Rock Salted

Miles Davis – Milestones…… Columbia CL 1193 (1958)

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This is an album I never quite understood, at least until recently.  Future Davis sideman Tony Williams loved it; I think he said it was a favorite.  Others love it too.  But why?  For the most part, it’s fairly straightforward hard bop. I guess, in retrospect, the late 1950s weren’t exactly a fertile time for jazz music (other than for the likes of Sun Ra, Cecil Taylor and Ornette Coleman, that is, none of whom achieved any meaningful commercial success).  It was generally a low point.  Sure, there were some good albums that appeared at that time, but most players were still milking either hard bop or cool styles for all they were worth.  The free players who hit big in the sixties either hadn’t fully developed their styles yet, or, more importantly, hadn’t found many recording or performance opportunities yet. Coltrane is here.  Yet Coltrane was a good but unremarkable player in Davis’ first great quintet.  He is starting to show signs of what he achieved on early albums like Giant Steps, but it was a few years after Milestones that Coltrane really became Coltrane.

What occurred to me recently was that this album represents and complacency and bourgeois aspirations of Miles and his associates.  While the rollicking “Two Bass Hit” features a fun and playful riff, most of the material here relies on up-tempo rhythms to mask simplistic and thin ideas.  Above all this music presents itself as the pinnacle of something — rather than, as history would later prove it to be, an anachronistic holdover from the be-bop era, sustained only by the suppression of the likes of Ornette Coleman.  Put another way, this music presents a linear view of history as a straight march of progress in a particular direction, and obscures how it really is music that participates in a system of institutional/tribal power hierarchies.  When Miles landed at Columbia Records, he was merely promoted within a fixed universe of possibilities.  To put this criticism in a more substantive context, this is music still clinging to the model of Louis Armstrong and Charlie Parker, in which a black man like Miles was trying to prove himself to be talented, within an established institutional framework (similar to the “Talented Tenth” theory), whereas in the future, after the legal end of the Jim Crow era in America, there would be a great recognition that individual accomplishment within the existing system wasn’t enough — the whole system needed to be changed.  Of course, eventually Miles got bored with this, and his boredom led to much better things that did challenge the whole system.

Miles Davis – ‘Round About Midnight  Columbia CL 949 (1957)

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Miles’ first album for Columbia Records is a winner.  While not quite as inspired as his last recordings for Prestige, which included the excellent Cookin’, Relaxin’ and Workin’ discs that for contractual reasons were released only later, this is a mere step behind them, and benefits from more high fidelity recording technology.  The great advantage of the Prestige sessions is that they sound like those of a band that has nothing to lose and everything to gain from superb, heartfelt performances that follow their own muse.  By contrast, ‘Round About Midnight sound more like the work of a talented band seeking to prove that the performers are worthy of the “big time”, so they show more deference.  Anyway, this remains a very worthy collection of hard bop jazz — and album jacket covers hardly get cooler than this one.

The Miles Davis Quintet – Relaxin’ With the Miles Davis Quintet Prestige PRLP 7129 (1958)

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Relaxin’ With the Miles Davis Quintet is an unlikely candidate to be one of Davis’s best albums.  But it ends up being precisely that.  It was drawn from two 1956 recording sessions that spawned a total of four With the Miles Davis Quintet albums made to fulfill a recording contract as Davis jumped to a major label (and kicked off one of the most productive and inspired artist-label relationships, well, ever).  There are a few people who rate Cookin’ With the Miles Davis Quintet as the best.  But, to put it bluntly, they are wrong!  Cookin’ blasts through more up-tempo numbers, but lacks the all-star firepower of Bags Groove.

This album is rooted in the hard bop tradition, but with a more laid-back and sophisticated demeanor.  Yet it doesn’t ever truly venture into “cool jazz” territory.  Relaxin’ is basically a perfect title for it.  This is just exceptionally cool (read: hip) music.

The record label Prestige had a somewhat ignoble history and shady reputation.  Its publishing policies were unfavorable to musician songwriters, so most Prestige albums feature all standards.  The label also did not pay for rehearsals, so their albums leaned toward a “live in the studio” approach.  Davis’ 1956 Prestige sessions lack nothing despite the absence of rehearsals.  They featured Davis’ working group and they played these songs with a familiarity and solid improvisational rapport.

This band became known as Miles’ “first great quintet”.  The rhythm section of “Philly” Joe Jones (d), Paul Chambers (b), and Red Garland (p) was the very definition of “solid”.  There is no egocentric showiness.  They just show up and play these songs like motherfuckers.  Notably, Garland had a distinctive style that pared back the chord blocking and focused on more minimal and melodic lines, closer to the wind instruments.

John Coltrane (ts) is here, and of his early recordings as a sideman this is one that more than most points toward what he achieved later in his solo career.  That is to say that he has an unobtrusive confidence and sense of wonder in his playing that is wonderfully effective, even if he plays merely a tangential role here and those qualities are just starting to peek out.

Miles, for his part, plays decisively while retaining a sensitive touch.  His Harmon (wah-wah) mute, played stemless, features prominently.  Davis always had a fiery, stubborn attitude, subdued somewhat by an introverted personality.  He channels all that raging energy into this batch of songs in a way that displays an absolute mastery of conventional devices and an impeccable sensitivity to tone/mood.  Perhaps it was the context of recording songs in a large volume that gave Miles the chance to playing without having to prove anything to anybody — otherwise something that seemed like a major preoccupation of his in his early career.

Basically, if the opener “If I Were a Bell” grabs you, get ready for a whole album with much the same effect.  Frankly, all but the album Steamin’ from these sessions are great albums — and even that lesser one is good enough.  For what it is worth, this reviewer reaches for Relaxin’ far more than any other pre-1960s Davis album.  Maybe you will too.