MILES DAVIS & GIL EVANS:
They were Miles Ahead
by Marshall Bowden

Today it is around 75 degrees here in Chicago, a gorgeous Friday afternoon with the promise of even warmer weather to come over the weekend. After a false start three weeks ago that saw a brief warming spell subsumed back into winter’s bosom, this indeed seems like paradise. It feels like the true beginning of spring, though the calendar says that the season arrived last month.

On these first beautiful spring days, the CD I find myself most invariably reaching for is Miles Davis’ Miles Ahead, recorded with a nineteen-piece band and featuring arrangements by Gil Evans. Recorded over several dates between May and August of 1957, Miles Ahead is most often noted as the recording that demonstrated the commercial possibilities of a Davis/Evans collaboration to Columbia Records, making possible the highly successful (both in terms of artistic merit and long-term sales) Sketches of Spain and Porgy and Bess. But it’s a fine listen in its own right, and there is, I think, extra excitement in the knowledge that this was the first time that Davis and Evans tried this. Evans had to construct skillful arrangements of the chosen tunes, which he arranged into suites with no gaps between songs. He had to allow space for Davis’ solos, but maintain tonal coloration that would complement the trumpeter without overpowering him. For his part, Davis had to carry the part of the only solo voice on the entire recording. He needed to play above the horn section and to keep his trumpet voice interesting to the listener. Even though the recordings were done on several dates and Davis also re-recorded segments of his solo that were ‘dropped in’ to the final recording, it still requires an artist with a good degree of stamina to achieve this.

One thing that is unique about Miles Ahead is the contrast between its lightness, in terms of overall texture, and its depth in terms of the levels of interest that are in play in Evans’ arrangements. It is not ‘light’ jazz nor lightweight. Some would question whether it is truly jazz at all, though listening to it today it seems clearly to have all the elements of ‘cool’ jazz as defined by Gerry Mulligan, Chet Baker, and Miles himself. Even more introspective numbers such as “The Meaning of the Blues” achieve a certain lightness that makes them more melancholy than truly sad.

The music on Miles Ahead bristles with the energy of the late ‘50s and early ‘60s, when small group jazz was entering its most fertile period. At the same time, it lays back with the gentleness and overall burnished sound of West Coast cool jazz. The harmonic explorations of bebop were well observed by these musicians, and they took the substitution of chords in standards of all kinds to be standard operating procedure. Gil Evans chose to use a big group, and his overall approach here owes a debt to Duke Ellington’s work. Ellington was still a major presence in the jazz world at this time, and he had pointed the way in terms of new ways of utilizing a large group of musicians that differed significantly from the approach of the big band swing era. Evans had been looking ways to bring the big band into the modern jazz era since his work with the Claude Thornhill Orchestra. Evans studied not only the music of Ellington, but also of Don Redman and Fletcher Henderson, both of whom were innovative big band arrangers of their time. Evans briefly led his own nine piece band, but went into the army, where he played in various army bands. It was during this time that Evans discovered bebop, and it influenced him tremendously. In 1949-50 Evans wrote arrangements for the nonet that recorded the sides which eventually were collected under the banner of Birth of the Cool. These sessions also included Davis and Gerry Mulligan. From 1949-56 Evans was relatively quiet, completing a few musical projects, but not a lot of real jazz work.

1957-1960 was an amazing time in the history of jazz music. In 1959 Davis would record the groundbreaking album Kind of Blue, while Coltrane would release My Favorite Things and Ornette Coleman would record Shape of Jazz to Come. The Dave Brubeck Quartet was playing concert halls and colleges around the world with their brand of jazz combined with oddly metered European-influenced compositions. Young, sophisticated people were interested in these new sounds, and they purchased some of these albums. Columbia released Miles Ahead with a cover depicting a young white woman on a sailboat, wearing a straw hat and a sweater with a geometric pattern--an image that may seem to match the lightness and coolness of the music inside, only Miles didn’t see it that way. He excoriated the record label for putting a ‘white bitch’ on the cover of his album, and subsequent pressings featured instead a picture of Davis blowing his trumpet, eyes open and staring at the listener with seeming defiance.

The period 1957-1962 was also the highlight of Gil Evans’ career. During this period he released a series of albums that included Gil Evans and Ten (released the same year as Miles Ahead), New Bottle—Old Wine, Great Jazz Standards (both 1958), Out of the Cool (1960), and Into the Hot (1961). Interspersed with these were the collaborations with Miles: Miles Ahead (1957), Porgy and Bess (1958), Sketches of Spain (1959), and the abortive Quiet Nights (1962). These albums have been universally respected by musicians and music writers alike in the years following, yet Evans still feels woefully under-noticed by many jazz listeners.

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