Miles ’56 at 70
A Special Sunday with Miles & Co
In 1956 Miles Davis had signed with Columbia and still owed records to Prestige. Columbia could record him in the meantime but could not release anything until the Prestige contract was done. So Miles took his quintet out to Rudy Van Gelder’s studio in Hackensack and paid off the debt in two days. The band went in on May 11th and again on October 26th, and recorded tune after tune, nearly all of them in a single take.
May 11th alone gave Prestige fourteen tracks. The label then spread the year across six LPs released between 1956 and 1961. The two marathons became Cookin’, Relaxin’, Workin’ and Steamin’, the March date went onto Collectors’ Items, and one ballad ended up on a different record altogether. By the time Steamin’ reached the shops in 1961, Coltrane had made Giant Steps and left the band.
Craft Recordings has put the year back in order. Miles ’56: The Prestige Recordings runs both marathons by date across four LPs, and it starts two months earlier, with a March 16th session that has Sonny Rollins in the band. On Sunday, October 18th, eight days before the second marathon turns seventy, we’re playing all eight sides.
Off the original Prestige tapes, cut by Kevin Gray
Craft went back to the original analog tapes and had them transferred and restored by Plangent Processes. Paul Blakemore did the remastering and Kevin Gray cut the lacquers at Cohearent Audio. The records are 180-gram, the box is a limited run, and the booklet carries a new essay by Ashley Kahn alongside track notes by Dan Morgenstern.
It came out in June for Miles’s centennial. He was born on May 26th, 1926. Most people own this music as the four original albums, which are fine records. But Prestige assembled them after the fact, and three of the four mix the two days. We would rather hear 1956 the way the box lays it out, one session after the next.
Product images courtesy of Craft Recordings.
Brubeck revisited
The quintet was Miles, John Coltrane on tenor, Red Garland on piano, Paul Chambers on bass and Philly Joe Jones on drums. It had been together less than a year when it walked into Hackensack in May, and Coltrane was twenty-nine.
The March date is a different group: Sonny Rollins on tenor, Tommy Flanagan on piano, Chambers again on bass and Art Taylor on drums. Its three tunes first came out that December on Collectors’ Items. Side A ends by setting its “In Your Own Sweet Way” against the quintet’s from May 11th, so you hear Dave Brubeck’s tune twice, eight weeks apart, once with Rollins and once with Coltrane. It is the clearest case in the box for playing the year in order.
“’Round Midnight” is the Prestige track the four albums left out
Everything the quintet put on Cookin’, Relaxin’, Workin’ and Steamin’ is here, re-sorted by date. So is one track that never sat with them. The band cut “’Round Midnight” on October 26th, and Prestige released it on a different record, Miles Davis and the Modern Jazz Giants. In the box it opens side F, straight after “Well, You Needn’t” closes side E.
The fast tunes get quoted most. The ballads are the better reason to sit through eight sides. Side D has two of them back to back, “It Never Entered My Mind” and “When I Fall in Love.”
The Prestige box goes on when the doors open
We open at 3:00 PM on Sundays and start side A shortly after. Then we play through to side H, with the flips a box set forces on you. Twenty-nine tracks take most of the afternoon. Our copies of Cookin’, Relaxin’, Workin’ and Steamin’ stay on the shelf for this one, since the box holds the same performances. Our sound system was built for records like these, and a jazz kissa is a room where you come to hear them rather than talk over them.
Moodsville, in September, was our last afternoon of Prestige reissues.
Sunday, October 18th
Doors at 3:00 PM, with the box starting shortly after. Free and open to the public, typically 21+. 667 Franklin Avenue, Crown Heights.
Our upcoming listings have the rest of the season, and Verve Mondays runs the next night.
Come listen
667 Franklin Avenue · Crown Heights, Brooklyn
No cover. No reservations required but always encouraged.
