If it’s nearly impossible to define jazz, Miles Davis, perhaps inadvertently, gave it a shot in 1956. The context was mundane: His band was fulfilling Davis’ obligations to Prestige, recording several sides’ worth of music that the indie would release mostly over four albums—Cookin’, Relaxin’, Workin’, and Steamin’—while the trumpeter moved on to a bigger deal and wider audience at Columbia. Those recordings, plus another session featuring Sonny Rollins in John Coltrane’s place on saxophone, are chronicled in a new box set from Craft recordings, assembled to celebrate Davis’ centennial.
In the course of those two tossed-off sessions, Davis and his all-star quintet distilled everything that came before them and much of what would come after; clairvoyance as the most unbelievably chic dinner party music. As a contemporary writer for the San Francisco Examiner put it, listening to these albums, “you will come very close to having solved the unspoken mystery of how ‘swinging’ is really achieved.”
What created the album’s alchemy is more obvious in retrospect. Start with the two names most instantly synonymous with the genre: Miles Davis and John Coltrane. Add in a rhythm section so definitive it would come to be known as “the rhythm section”: bluesy, eloquent pianist Red Garland, bass prodigy Paul Chambers (he was 20 when he joined Davis’ band in 1955), and groove architect Philly Joe Jones. That ensemble, retrospectively named Davis’ “first great quintet,” spent weeks and weeks on the road building chemistry in little clubs across the country—especially the iconic Café Bohemia in Greenwich Village, where the band was in residence when they recorded both those May 26 and October 11, 1956 sessions at Rudy Van Gelder’s Hackensack studio. “We’re not trying to prove anything,” Davis told Tan magazine that fall. “All we want to do is blow.”
The resulting music, almost entirely recorded in first takes, is instantly, casually superlative (a few previously released false-start tracks are omitted from the box set; “The Theme,” a Davis original, is the only composition that received two full takes, both included here). In a moment when the genre was bursting with innovators, pushing at its seams from all sides—jubilant, gospel-fiery soul-jazz; the first dissonant strains of free jazz; dizzyingly ambitious big bands; calculated cool—this ensemble seemed to lay back, in tempo and affect. They perform bebop standards like “Woody N’You” and “Salt Peanuts”—Davis’ apprenticeship with Charlie Parker shining through—with reverent fluency, creating a controlled burn within the blistering tunes. The ballads, though, are where the trumpeter puts on his Harmon mute and things turn magical.
“It Never Entered My Mind” and its intoxicating opening arpeggios from Garland might be the best-known track of these sessions, the stuff of a million “cozy jazz” playlists for those who might soundtrack the mundane with transcendence. The rhythm section is downright molten, an understated, earthy sway beneath Davis’ soaring melodies. It is disarming in its confidence (they had clearly been refining the arrangement for a while, if live recordings from that year are any indication) and clarity; musicians spend lifetimes trying to be this succinct (yes, yes, “it’s about the notes you don’t play”—did Davis actually say it? Who knows!). “My Funny Valentine,” “When I Fall in Love,” and “You’re My Everything” (“Play some block chords, Red,” Davis says, interrupting the introduction of the one recorded take) are similarly rich with a kind of cosmopolitan romance, intimate and airy at once. The session included newer compositions from Rollins, Davis, and Theolonious Monk alongside the theoretically hokey showtunes that Davis would help turn into standards. In their hands, “If I Were A Bell” (from Guys and Dolls) and “Surrey With the Fringe on Top” (from Oklahoma!) morph into sprawling, swinging launchpads for Coltrane to refine his sound through endless fluid lines.
There is a warmth and familiarity to these recordings because they are echoed in so much that followed—both explicitly, in the neoclassical movement that Wynton Marsalis would spearhead in the late 20th century, and in the kind of musical baseline that jazzers would return to through every era and experiment. Pick a beloved standard, play the head and then trade some choruses over a swinging ride cymbal and walking bass line—maybe you'll sound like a giant. As a result, the music is the opposite of intimidating, the way icons like Davis and Coltrane can sometimes seem and sound at first glance. Crowd-pleasing, even, given that this music was honed in front of crowds, or at least in little, dimly-lit clubs full of drink and smoke and probably less glamour than we imagine looking back. In this quintet’s hands, though, they sound like a place you’d like to live forever.
