jazz bands. The resulting works, which have become classics, were due to the coming together of a group of players and a group of arrangers. If Miles Davis' wonderful solos have won a place in everyone's memory, people haven't forgotten the new light shed by the writing of such scores as "Boplicity" and "Moon Dreams" either. Why is it that the author of these masterpieces, the composer-arranger Gil Evans, has remained almost unknown by the jazz public - so much so, in fact, that you often hear connoisseurs attribute the paternity of these two arrangements to John Lewis or Gerry Mulligan? John and Gerry have their own claims to fame; I also know how much esteem and respect these great arrangers have for Gil Evans. Gerry Mulligan has said: "Not many people really heard Gil; those who did, those who came up through the Claude Thornhill band, were tremendously affected, and they in turn affected others." (Cited by Nat Hentoff in Down Beat, May 2, 1957.)
Eight years after "Boplicity," seven after "Moon Dreams," what was going to emerge from the new reunion of the two great masters of the "cool” school, arranger Gil Evans and soloist Mill Davis? Miles has not changed his opinion since then. For him, Gil Evans "is the best. I haven’t heard anything that knocks me out as consistent as he does since I first heard Charlie Parker. (Quoted by Nat Hentoff in the same issue of Down Beat.) And now that this album is here, with it high points and its not so highs, its extraordinary moments and its inevitable imperfections, once again it seems perfectly obvious that Gil Evans is the ideal arranger for Miles Davis. These two artists have a rare way of feeling things alike.
So let's listen to the fruits of this much-awaited collaboration.
This group differs from the old Miles Davis band in two essential ways: first, here Miles (who plays flugelhorn instead of his customary trumpet) is, so to speak, the only soloist, and second, the band is a big one, made up of Bernie Glow, Ernie Royal, Louis Mucci, Taft Jordan, and John Carisi trumpets); Frank Rehak, Jimmy Cleveland, and Joe Bennett (trombones); Tom Mitchell (bass trombone); Willie Ruff and Tony Miranda (horns, with Jimmy Buffington replacing Miranda on one session); Bill Barber (tuba); Lee Konitz (alto sax); Danny Bank (bass clarinet); Romeo Penque and Sid Cooper (flute and clarinet, with Edwin Caine placing Cooper on one session); Paul Chambers (bass); Art Taylor (drums). Finally, by an interesting innovation, Gil Evans has combined the ten pieces that make up the album in a kind of suite, each following the preceding one without interruption.
For the first time since Duke Ellington, we are faced here with a kind of big-band writing that is logical and makes use of the many possibilities of such a group. For that matter, whether intentionally or not, Gil Evans has taken as his point of departure what Ellington was doing in the early 1940s. A number of passages represent real homages to Duke's art. As examples I have only to cite the winning theme of the Dave Brubeck composition "The Duke," which has a melody and a kind of orchestration that might have come from the pen of Ellington in his best days; or the variety of timbres and rhythms in the background of "The Maids Of Cadiz"; or the final ensemble of "I Don't Wanna Be Kissed," which has a thoroughly Ellingtonian verve. Of course, here is no plagiarism here, but a filiation which, when all is said and done, honors Miles and Gil, for creators often define themselves by the choice of their sources.
I don't have room enough to point out all the beauties that I have discovered while listening over and over to the orchestration of these ten little concertos assembled in a vast fresco. Happy finds in writing technique, such as those ensembles of "Miles Ahead" which recall the icing of "Boplicity," and those brass solos in which a greater mobility and a more apparent concern for accentuation are manifested (this concern is found again in Kurt Weill's "My Ship” where the accents are admirably worked into the "group phrasing"); such as that introductory motif of "The Maids Of Cadiz," which is so delicately harmonized; such as those beautiful ensemble phrases of "The Duke" which alternate with such, personal use of the tuba, or those brilliant outbursts of the brasses in Carisi's "Springsville" - all that is Gil Evans at his best.
Happy finds in matters of form, too, such as that riff in Ahmad Jamal's "New Rhumba," which has always the same structure but a constantly varied instrumental presentation; such as "Blues For Pablo" (which Gil Evans had given us recently in a version for small band), in which a latent conflict gradually takes shape between the Spanish-type theme in minor and the blues theme in major, with the latter putting in a brief four-bar appearance before predominating throughout three choruses. (It will be noticed that Evans breaks away here at a few points from the four-bar unit of construction and thus destroys the symmetrical form of the traditional blues, which is something that very few arrangers dare to do.)
Miles Davis, in this album, confirms what we already knew about him - that he is the most lyrical of modern jazzmen. But whereas the lyricism of a Charlie Parker, in his great moments, seemed to want to burst open the gates of delirium, Miles' lyricism tends rather toward a discovery of ecstasy. This is particularly perceptible in slow tempos. The most beautiful solos of this album are found, I think, in the ballads (even though Miles plays with his unique "detachment" in the medium tempo of "Miles Ahead" and gives us, in "New Rhumba," a highly successful "stop chorus"). In slow tempos, Evans' lyricism is even more closely tied up with Davis'. The exposition of "My Ship" is proof of this. The discreet flight of the theme played by the band prepares the way for Davis' type of ecstasy; the almost motionless background prolongs it. The effect is still more striking in "The Meaning Of The Blues" and J.J. Johnson's "Lament." Here Miles uses the seductiveness of his allusive style and it is the band that tells us, in its infrequent interventions, what the soloist lets us only guess at.
Last of all, note the perfection of those written-out passages in which Miles' horn is called on to lead in ensemble. "Gil," says Mulligan, "is the one arranger I've ever played who can really notate a thing the way the soloist would blow it."
This first experiment of Miles Davis with a big and has been looked forward to and is, we believe, conclusive. Representing also as it does Gil Evans' brilliant reappearance, it is a happy event for the history of jazz, and one for which unreserved congratulations are due the men behind it, George Avakian and Cal Lampley.
- Andre Hodeir
(Translated by David Noakes)
Miles Ahead
By Phil Schaap
Miles Ahead has been reissued on CD two times before. This charming third edition however, is the first to offer all the music from the original.
The first CD version, in 1987, created quite a controversy. Miles Ahead was a mono recording, which had been repackaged in - ugh! - pseudo stereo. It played in stereo, but didn't say so. It also failed to point out that the music was different. In fact, there were denials that anything was amiss.
Years passed. Columbia pulled the '87 edition and released "the original" in mono with a statement that it could only be in that form. There was still no explanation; and a few new questions needed answers, not the least of which was why in 1993 was Miles Ahead being released, in part, in pseudo-stereo.
In 1995, I was asked to resolve the mess for the box set Miles Davis & Gil Evans: The Complete Columbia Studio Recordings. I had noticed that on the 1987 edition Miles didn't play in the coda of "Springsville" but the ensemble sounded precisely the same. I soon discovered tapes on which Miles Davis overdubbed! There was a year's work ahead, but the key to the mystery had been found.
A lot of important unissued music was also found. In selecting the bonus tracks, only complete performances were chosen. Admittedly, there are misplayed passages by the ensemble, and Miles Davis hits a number of clams, but such problems exist on the 'master' takes. Choosing full take performances eliminated the introduction of edited/hybrid takes, a factor that marred previous reissues.
Yes, this reissue does offer the original in stereo when it was initially issued only in mono. And on CD, the end of the original LP's side one plays through into the original LP's side two. But this is the logical approach as the masterpiece Miles Ahead is a suite, a continuous blend of ten independent but related pieces of music. Plus you get four bonus tracks culled from the remarkable finds which surfaced on the box set Miles Davis & Gil Evans: The Complete Columbia Studio Recordings. Beyond their musical worth, each track addresses a different component behind the mystery of how Miles Ahead was made and reissued.
Springsville: This bonus track is take 7 from the remake version of May 27, 1957, the version that uses Wynton Kelly's piano. About 10 seconds of Kelly's uncredited playing was spliced into the master. Here you hear Gil Evans' full idea. Gil had changed his arrangement between the first recording of "Springsville" on May 23, adding the piano part by the time of this May 27 remake.
Blues For Pablo: This is the first take, in a way, the only one. When the second try broke down, it was decided to record the work in chunks. The master of "Blues For Pablo" is edited from seven separate segments, including the first 19 seconds of this "unissued" take one. Here you hear the concept as a whole. The continuity of Miles' solo work in this sole full performance offers musical coherence, despite some technical mistakes.
Medley: The Meaning Of The Blues & Lament: This is a recording of a rehearsal. Producer George Avakian recorded rehearsals. George didn't do this so archivists could find exquisite bonus tracks a generation later. It was an insurance policy. Avakian occasionally used bits from the rehearsal recordings to patch a mistake on true takes in creating his edited masters. Here you hear an entire rehearsal: two tunes played all the way through. This bonus track thereby offers an important added dimension since none of the 9 components of the Miles Ahead suite is a continuous performance. Gil Evans noticed some mistakes in the written parts at the end of "Lament" and corrected them on the spot.
I Don't Wanna Be Kissed: This is take 8, the last one, surprisingly at a slower tempo than the earlier takes used to create the master. Moreover, take 8 is the only one on which Miles Davis played all of his parts and solos. On the master, much of Miles' playing is overdubbed. This "I Don't Wanna Be Kissed" was the only complete alternate take introduced on the first, highly controversial CD issue of Miles Ahead.
- Phil Schaap
1997
The success rate of Miles Davis and Gil Evans astounds. Their first album, Miles Ahead, is a masterpiece, a monument in the history of recorded Jazz.
Remastered from the original session tapes, this CD recaptures the natural sonic beauty of the music and digs further into the making of this complex masterpiece. In addition to alternate takes, Producer Phil Schaap has unearthed enlightening rehearsal sequences and overdubbed sessions that bring the listener into the process.
Tracks 1-10 present the original Miles Ahead LP in stereo for the first time, despite failed attempts to reissue the album in its original form and assertions that the raw materials did not exist to rebuild this heavily edited work in stereo.
Tracks 11-14 are illuminating alternate takes and rehearsals that Schaap uncovered in his quest to do "the impossible" - give us the original Miles Ahead in stereo.
[adapted from the introduction to the box set Miles Davis & Gil Evans: The Complete Columbia Studio Recordings]
Produced by George Avakian
Assisted by Cal Lampley
Recording Engineer: Harold Chapman
Produced for Reissue by Phil Schaap
Project Director: Seth Rothstein
Remastering: Phil Schaap
Restoration and Editing: Phil Schaap and Mark Wilder
Masters prepared by Mark Wilder
Additional Engineering: Tom "Curly" Ruff
Reissue Art Direction: Howard Fritzson
Reissue Design: Randall Martin
Liner Photography: Don Hunstein
Packaging Manager: Nicholas Bennett
A&R Coordination: Patti Matheny
Production Assistance: Rene Arsenault
Columbia Jazz Reissue Series: Steve Berkowitz and Kevin Gore
