An essential collection of early Miles Davis, from when he was newly cleaned-up and sounding fresh and vital. This album paired two earlier 10" mini-LPs, recorded at two sessions in April 1954 with slightly different lineups. The first two sextet tracks are bold, confident settings-out of his hard bop stall that would lead to milestone albums like, er, Milestones. The title track might have been taken at increasingly breakneck speeds in concert, but here's it's at a perfect swagger, leaving the fast tempos for Dizzy Gillespie's Blue & Boogie.
The three quintet tracks from the other EP are both a throwback to cool jazz and a sign of things to come in Miles' mellower records. The trumpet mute goes in, and an absolute Miles classic, Solar, is first up before the group relax into two great standards. Early Miles Davis, just before the First Great Quintet, doesn't get much better than this.
link
pw: sgtg
Previously posted at SGTG:
Blue Moods
Bags' Groove
Miles Ahead
Sketches Of Spain
On The Corner
Agharta
Much appreciated
ReplyDeleteThanks for this -- and, belatedly, for many other welcome postings over the years.
ReplyDeleteI always enjoy your commentary, informed and cogent and well-written. However, in this case you're misrepresenting the original physical source of the material.
The ten-inch 33-1/3rpm long-playing records on which these tracks originally appeared were neither "mini-LPs" or "EPs." They were not "mini-LPs," a designation that only emerged in the '70s when the 10-inch format made a brief comeback. So that's anachronistic.
And they were not "EPs," which designates a type of 45rpm record -- "extended play," meaning that they crammed about 6 minutes of music per side onto a format that usually held 3 minutes' worth.
When first introduced in 1948, the 10-inch LP held about 15 minutes' worth of sound per side, the 12-inch LP about 25.
Record companies considered the 12-inch format more suitable for symphonies, operas, and other long-form classical music, which could be presented with far fewer interruptions (or none, depending on the score's length) than the preceding 78rpm format enabled. They used the 10-inch format for shorter classical pieces and pop music (including jazz, like these Davis sessions, but also folk and blues). In the mid-'50s they abandoned the 10-inch format entirely, and 12-inch became the standard.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LP_record
Spot on - and not sure how I managed to forget all the mini-LP history that I read up on previously ;) [see middle para of the Blue Moods review.]
DeleteHappy to be corrected here. I love how the evolving technology of shellac/vinyl/10"/12" had such an interesting influence on the development of jazz. Davis and Ellington in particular absolutely grabbed each bleeding-edge development with both hands.