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Posts tagged ‘Miles Davis’

Jan 1

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Miles: back to mono

Miles in MonoLike a fool, I gave myself a Christmas present. After all, I could hardly justify asking anyone else to buy Miles Davis: The Original Mono Recordings for me. It’s just too much of a record-company scam. But I’m enough of an idiot to fall for it. Which is exactly what they’re counting on.

The trouble is that Miles Davis isn’t around any more. I spent around 30 years buying his records when he was alive, and more than 20 years later it’s still hard to get out of the habit. So every time they repackage something artfully enough, I open my wallet. It’s the nearest thing to having him back again.

And I can’t say I regret holding in my hand the black and white box containing The Original Mono Recordings, even though the nine albums in the package contain not a single note of music that I don’t already own (and in the case of several of the albums, several times over in marginally different forms). The albums included are Round About Midnight, Miles Ahead, Milestones, Jazz Track (including the Lift to the Scaffold soundtrack), Porgy and Bess, Kind of Blue, Sketches of Spain, Someday My Prince Will Come and Miles and Monk at Newport, recorded between 1957 and 1961, and all presented in card sleeves with miniaturised versions of their original US artwork. At the very least, it’s an excuse to listen again to the products of this phenomenally fertile and career-defining period.

The remastering engineer, Mark Wilder, talks in the accompanying booklet of how he “added a little more bass and mid-range” to Miles Ahead, “as well as a little high-treble equalisation to create air around the instruments,” and used a tube compressor to “tone down the treble a little” on Someday My Prince Will Come. Of course they sounded fine to most of us in their original monaural vinyl incarnations, thanks to the particular properties of Columbia’s 30th Street studio and the sensitive ears of the engineers, such as Fred Plaut and Harold Chapman, who worked there but go uncredited in this repackage.

You can listen to these “restored” versions with enormous pleasure, but direct comparisons reveal evidence not always supporting the implication behind the claim of George Avakian, Miles’s first producer at Columbia, that “mono has always been truer to the studio sound and the original intent”. When I flip back and forth between the mono and stereo versions of “Summertime”, a particular favourite from Porgy and Bess, it’s impossible not to notice how the stereophonic picture clarifies the individual voices in Evans’s horn arrangement behind Miles, while in mono they coalesce into a more recessed and undifferentiated blur of subdued colour. Maybe the latter effect is what the arranger had in mind, but somehow I doubt it. On the other hand, I much prefer the sound of Davis’s flugelhorn in the new mono versions of “Springsville” and “Blues for Pablo” from Miles Ahead: it’s more rounded, not so brightly burnished by the studio EQ, and somehow truer to itself.

These matters are less of a consideration when it comes to the combo albums, where mix and balance are more straightforward, although I’ve never been sure whether I prefer to hear “Milestones” — probably my favourite piece of music ever, when all is said and done — with all the instruments separated and laid out in a panorama, every detail highlighted, or with the tighter aural focus of the version in which I learnt to love it, and which still seems perfectly suited to its sense of forward movement.

Just in terms of the music, the album that interests me most at the moment is Someday My Prince Will Come, always seen as a transitional affair in terms of Davis’s career. Perhaps feeling that his basic 1961 working quintet with Hank Mobley on tenor was not stimulating enough, Miles invited John Coltrane back to play on two of the album’s six pieces, both in 3/4, a metre in which Coltrane was deeply involved with his own quartet: the title track (where he solos after Miles, Mobley and Wynton Kelly, providing the piece with its climax), and the modal, Spanish-tinged “Teo”, on which his long solo is an absolute beauty. Davis’s own playing is luminous and inventive thoroughout, particularly on “Teo” and the ballads: “Old Folks”, “Drad-Dog” and “I Thought About You”.

It’s wonderful to listen closely to this music again. And I certainly don’t want to do Mr Wilder — or the reissue producer, Steve Berkowitz — a disservice. Maybe their diligence has made it a little easier, for instance, to appreciate the genius of Paul Chambers on these marvellous recordings, to which the great bassist, with his lovely tone, impeccable note selection and peerless swing, contributed so much. And if that’s so, perhaps we can say the whole project was worthwhile.

* The photograph of Miles Davis (playing flugelhorn) was taken by Don Hunstein during the Miles Ahead sessions and appears in the booklet accompanying The Original Mono Recordings (Columbia/Legacy).

Mar 5

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One night in Berlin

Miles in BerlinAt the start of the film of the Berlin concert which forms a bonus DVD to three audio CDs of the recently released Miles Davis Quintet Live in Europe 1969 set, you can’t help being struck by the impassive demeanour of the musicians as they are announced, one by one, to the audience. Jack DeJohnette doesn’t even look up as he fiddles with the placement of a microphone boom over one of his cymbals. Dave Holland, the young Englishman, is expressionless as he adjusts his double bass. Chick Corea reaches out his left hand to twist a knob above the keyboard of his Fender-Rhodes piano. Wayne Shorter licks his mouthpiece and stares into the middle distance. Meanwhile Miles has already prowled on to the stage, clearly not caring that the spontaneous wave of applause for his arrival has disrupted the MC’s scene-setting introductions. From none of the musicians comes even the tiniest acknowledgement of the audience’s welcome. This is how far the influence of Miles’s own super-cool on-stage deportment had spread, to men a generation younger than him (and, in the case of Corea and Holland, with naturally outgoing temperaments); he, in turn, is taking his wardrobe cues from them.

None of that stops it being a great concert, of course — or half a concert, in fact, since Miles’s group were sharing the bill at that night’s concert with Stan Kenton. You might think it an unlikely combination, even by the eclectic standards of the Berliner Jazztage, and that was how the 2,400-strong audience saw it, too. I remember half of them vociferously expressing their dissatisfaction with Kenton’s set, while those who acclaimed Kenton were clearly disconcerted by what Miles was up to (although their presence can be detected in the film only in the shot of some listeners frowning and shaking their heads as the camera scans the audience while the band leaves the stage). This intolerance was typical of Berlin audiences of the time and seemed particularly impolite since the whole festival, including that evening’s performances, had been dedicated in advance to Duke Ellington, who was due to appear at the same venue the following night in a concert scheduled in celebration of his 70th birthday.

It was my first exposure to Miles in person, and I certainly wasn’t disappointed. Urged on by sidemen who were leading him to the frontier of free jazz, he was spellbinding. Less than a year later, as he veered away from freedom towards an engagement with funk, he would be wanting his musicians to anchor the beat in a much more explicit way. But this was enthralling, a  freewheeling post-In a Silent Way, pre-Bitches Brew journey into abstraction, with a gorgeously oblique version of “I Fall in Love Too Easily” to seduce even those scandalised by the black shirt, trousers and leather waistcoat and the orange and gold scarf in which he took the stage, an outfit to match his black and orange trumpet.

Poor Kenton suffered far worse from the hecklers. He was booed even before he started, and later confessed that the experience had given him a sleepless night. Conducting the specially assembled Berlin Dream Band, a 19-strong multinational emsemble which included the trumpeter Carmell Jones, the trombonists Ake Persson and Jiggs Whigham and the alto saxophonist Leo Wright, he ran through a series of his best known pieces: “Artistry in Rhythm”, “Intermission Riff”, “The Peanut Vendor” and so on. Towards the end, however, he gestured the band to stand down as he performed his personal homage to Ellington, a five-minute variation on “Take the ‘A’ Train” delivered with such sincerity of emotion that the dissenters were temporarily silenced.

From the point of view of the audience’s divided reaction, it was one of the most bizarre concerts I’ve ever attended. The festival’s director, the late Jo Berendt, a man of broad vision and catholic taste, was intensely embarrassed. The following night, however, Ellington took the stage at the head of a band including Cootie Williams, Lawrence Brown, Johnny Hodges, Paul Gonsalves and Harry Carney, and harmony was restored.

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