A Guide to MILES DAVIS / Birth - Kind of Blue

hi I'm Oliver and this is deep cuts a channel dedicated to music for lovers of music cannot believe I'm finally here again first off sorry for the delay I think finishing my master's degree starting a full-time job and promising season to all at the same time was just too many things so it's taken me a lot longer to get this stuff together plus the fact this video itself took a long long time to research I'm talking months of reading but we're now thanks to all of you who have patiently waited for deep cuts to come back off hiatus I think all of you that have been following me on Twitter and Facebook and Instagram and the words of encouragement the messages you've all sent me I really appreciate it and you guys are the reason I came back to do more videos in the first place so thank you so much also a quick update on the state of the patreon so I've decided I'm not going to open the patreon up again it was just it was a lot of pressure on me to deliver certain number of videos a certain number of times and I just don't really have time to do that whilst I'm working full-time so if you do want to donate anything to the channel towards equipment towards anything I still have my coffee page which I've linked in the description box below so if you do want to give me shot me three quid or something then you're welcome to do so but don't feel obliged honestly for many of you this might be your first ever deep cuts video or fresh deep cuts video if you've subscribed in the last year so welcome this is this is new content this is what new content looks like shocking for me as well I think I'm probably effed in the head for even trying to do this guide a guide to Miles Davis probably the most influential jazz musician on the face of this dirty little planet one of the most influential musicians of all time not by purply that's just the case I've spent the last six months reading Miles Davis books guides to his music information on the records listening to everything he's put out all of the live albums all of the early recordings I mean there is so much here and it's taking me a really long time to put all that into a guide so this is part 1 and part 2 will be coming in three or four weeks after we've done sort of a five albums video albums a decade all that kind of stuff you you expect from me at this time of the year so this is going to go up to kind of blue so we're gonna start with his birth and go all the way up to kind of blue we'll go on part two will be sketches of Spain all the waiters death obviously I haven't included every single bit of information on his life because how are you supposed to do that and in you know two hour-long guides so I would recommend if you want to read further read Ian Carr's biography on Miles Davis I've got so much of my information from there and you really helped me discover who Mars is as a person and how he progresses as a musician check out Mars his own autobiography because you get certainly great quotes I mean I'm gonna pepper this guide with some of his quotes including the number of times he uses the word which is a lot of times and also anything written by Ted G Ola he's done a history of jazz book which is absolutely fantastic all of these books are actually behind me incidentally I'm not gonna move them because you know they're very carefully placed but yeah if you want to get much more in depth to this stuff I really do recommend you reading those books I'm also not going to talk about every single release like I do on some of these guides simply because there are so many there are so many live albums I've talked about pretty much all of the studio records and a number of the most important life releases but obviously not everything is in this guide if you've got here and you don't know who Miles Davis's I'm not sure what rock you've been living under because every single person has at least heard this name I'm sure he's a trumpet player with a style that explodes with pathos and expression he's a band leader who understood the power of the ensemble and didn't allow his own immeasurable talents to get in the way of what the sound of the band was and that's so important to him it and we'll go into that and a little bit more detail as we reach the releases that really push that to the fore once I do something it's over and I have a strong urge to do something else and when I'm doing something else I forget about what I've done I've been like that through the ears a fearless innovator just because you've listened to kind of blue and brew don't think you know this artist there is so much more to him and I'm gonna hopefully show you that over these next two guides we'll be jumping from bebop to cool jazz to hard bop to the fusion of the 70s to the kind of pop flecked 80s stuff that you did which often gets overlooked I often use the phrase treasure trove to describe these discographies but this truly is a treasure trove I mean there's so much here so let's just get into it despite his supreme extraterrestrial talent surprisingly Mars was born a normal human baby boy as mild Julie Davis the third on the 26th of May 1926 in Alton Illinois he was born into a wealthy family they were quids in they had estates they had horses his father was called Miles Davis the second his father before that Miles Davis was a very aristocratic thing to do isn't it that they were very well-to-do in that and they had money good connections all that sort of stuff Martha's father called Mars a keen horse rider if he was ever thrown he dream out immediately and master his mount maybe it's too poetic to make a connection there with the way that he approached music but he certainly wasn't someone who gave up someone who worked really hard to achieve what he wanted to he grew up with a kind of musical censorship in so many ways and that might be a surprising thing for you to hear his parents would listen to a lot of western music western classical music and described by a biographer Ian Cara's genteel and and that style was very much what Miles was listening to at a very young age before he started hearing the kind of things that would truly push him in the direction that he was going musically but even though there was this musical censorship happening there was a musical history bubbling underneath his family so one day came home and his mum was playing this funky piano motif because she was taught by her grandmother who played the organ so there was like a bluesy history to this family which was maybe been covered up by Martha's parents early age trips to Arkansas gave miles this taste for blues gospel and rootsy music his mom did eventually buy him Art Tatum and Duke Ellington records and you can start to see where these influences are coming in you can only imagine how these early experiences gave him this flavor of what he wanted to experience or perhaps what he wanted to create in the future then at the age of nine miles was given a trumpet by a doctor named Ewbank and this is the focal point this is the point where history could have been entirely different if he was never given that trumpet it defines the life of this incredible bandleader this jazz and music maverick Miles began learning trumpet at school and it seems like he picked it up very quickly much quicker than the other children he was learning chromatic scales very quickly he was learning to hold notes two of these things are obviously important if you're gonna be a jazz player his father one stick used school music competitions of being racist he was always the best but the blue-eyed boys always won first and second prizes Mars had always to settle for third the officials miles and everybody knew that he should have had the first prize one of Martha's first memories he said he's being chased down the road by white children shouting the n-word at him and so so there's a lot of racial politics in that and an anger of injustice which which Martha's father felt and Mars very much brings forward in the way he talks about race relations in his later days too horrible but a clear example of the racism rife in the 1930s it probably hurt him but later on Mars was doing these things that none of these kids could have even dreamed of not even that further on from the point we're talking about about winning competitions at school he was playing these jazz clubs with his teacher Clark Terry and these other jazz musicians who were pretty impressed by this young talent on the trumpet a little aside about st. Louis it's considered a pretty special place geographically for the birth of a very specific type of sound the gigging tended to be pretty crazy because if you were traveling up the country from New Orleans to Chicago then you're probably gonna stop in st. Louis vice-versa if you're traveling from Chicago down to New Orleans you're gonna stop in st. Louis so it became this melting pot of styles for all these different musicians it sounds like as a pretty amazing place to check out this berth and Genesis of different types of music in the 30s and 40s ragtime was already a big part of the city but now we have this new type of sound for those not aware ragtime is pretty much the ancestor of the jazz sound look up the king of ragtime Scott Joplin for an example of that well a long sidle with this captivating music you had this very unique trumpet sound clear bold expressive and it was being played by local legends like Bobby Danzig who miles described as a crazy or his teacher Clark Terry who he described as a bad or even the Levi Madison who he describes as I think the baddest if he read his autobiography you've come to realize that pretty much everyone is described as a in one way or another and thanks to him this video will probably now be demonetised mother the sound is attributed to a very specific mouthpiece being used on these trumpets called a high mouthpiece Clark Terry used it Levon Madison used it and eventually miles himself will come to use it apparently it's quite a difficult mouthpiece to master it's more difficult to hit higher notes in the register because of the way the mouthpiece is built and so mom's really had to persevere with it when he started to learn on it but obviously you know him it worked out quite well isn't it amazing that something as simple as a trumpet mouthpiece made of thin metal with a deep cut could help be responsible for this entire sound it's just insane one day miles goes to watch a band play in st. Louis featuring none other than Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie and in that moment miles is asked to join the band onstage to play the third trumpet part imagine the scenes this young musician getting to stand on stage with the heroes at the time this really gave him a taste for life outside the confines of San Luis so he enrolled in Juilliard famous performing arts school and set off for New York the epicenter of that burgeoning bebop style so Bebop this is what we call a non sequitur or one of those annoying bits in family go they have like a joke that doesn't really connect to the main thing it's not really allowed to talk as it does connect I'm just gonna talk about bebop bebop is crucial you really need to understand what it is before you jump into really any post-1945 jazz and especially Mars's discography this was a revolution in style ramping up the melodic style of earlier jazz music and speeding the hell up multiplying chord changes intensifying rhythmic sequences you've got accents flung all over the place polyrhythm skittering across melodies and sometimes making the melody the least important part of the music snappy solos los danceable and it means that there was a bit of a backlash to the bebop sound a lot of people didn't really vibe with it including and you might have expect this Louis Armstrong the Louis Armstrong he described bebop as this modern Menace which is one of my favorite quotes of all time and I really need to get that on a shirt so dizzy and Charlie Parker or bird as his nickname was were really at the forefront of the bebop sound and Mars was completely enamored by this new vital sense of musical exploration despite his early obsession with it you're probably all notice the difference between mousers playing and some of these bebop heroes playing ridiculously fast was never really Mars this thing one of his peers John Coltrane her we will come to in a little bit he was happy to unleash this ballistic fury of notes very similar to kind of some of the ways that Dizzy Gillespie played and bird but miles never did that his playing was very expressive he would hold a lot of his notes he had a patience he knew when to keep hold of a note and when to drop a note and that comes to to really be a focal point of his plane throughout his career he understood the value of patience I wanted to remember that as we go through this discography because I think it's important again the use of Pali rhythms and accents in the bebop sound are not particularly a western style it's much more from the African style of making music and this again might be why there were some detractors initially people like Louie Armstrong just didn't feel that they maybe understood it it didn't have the conventional sound conventional motifs and techniques to this music it was in some ways otherworldly for people who hadn't stepped outside of that Western musical canon but people did soon become enamored by ER because it was playing in these really cool bars bursting out of New York and people started to understand and appreciate this sound and and that's that's history really players like Kenny Clark Thelonious Monk and Dizzy Gillespie are playing places like Minton's Playhouse in Harlem really pushing these new expressive ideas then we have Charlie playing in smaller groups with Dizzy Gillespie - who in a convenient segue which may have been planned ends up living with Miles in New York Mars came to New York and apparently spent weeks looking for Byrd in bars across the city because he wanted to learn from him he'd been pretty enamored by what he'd heard in st. Louis and getting to play alongside these guys and he was living off of his family's allowance that he was being given so he was pretty well-off living in this city even as a young man and these influences were everything to Miles you know through Charlie Parker he met felonious monk you know one of the greatest jazz musicians of all time listen to brilliant corners if you've really want a taste of that did he also put him onto Freddy Webster another trumpeter who miles cites as a big influence so in April 1945 a student who is enrolled at music school but basically isn't turning up at any point isn't getting much out of it and is spending all of his times practicing and playing live with other jazz musicians we have the first appearance of Miles Davis on a recording he doesn't solo and he says he was pretty nervous which I guess is it not much of a surprise that plays the trumpet part on a herpe Fields quintet featuring rubber legs Williams on vocals I've thrown a link in the description if you want to take a listen during this time Mars drops out of Juilliard hardly surprising really bearing in mind all of the musical experiences he's getting outside of that and then he ends up recording them people like Charlie Parker the brilliant drummer Max Roach among countless others and in November of 1945 we have what's considered one of the first definitive recordings of bebop the Savoy sessions featuring Charlie Parker Max Roach itaú Dizzy Gillespie plays piano and Mars got the opportunity to play alongside these legends on a recording he was once again pretty nervous though I wasn't gonna get out there and embarrass myself check out the solo on track now's the time link in the description it's also on the Spotify playlist I've done it's not the confident Mars you expect which again I guess on his first few recordings you wouldn't imagine that he would be that confident but if you compare this to a couple of albums time or even become people either classics the kind of Blues the sketches of Spain the brew it doesn't sell on the same player nevertheless a great track and one you should definitely listen to I'm gonna skip through a few bits here because I don't want to mention every one of these earlier recordings and I have spent quite a lot of time on his musical Genesis but I think that's important to get an idea of who he was as a musician earlier on because then seeing his progression seeing me talk about his progression will hopefully make a lot more sense and you'll see how this kind of monolithic figure in music came to be it he's a fascinating person honestly he was a turbulent time miles like bird himself became addicted to heroin it's a sad story that's replicated across so many of the jazz greats of this period unfortunately it sort of ripped through the bebop scene and the jazz scene so many of these young players becoming just victims of this really nasty drug Mars moved across to LA for a stint of performances when he came back he did play with Charlie Parker a few times but he was trying to distance himself away from him a little bit so he started playing with people and played with before such as Sonny Rollins John Coltrane Oscar Pettiford and Gil Evans Gil is an important influence at 22 years old miles were so impressed by what Gil was doing really separate to the improvisers that miles was being influenced by this at this stage you know Gil was doing a lot of compositional things a lot of writing this stuff down also Gil knew exactly how to pare down music so you only had that the components you really needed it wasn't about over stuffing the mix and the sound and that's something that really rubs off on Mars and you can hear it in some of those recordings in the late 1940s also his use of orchestral instruments which leads us to a very important record birth of the call now hold on I hear some of you ask maybe wasn't birth of the cool released as a compilation in 1957 yes it was but these recording sessions happened in 1949 and 1950 and they were released as seventy-eights at the time so you only heard this all together as one thing when it was released as a compilation in 57 I think as then as a way of working through this discography it makes sense just to check out but the birth of the call to hear some of these early Miles Davis recordings rather than hunting down for old 78 rips on YouTube I just don't think you gonna get much out of that these sessions were recorded by a nonet which is a group of nine musicians and it already marks this moving away from the style of bebop Miles wasn't the only musician whose talents were outgrowing the conventions that that genre had sort of pushed and they were thinking of new ways of stepping outside the box because bebop was no longer this this really intense brand new style of music the nonet with the arrangements from Gil Evans which was more classical and orchestral it focused more on melodic soloing and more so than Bebop it had things like a tuba so knowing rather than a tenor sax you wouldn't normally see a tuba anywhere near a modern jazz bebop group miles on birth of the call in his autobiography ebook didn't have the humanity of Duke Ellington it didn't even have that recognizable thing burdened is were great fantastic challenging but they weren't sweet the birth of the call was different because you could also hear everything and Hum it also oh yeah in September of nineteen forty eight the nonet opened for Count Basie in jörg imagine that I wish out a time machine so if you think of Gil Evans background and the fact that Myles wanted to throughout these sessions create music almost like a choral group use the use the instruments for their voices create lilting motifs that you could hum that will set you off really well for listening to this music it's a beauty one which was called not jazz when it was released Bell end critic but it has gone down as being one of the defining pinpoint moments in the history of Western music to be fair though it is very different and I can kind of see where the critic was coming from if you look at the journey in the drama of Evans arrangement on the third track moon dreams for example has these gorgeous deep harmonies and this stepwise dissonance happening across all of the instruments it doesn't really sound like jazz or certainly nothing like jazz up to this point and it never loses that sense of musical voice which was so integral to Miles for this recording this is exactly what he wanted to achieve with this whereas the track like Bop olicity which was composed under Martha's mother's name I think it was for a rights issue I can't exactly remember as this great laid back swing to it like a really nice example of cool jazz already you looking at moon dreams publicity two quite different arrangements really pushing the boat out on what jazz music a bit cool jazz itself was basically a push back from the hard edge of bebop and did flurried intensities of Charlie Parker a towel also elements of classical music would sneak in and again if you listen to birth of the call even give it a cursory listen it's gonna be hard to ignore that and with that this early on in his career in Mars releases something which kicks out against the conventions of the jazz scene and and puts him apart from other musicians and other performers other creators of the era quick note if you seek out the complete birth of the cooled recordings when you want to listen to this it includes a live set from the Royal rooster in New York in 1948 now on this as a track called si vous play which is French Hey didn't know that see you learn something on these videos and the genius of drummer Max Roach really does I mean it's just insane on this track when I first heard this I thought I wish I had been there to see Max Roach play the recordings of really rough not particularly good quality but wow it really gives you a sense of what he sounded like as a performer obviously everyone else on there is great as well but as someone who who used to drum quite a lot it's just that performance from Max Roach Wow Mars also recorded again with dizzy and Byrd on the metronome all stars ban 1949 on this really great track called overtime which I definitely recommend you checking out it just fizzes with energy it's a great cut after these sessions at the beginning of the 1950's Mars was kind of a bit washed up if I'm honest you know the alcohol and the drug addictions were really taking a toll on him he hadn't really capitalized on on that intensity intense creative period of the late 1940s and he was sort of just languid and just sort of hanging around doing performances not really realizing his full potential kept going back to San Luis and seeing his family he was recording some ensemble pieces here and there nothing particularly of note that there is a Sonny Rowland's quintet track would I know which was recorded in 51 and Miles has actually played piano on that so I've linked that in the description if you want to hear him playing something other than trumpet because that's quite interesting there were a number of performances that were recorded that you can see cow and Miles Davis sextet was something a lot of Birdland recordings that they did live including Sonny Rollins and saxophone the great Art Blakey on drums and Kenny Drew on piano listen to the frenetic half-nelson is a great track that she ended up on the album work in years later but I think it's far better here in it's more raggedy live form just before kicking his drug habit Miles went down to California with the brilliant Charles Mingus haven't heard of him you bloody should have and Max Roach and he did some some sessions and some live performances with them as part of the lighthouse all-stars which was released in 1953 here we have the meeting of Miles and Chet Baker another trumpeter who is incredibly important in history of cool jazz and if he's not on your radar he should be what I love is the smoky atmosphere hinted out on these recordings you can hear the distant chatter of people watching the performances as they happen and it really brings the period into sort of stock Technicolor as you listen to it it feels as if you're there as all great live recording should then Mars went cold turkey it was like having a bad flu only worse I lay in a cold sweat my nose and eyes ran I threw up everything like tried to eat my pores opened up and I smelled like chicken soup then it was over biggie Ikes so now we'd stop being a complete state it was time to get back on the horse and release arguably one of the greatest ever strings of recordings in the history of ever ever this is we're doing a traditional deep cuts video gets quite difficult these guides because some of these tracks turn up multiple times or certain albums released much later than they were recorded so you have to bear with me a little bit hopefully I've I've road marked everything so it makes sense a lot of recordings also end up on multiple releases sometimes the labels even released albums posthumously and changed the titles bastards making my life so much more confusing so one track I want to talk about is blue haze from the 56 compilation at the same name actually recorded in 54 what it does is it displays a newly clean confidence of Mars as a player but also as a bandleader with the quartet consisting of himself or a silver on keys Percy Heath on bass and op Blakey on drums this is an effortless piece of swung coolness Art Blakey slow ride hits and rim taps segue into snare rolls that frame the sections Mars's own performances and exercising under blowing not over using your instrument and that is just so much a feature of this period of Mars's playing so different to the bebop style and I think a lot of that was the rub off from working with Gil Evans the way that he looked at music in a compositional orchestral way if you can find a track as effortlessly cool as blue haze send it to me or put it in the comment section below because I'd love to hear it Horace Silver recalls these sessions we tried it and it didn't seem to work at all then Miles told Bob Weinstock to put out all the lights in the studio so the only light we had was from the window of the control booth myles sat in the chair and pulled his cap right over his face and he also took his shoes off then he beat it in at just the right tempo and the whole thing happened perfectly Mars uses bent notes slurs and smears with all of the confidence and energy of someone who has spent all their life up until this point mastering the craft of one specific instrument glossary time smear a often loud slide away from a tongue slur playing two or more notes without a pause between them then notes also referred to as blue notes where as a way of expressing the music you bend the pitch of the note up or down usually a semitone or so hope that was useful now signed to the influential prestige records Mars was in the studio a hell of a lot over the next very important years underlined important there 1954 s Miles Davis quartet recordings can be found on that blue haze compilation that I was just talking about a couple of really great tracks on there like that old devil moon or when lights are low just to prove the rounded musicianship of miles that same year procedure released the Miles Davis all-star sextet which included two important tracks walking and blue and boogie best way to describe this release in miles as words that record was a man sure he wanted a big sound so he added JJ Thompson on trombone we had that lucky Thompson on tenor sax but then you also have Horace and Percy on piano and bass respectively and then Kenny Clark rounding everything off on drums it brings back some of the improvisational importance from Bebop that was kind of moved away from a little bit on birth of the cool but really this these two tracks are properly working with this funky blues idea that Miles really wanted to portray together Percy and Kenny really get that going in the base and the percussion this thing just grooves so hard apparently Mars liked Kenny Clarke's plane because he had a subtlety that Art Blakey didn't really have if you just you can hear the nuances on tracks like walking and blue and booty and it is a couple of really great performances from him both of these tracks appear on the 57 record walk in which includes another crucial track that we have to talk about called solar and is important because it's the first time Mars ever uses the Harmon mute on a recording something which would push his expressive performance up a notch and make him even more recognizable to give you an idea of the importance of solar to Mars as a musician the first two measures of this track are actually inscribed on his tombstone hell of an epitaph at the opening of the truck is striking with Horace silver hitting this dissonant chord before Miles arrived with this muted breathy sound the Harmon mute gave him soon new sounds to work with you get that breathy tone in the low registers but in the upper registers you get this almost ear-splitting high-pitched sound and then this can make for some bloody dramatic soloing in solar he hasn't quite fully realized it yet but you really get that sound introduced on this track another early use of the Harmon mute is on olio which is included on the bags groove release in 1957 this includes sonny rollins on tenor which finishes a lineup of miles Horace Percy and Kenny which is a group of musicians that gelled so well together musically an important group of people here close to the outro of oleo you just have the meet trumpet and Percy's bass and it properly spotlights the originality of this tone it ends up spawning a lot of imitators and you it's not really surprising to hear that is it because it just sounds so good it's it's sort of haunting it eligaya k-- other descriptors are available there's just something about the sound of that harm you which hadn't really been done before in this way speaking of bags groove the title track was recorded at the end of 1954 and it's a proper airy and dreamlike piece thanks to the vibraphone sound from Milt Jackson who also wrote thee the piece itself loved that track so much it's on the playlist definitely listen to it none other than Thelonious Monk joined this session too but you'll notice that there's no keys whilst Mars is playing only bass and drums why is that I hear you ask please ask some tension between monk and Mars apparently there was a bit of a strop that happened at Mars through and he was famously quite difficult to work with sometimes and you hear you hear certain things about how difficult he was to work on certain things about how amazing yours to work so I think it depends on what space he was in creatively or his temple was like at that any given moment but anyway they fell out and apparently in a few years later Miles said in an interview that the monks an amazing player but often he doesn't give you the backing you need as a soloist you need to have a certain amount of structure behind you to perform the solo and he said monk didn't give him that so apparently that was why this wasn't included on this track itself I should say isn't like the pair didn't have an excellent working relationship because for the most part I think they did just a bit of a rocky moment they're pleased this to this track and just hear that tasty vibraphone solo got a la vipera fights he works so well here even though miles was gaining some recognition at this point he was still feeling as if people were looking on him as an unreliable junkie I mean it's bound to happen isn't it if you do end up becoming an addict in those early years and you don't end up being quite as reliable as you were before but he was working steadily in the studio and trying to rectify that working live it's getting all of these creative juices flowing and working with all these different musicians the musings of Miles was released in 1955 and it has a lot to answer for especially due to its lineup we have red garland on piano Oscar Pettiford on bass and Philly Joe Jones on drums Mars really liked red garland because at the time Mars is they're very influenced by another pianist called Ahmad Jamal so many great records to listen to from that play and you should check that out as an aside from all of the stuff here that I'm asking you to listen to and basically miles asked red to play like Jamal he was into boxing and had that light touch that I wanted on piano red knew I liked our match of all and that was the type of piano player I was looking for and so I asked him to give me all that sound because red played his best when he played like that this was another record put down or tapered rudy van Gelder's home studio in Hackensack New Jersey we don't really have time to break into the mastery of Rudi van Gelder's recording techniques for now there's just too much else to talk about in this guide but he was very an innovative and one of the things he used was a german neumann u47 microphone one of the first times it was really used in western music and it really introduced more clarity to recordings but also to Mars as sound if you listen back again to that recording of Sola it really does just cut through everything and arguably a lot of that is down to that recording technique and and gelda understanding what needed to come out this recording to really harness the sound that Mars was going for here its clarity its expression and he was a very important figure in the recording of music in the mid 20th century not particularly amazing release in of itself other than that the fact the lineup is going to be really important a night in Tunisia is fantastic though Oscar Pettiford mischievous bassline has more than a hint of the Menace in it and you can really hear that light touch of red Garland's fingers on the pier this it's an excellent track in what I would say is a fairly forgettable LP well I haven't really returned through that many times in this massive discography so 1955 is an incredibly important year for the jazz trumpeter because he was asked to join the Newport Jazz Festival very important place in the harnessing the talent around America for jazz and Beyond America as well but he was invited to play alongside people like Count Basie Louis Armstrong Dave Brubeck Gerry Mulligan and countless others this was seen as his comeback performance in many ways finally shrugging off the shackles of addiction and performance inconsistency to blow the crowd away which is exactly what he did miles joins the all-star band on stage which includes Thelonious Monk Percy Heath and Zoot Sims you have Jerry Mulligan and Connie Kate so they play now is the time the standard now that the people respect and we heard it way back we've talked about rather beginning of miles is recording experiences and then a track called around midnight which is Mokes track this is a track fermius monk wrote so what miles does is he whips out the harmon meet during this track and drives the crowd insane i got a standing ovation when I got off the bandstand everyone was looking at me like I was a king or something people were running up to me offering me record deals yeah no you were being offered record deals it's a gorgeous trap that really puts the duality of piano and trumpet to the fore romantic lilting monks assertive chord sculpt the mood behind that beautiful muted trumpet seems like you were getting the support from monk this time Myles I've included a link in the description to the bootleg of this track and it's also on the playlist and spotify as well it's it's really worth a listen just listen to the crowd go wild at the end of this track so one of the deals that Myles was offered was from Columbia you know the legendary Columbia Records and then this begins a strange set of years where Mars was signed to prestige in recording and releasing material but at the same time he's recording stuff in the studio for Columbia but more important than that the musicians that Myles surrounded himself with the band that he created for this time came to be known as the first great quintet and this quintet are going to be responsible for some of the most important jazz recordings of all time the music we were playing together was just unbelievable it was so bad that it used to send chills through me and it did the same thing to the audience's to man the we were playing in a short time was scary so scary though I used to pinch myself to see if I was really there oh boy this ain't no hyperbole seriously he's just said it and he was right that line up his red garland on piano Paul Chambers on bass and Philly Joe Jones on drums and a little saxophonist known as John Coltrane I love this story it was originally meant to be Sonny Rollins as part of the quintet but he had to go and get in recovery for his heroin addiction this is not the part of the story that I like that would be weird moms have been aware of Coltrane a few years back seeing him perform alongside Sonny Rollins but according to Miles Sonny wiped the floor with him and as such he wasn't really expecting a great deal from Coltrane this time around and then we get not only one of the greatest partnerships in all of jazz despite the fact it didn't last very long at all but Coltrane would become a master in his own right going on to record records like a Love Supreme an ascension I mean this man is another one of the the great jazz monoliths and can you just see now how all of these great players were working together they were all aware of each other I just I can't think of another genre in the history of music where these people are all kind of getting involved in each other's stuff and working together and it's just this amazing melting pot of just indescribable talent as an aside I did a deep cuts essential actually for ascension one of John Coltrane's best records a kind of free jazz explosion check that out I have put a link in the description so many links in the description on this video because there just simply has so much to talk about and check out this quintet worked bloody hard between 1955 and 1956 in order to relieve his contract of prestige he had to release a number of albums so he could commit full-time to Columbia so he get this this string of records cook him relaxin working and Steven opening track of relaxin my funny Valentine is actually a cover of a 1937 show tune by Richard Rodgers has a gorgeous lyrical trumpet solo from Mars and you have that lightness of red Garland's piano playing work in second track is the song for now most of you will recognize this because this is one of the jazz standards I mean almost every single artist has played this from people like Keith Jarrett to Chet Baker it gets played by high school jazz bands I mean this song is is you quitters check it out and you'll definitely hear that straight away be like yeah I definitely recognize that it's also a trap that brilliantly framed the dual power of miles is Horne and Coltrane sax and there's lovely a lovely interplay here in the different Tom Bruce of the sounds the style of the sounds of the different instruments and the way they master those in separate ways these two solos just work off of one other and I think it's a really great example of what these two can do obviously we're going to get two tracks that the illustrate and an even more intense way but this is a great place that also see it sorry with the fringe on top opens the steaming record it's another Richard Rogers show tuned cover this time from the musical Oklahoma I think it's it's interesting to point out at this point that he's getting his as some of his style and ideas from places like performance show tunes musicals he wasn't the snobby artist he wasn't going well I'm only gonna look at bebop or he was happy to kind of almost crate dig in these different genres and styles I don't think he'd be the kind of transformative artist that he was and and you will see throughout discography if he was snobby like that salt peanuts from the same record he's a bit of a throwback furious bebop tune originally paid by Dizzy Gillespie it also has its roots in a Glenn Miller Big Bounce on from the 1940s also check out the firebrand drumming from Philly Joe Jones on this track he's doing his paradiddle pattern on the ride cymbal okay so good these full records were laid down in just two sessions I mean that is incredibly prolific playing I don't know how the hell they got so much done in such a short space of time but it certainly does prove how well this band worked together as a unit so at the same time the quintet begin recording for Columbia and we get round about midnight named after that performance of Newport which had people win rapturous applause it put miles on the map even more and it was the performance that got him the deal with Columbia so it makes sense of that to be the first title of release from Columbia Records now some say this record is inferior to the prestige records the working relaxants team in cooking I disagree but it might be because I was exposed to this album early on and I only came to the work in cooking relaxing steam and records a bit later but honestly I think this is a fantastic album the recording of round midnight feels almost painfully intimate with that trumpet holy commanding the opening few minutes and when the band finally comes in fully with those unison snaps it is just glorious and something which is pretty well documented through these prolific quintet recording sessions is the ability each soloist has of completely changing the mood and the atmosphere of that song it feels like you're really going on a journey with these musicians because each one is so capable of commanding their craft that performance take bye-bye blackbird for example miles is opening Harmon mute solo is introspective and pretty blue when Coltrane jumps in things get so much more intense and agitating these flurries of notes that he's cramming into every bar some have commented on how it seems as if Coltrane has got so much to say he just wants to fit it all in and that's why his playing can be so fast I think that's a lovely way of looking at his expressive emotive playing very different to Miles but but they complement each other so well when we reach red Garland's piano solo on this track and almost Lounge jazz aesthetic is brought to the table and all that tension that was built up kind of melts away with that final coda from Miles it set up standing track these five records were so influential and jazz players at the time they took some of those tropes and conventions of bebop and they gave it more depth I suppose you could say that they updated it miles got burned out from so many recording sessions though and it's not really surprising is it when he's doing so much all the time tensions run high with Coltrane and Coltrane left the band briefly he was kind of given an ultimatum you either need to get clean or you need to get out because he also had a really awful heroin addiction so he left and also apparently red garland got pretty pissed off and he decided to leave as well again you might be getting the fact that Miles Davis is quite a difficult person to work with and you'd be generally correct other than a handful of really amazing partnerships is a constantly rotating cast of musicians throughout his discography and some say that's because he was very hot-headed he knew exactly what he wanted and that could piss a lot of other musicians off and but you can see that the output that comes from that kind of creative control doesn't mean that he didn't lose some friends in the process and piss a few musicians off though you don't wanna get on the wrong side of him basically is what I've garland from everything I've read about and so all burned out it was time for a new challenge enter Gil Evans stage left they work together of course on birth of the cool sessions which I was talking about earlier and Gil brought his orchestral classically trained ear and hand to what miles was doing here again they were writing and recording together and we get miles ahead released in 1957 in every way a masterpiece perhaps the first absolute masterpiece in the Miles Davis discography this is a record that Dizzy Gillespie loved so much that he had to return to Mars a week later and ask for a new copy because he'd worn it out so much I think you can't really get much better than that can you he told me it was the greatest man that was one of the greatest compliments I'd ever had for someone like dizzy to say that about something I've done the miles of miles ahead is very different from the previous five bebop oriented records seriously lush orchestration defines this releases 37 minutes long you have 16 players this is essentially a suite miles placed the flugelhorn as well and he placed her out so there's no trumpet on this no trumpet soloing which might come as a shock to some of you who are coming here to look at a prolific trumpet players discography it's flugelhorn throughout which offers a different kind of hombro a different style to this orchestral suite Myles is the sole soloist throughout the entire suite so the rest of the band is bubbling underneath him over the top of this fairly intricate jazz classic Hybrid which is sometimes known as third stream which is when I was reading about Miles Davis and prep for this guide I'd never heard of the phrase third stream before but apparently it's a hybrid of jazz and classical music I mean maybe you have heard of it but I certainly learned something new it's bloody exquisite to be honest this record I mean it does so much for me and I hope that it does the same for you opening tracks spring still shows off this tight orchestration written for a 16 piece band and it brings such a rich palette which regularly steps back which I really like and it allows Martha's view flugelhorn to have the optimal space that it needs to really thrive in this environment you'll probably also notice that Martha's playing is far and away different from those of the prestige recordings and this is very much Myles taking forward this idea of less is more something that Gil Evans was so good realizing listen to his soloing throughout the maids of Cadiz it almost feels sorrowful the way that he holds those notes across this bed of music that the 16 musicians are making Gil's orchestration is in some ways an update of the nonet used on birth of the cult and coupled with his greater experience since then and meiosis you get something that is far more sophisticated in quality I mean I've said already it's a masterpiece on track blues for Pablo Gil and Miles create so much space between the higher instrument registers and the low instrument registers and then Mars's flugelhorns or floats through the middle you really get this sense of sensitivity that's applied to every aspect of this orchestration every aspect of this performance this is the complete opposite of the fire that bebop wanted to start it's more planned it's more considered it's almost like a movie score which makes complete sense when you see that the next project he does is called a swan sir poor Alicia 4 or elevator to the gallows which is in 1958 score for the film of the same name please excuse the terrible French pronunciation I've been trying to learn French and I still can't pronounce a single thing so maybe someone could pay for some lessons for me please Mars was in Paris at the same time of the great French filmmaker Louis Mao who was a big fan and asked him to put this soundtrack together unlike the complex and intricately planned scoring of miles ahead this was much more based on improvisation although did try to ape the kind of sultry moods that were created on miles ahead I've never really fell in love with this release or opening track of generic displays a very reverb Miles Davis trumpet part it definitely evokes those smoky thrillers that have become so commonplace as part of the convention now of TV and film thrillers has a nice atmosphere to it but if it has never done a great deal for me now even more musically invigorated miles headed back to the USA to do something which would fundamentally alter the state of jazz forever he reconnected with John Coltrane who had been playing in Thelonious monk's band he got back together red garland Philly Joe Jones and Paul Chambers and also added a saxophonist called Julian cannon all Adderley a sextet was born Coltrane on this period on returning I found Mars in the midst of another stage of his musical development there was one time in his past that he devoted to multi chord structures he was interested in courts for their own sake but now it seemed as if he was moving in the opposite direction to the use of fewer and fewer chord changes in songs he used tunes with free flowing lines and chordal directions this is so important because miles and his bands were playing so far away now from the conventions and restrictions of bebop it was taking a step back and just allowing these compositions to live and breathe a great example of this is milestones released in 1958 recorded over two days and the first true example of this sextet playing together and it's an increasingly impressive record the more time you take with it miles really wanted to push the trio of horns to the fore on this record you can definitely hear that he's understood the power of having three horns in a small band set up the contrast in Tamas and approaches is something you take even further before the decade is out but you can really hear a hit on opening track dr. Jekyll the firebrand phrase that opens this find the trumpet playing over the top of a cannonball and Coltrane unison harmony underneath the speed is break-neck propelled by Paul Chambers flighty baselines and Philly Joe Jones really swinging is disgusting in the best way of really harnessing this agitated further by contrast sits ahead demonstrates the power of traveling through solos and the build-up that is created through this track Paul Coltrane begins on such a powerful solo which increases in intensity throughout and then out of nowhere Philly Joe Jones who's just riding the ride and this lovely swing starts playing a straight beat as if it's almost rocky and the stunned the style switch of his almost revelatory as Mars begins to throw down Philly Joe Jones jumps straight back into that swung sound again just such a great moment here and throughout the record the focus is unquestionably on the horns they're the only instruments they get solos throughout this record it's about them also check out that stunning horn motif on opening title track milestones and it's underscore but this aggressively fast swing the drumming for this record is probably one of my all-time favorites or even the track Billy Boy with this formidable drum piano face of beginning Wow before we get to the final record in part 1 of this guide we have to land on 1959's porky and best I think probably one of the most alluring records Mars ever created very much a successor to miles ahead porgy and bess is another continuation of Gil Evans and Mars working together to create this orchestration of jazz classical hybrid sounds now due to Martha's collaboration with the pianist Bill Evans on 1958's jazz track he become even more interested in chord sequences and the process of composition looking composers like maurice ravel's and around khachaturian and also looking at how a piece would be created from a modal point of view looking at how you create things with a modal dynamic quick primer on modal for those of you unaware so bebop was basically based on soloing over increasingly complicated chord changes there are these things called modes which are scales which elicit a different feeling based on kind of how they're structured like Dorian Phrygian mixolydian etc instead of building a composition on chords you build them on modes instead as a process Mars was very interested in this idea and it's used throughout 59s porgy and bess the original porky ambassadors george gershwin's 1935 musical and this recording was put down over four sessions in 1958 released in 1959 Myles decided against having Cannonball Adderley and John Coltrane as part of this band despite the success in harnessing their talents on milestones he felt as if everything had to be very straight and serve only the composition itself roppongi invest and felt that their stark originality would maybe it would undermine the compositional aspect of this record so basically they just won't part of this this album is essential lush swooning orchestrations dominate every single track Myles our solos brim with passion and sadness the entire orchestra comes together perfectly it's mind-boggling to me that this was put down in only four sessions it's difficult to pick out a highlight here because it all really is a highlight you've got the cacophony of horns and crash cymbal was on opening track buzzards song miles is solo on old best where's my best is about the most tender a ballad as you'll ever hear and those meandering tubers oh my good god all gone the big bands smash which seeds Jones throwing down some really intense solos which is then followed by gone gone gone which takes the motif have gone but it makes it funeral in tone and that's just a great moment in the record there really dolls everything back becomes introspective reflective just go and listen to this please the emotional power of this goddamnit and with that we land on 1959 kind of blew the most well-known jazz record of all time weirdly this is the first time I ever talked about on this channel here's an awkward excerpt of me nervous as hell talking to a camera back in my room in June 2016 this is probably the quintessential jazz album everyone any announced got this album literally every single person you could possibly imagine has this somewhere in their house it's unlikely there'll be many of you who haven't heard this record at some point in their lives it sold four million copies by 2009 and it was steadily selling five thousand a week not too long ago I mean that those numbers are are pretty insane and now with access to streaming services if you're a fan of music and you're looking at best albums of all time this is gonna come up constantly so I'm sure most of you are aware of this in some form or another kind of blue took those modal experiments and developed them fully each track on this album is based on a mode of it the band working around it sometimes each track on this album has been referred to as a modal sketch this is the furthest Mouse had ever been away from bebop and it marks a firm line in the sand with what bebop sounded like and what modal jazz could achieve lyrical impressionistic music Mars wanted to evoke the feeling he had as a child walking past churches in Arkansas hearing the gospel music flooding out of the doors this quote is insane everything was a first take which indicates the level everyone was playing on it was beautiful first take for one of the most important albums to have ever existed how is that even possible speaking of the band we have a slight modification to the sextet so we still have caliber john coltrane on on horns we have we still have Paul Chambers on double bass but Philly Joe Jones gone replaced by Jimmy Cobb and red garland replaced by the great Bill Evans miles brought in these modal sketches to the studio and and all the musicians had to play him within these restrictions or confines that miles had set out and this restriction it anchors the mood of each piece and stops musicians from ricocheting off into the usuals of bebop improvisational soup it means that the tone of this album from start to finish is retained that that laid-back mood is always there and this is why this this record is considered such a masterpiece because the mood that it establishes is second to none play anyone so what and I'm pretty sure they will recognize that Paul Chambers double bass line but everyone knows that the result of using this modal system means each track gradually shifts but instead of shifting instrument by instrument the entire track and every single sound within it shits together in situ completely in step with one another it's a legitimate marvel that's six people all with different brains could come together to create something that's so singularly exquisite and also in one take speaking of all Blues the quiet agitation in Bill Evans piano PI's such a subtle way of building intrigue for the horns to work over the shimmering piano sound and then you have Mars as Harman muted horn which it builds this melancholic world that you just want to get lost in over and over again and it never tires masterpiece obviously you don't need me to tell you that it just is and that's it for part one you stay subscribed if you want to watch part two we'll be going from sketches of Spain all the way to Martha's death so we still have another half a discography to cover I hope you've enjoyed following this journey of the Miles Davis's life well I hope you get stuck in to the books that I've mentioned all the records I've talked about because there is just there's so much to get into here I can't do it all just this on a video but I hope I peak your interest in him as an artist thank you for being here and supporting this channel we it's a genuine pleasure for me to be here doing this again please join me on the deep cast this Court on Tuesday at 10:00 p.m. GMT to listen to Miles Davis's porgy and bess we're going to be kicking up these these listening parties on the discord every week after each video so please come and join us so we have a lot of discussion and have a lot of fun and maybe you'll make some friends and that's it see you next week [Music] you [Music]

Channel: deep cuts

Views: 77,479

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Id: sDNbTxbncLs

Length: 53min 32sec (3212 seconds)

Published: Mon Dec 09 2019