admin

Miles Davis – Quiet Nights (1964) [Reissue 2000]
PS3 Rip | SACD ISO | DSD64 2.0 > 1-bit/2.8224 MHz | 39:24 minutes | Scans included | 1,28 GB
or FLAC(converted with foobar2000 to tracks) 24bit/88,2 kHz | Full Scans included | 860 MB

Miles Davis’ final official collaboration with arranger Gil Evans resulted in their weakest project. There were only 27 minutes of music on the original Quiet Nights LP, and six minutes were taken up by a quintet performance of “Summer Night.” The six remaining tracks are enjoyable enough (highlighted by “Once Upon a Summertime” and “Corcovado”), but rather brief, making one wonder why Evans could not have been persuaded to write more material. The 1997 CD reissue adds “The Time of the Barracudas” (which clocks in at almost 13 minutes), and was not released until the 1996 Complete Miles Davis/Gil Evans box set. The latter is an interesting but not too substantial mini-suite written for a stage play that features the late 1963 Miles Davis Quintet joined by four brass, three woodwinds, and a harp. Overall, this CD has its moments of interest, but it has an incomplete feel and is not too essential.

(more…)

Miles Davis – Milestones (1958) [MFSL Remaster 2012]
PS3 Rip | ISO | SACD DSD64 2.0 > 1-bit/2.8224 MHz | 48:25 minutes | Scans included | 1,94 GB
or FLAC(converted with foobar2000 to tracks) 24bit/88,2 kHz | Scans included | 726 MB
Monoural | Mobile Fidelity Sound Lab # UDSACD 2084

What is immediately noticeable upon listening to this delicately and superbly remastered version of Miles Davis classic first — and only — album with his original sextet is how deep the blues presence is on it. Though it is true that the album’s title cut is rightfully credited with introducing modalism into jazz, and defining Davis’ music for years to come, it is the sole selection of its kind on the record. The rest is all blues in any flavor you wish you call your own. For starters, there’s the steaming bebop blues of “Dr. Jackie” — recorded in 1955 for a Prestige session with Jackie McLean. Davis is still in his role as a trumpet master, showing a muscularity of tone that reveals something more akin to Roy Eldridge or Louis Armstrong than Dizzy or Fats Navarro. The tempo is furious as all the members of the sextet solo except for Jones. The saxophonists trade choruses and come off sounding like mirrored images of one another in the slower, post-bop blues that is “Sid’s Ahead.” With a slippery melody line that quotes two harmonic lines from early New Orleans-styled blues, Davis drives the band into the rhythm section’s garage. It’s Coltrane first with his stuttered, angular lines, hiccuping halfway through the interval before continuing on with a squeak here and the slightest squawk there. Next up is Davis, blowing fluid and straightened lines, ribbons through the rhythm section’s center as Red Garland lays out and leaves it to Paul Chambers and Philly Joe Jones to provide the earnest, time-keeping 4/4 that Davis sidles to in the tune. When Adderley solos, all best are off as he plays as pure a blues as he was capable at the time. Nonetheless, there are the long lines of slurred notes, smattered against Garland’s harmonies and he slips into quoting “Skip to my Lou” before knotting it back down to the basics and even then not for long. Coltrane was already exploring the edges of mode and harmony; he used an intervallic invention in the choruses to juxtapose his solo against the rhythm section and it worked — but it must have made Davis raise an eyebrow. Chambers’ solo is as tasteful and as breezy and free as only he could be. His contrapuntal soloing rides the rhythm out, Garland striding along quietly until the tune returns.

(more…)