‘I always had a curiosity about trying new things in music. A new sound, another way to do something.’1
Miles Davis
In 1947, Irene Birth had joined Miles in New York, bringing with her Cheryl, now three years old, and baby Gregory. The presence of his family may have offered some sense of stability and continuity, but April that year also brought the death of Freddie Webster from some contaminated heroin. Webster, who was just thirty years old, had been like an elder brother to Miles, who felt the loss deeply. The death of someone so close to him, as a result of drug addiction, was an ominous warning. Miles, however, was making such progress in terms of his burgeoning identity as a player and bandleader that he was absorbed in the present rather than looking to the future.
Throughout 1947, Miles had gradually expunged most of the clichés of bebop from his trumpet style, and had begun to reveal an approach which owed a debt to Lester Young. During the 1930s, Young’s tenor sax style had introduced a new element into jazz: a smaller, lighter sound, and a more delicate, introspective quality. He brought to artistic fruition qualities he had found in two white musicians of the 1920s – cornettist Bix Beiderbecke and saxophonist Frank Trumbauer. When Beiderbecke came on the scene, the trumpet was the dominant instrument of jazz, and Louis Armstrong, a man who phrased with classic grandeur, its prime exponent. Bix’s palette was much smaller: he confined himself to the middle register of the instrument, but compensated for this by his burnished, singing tone, and the intensity of his lyricism. There can be no doubt that when Miles Davis abandoned the Gillespie approach to the trumpet and began confining himself to the middle register and showing a more delicate melodic flair, he was being influenced – albeit indirectly, through Lester Young – by Bix Beiderbecke.
By 1948, there was a growing audience for bebop, and in New York the revolution became the new establishment and imitators abounded everywhere. Miles and other musicians at the centre of the movement were beginning to look round for some new areas to explore. At the same time, the focal point of the jazz scene was moving away from 52nd Street, which was becoming an area of strip-joints and restaurants. Instead, the music was now being heard in the more reputable area of Broadway, and in larger clubs such as the Royal Roost where patrons were not browbeaten into drinking alcohol at high prices but, for the price of admission, could simply sit and listen to the music. Just before Miles left Charlie Parker’s quintet, the group made a broadcast from the Roost and were heard by a much wider audience. It was at the Roost, too, that Miles first led his own groups after leaving Parker.
Meanwhile, he had been branching out restlessly, playing on his own as a soloist and with other musicians around New York. He worked with saxophonist Sonny Rollins on several occasions, becoming firm friends with him. Miles also gigged with bassist Oscar Pettiford, and may well have played with John Coltrane around this time. But the most important event that year was his renewed association with the composer/arranger Gil Evans. This relationship between the black, academy-trained, improvising musician, and the white, self-taught composer, ripened into a friendship that was to endure for decades and that produced, in the later 1950s, some of the finest orchestral music of the century.
In 1948, Miles was still only twenty-two and unsure of himself, even though he’d achieved a certain amount of success and recognition. On the other hand, Evans was thirty-six and full of knowledge and musical wisdom acquired empirically over the years. He was the perfect father figure for Miles at the time, because he knew and understood ‘straight’ music but also because he had a profound understanding and appreciation of the great jazz improvisers. The apparently irreconcilable worlds of formal composition and of improvisation were united naturally and easily in Gil Evans’s concept of music. Miles has said of him: ‘He is as well versed in classical music in general as Leonard Bernstein. And what the classical guys don’t know is what Gil knows.’2
Gil Evans was born in Canada of Australian parentage, and had no formal musical training at all. When he was fourteen, he heard some Louis Armstrong records that inspired him to begin playing the piano and teaching himself music. In 1941, he became the principal arranger of the Claude Thornhill Orchestra, which was a white ‘society’ band. Thornhill, himself an arranger, had known and worked with Evans during the 1930s, and both men had been staff arrangers for Bob Hope’s radio programme. Thornhill, an excellent pianist with a beautiful touch, was the first dance band leader to use French horns and to use the tuba as part of the ensemble colour rather than as a rhythm instrument, and his orchestra’s sound was, for the most part, soft, dense and static. Gil Evans described the problems it presented:
The sound hung like a cloud. But once this stationary effect, this sound, was created, it was ready to have other things added to it. The sound itself can only hold interest for a certain length of time. Then you have to make certain changes within that sound; you have to make personal use of harmonies, rather than work with traditional ones; there has to be more movement in the melody; more dynamics, more syncopation; speeding up of the rhythms. For me, I had to make those changes . . . I did not create the sound; Claude did.3
Evans plays down his own part in all this with typical modesty. Such honesty and generosity are rare enough anywhere, and it was probably Evans’s own qualities (musical and moral), as much as anything else, that drew so many of the most gifted young white musicians towards Thornhill’s band. It was Gil who persuaded baritone saxophonist Gerry Mulligan to join it and to write arrangements for it. Other notable members were trumpeters Red Rodney and John Carisi (who also arranged), and the brilliant young alto saxophonist Lee Konitz. Gerry Mulligan who, like Konitz, was a year younger than Miles, recalls: ‘Lee joined Claude’s band in Chicago and knocked us all out (including Bird) with his originality.’4 Konitz had an exceptionally soft and fluid approach to the alto, with a smooth, clear, almost diaphanous sound. It was a saxophone style without vibrato and with no blues inflexions at all . . . a ‘white’ sound which suited the non-vibrato sound of the Thornhill band. Konitz’s style was in every way the antithesis of Parker’s. The pair of them had perhaps only two things in common: the instrument they played and the great originality of their improvisations. Miles liked them both: ‘Thornhill had the greatest band, the one with Lee Konitz, during these modern times. The one exception was the Billy Eckstine band with Bird.’5
During this period, Parker was actually sharing Gil Evans’s room, and dropping in for a quick nap between his club sessions. Evans had arranged two Parker compositions (‘Anthropology’ and ‘Yardbird Suite’) and one of Miles’s tunes (‘Donna Lee’) for Thornhill’s band, and he became the focal point for aspiring young musicians interested in adapting Parker’s ideas to more formal musical settings. There was something spare and ascetic about Evans’s lifestyle at the time, which gave the impression that everything – all intellectual and sensuous experience – was subordinated to the experience of music. He was living in a one-room basement apartment on West 55th Street, behind a Chinese laundry, and pianist/composer George Russell has described the scene and the informal seminars which took place there:
A very big bed took up a lot of the place; there was one big lamp, and a cat named Becky. The linoleum was battered, and there was a little court outside. Inside, it was always very dark. The feeling of the room was timelessness. Whenever you got there, you wouldn’t care about conditions outside. You couldn’t tell whether it was day or night, summer or winter, and it didn’t matter. At all hours, the place was loaded with people who came in and out. Mulligan, though, was there all the time . . . Gil, who loved musical companionship, was the mother hen – the haven in the storm. He was gentle, wise, profound, and extremely perceptive, and he always seemed to have a comforting answer for any kind of problem. He appeared to have no bitterness . . . Gil was . . . one of the strong personalities in written jazz, and I’m sure he influenced all of us.6
By the middle and later 1940s, several big bands had already adapted and used the ideas of bebop. Perhaps the most famous were Dizzy Gillespie’s big band and those of Woody Herman and Stan Kenton. For the most part, however, these had concentrated on one side of Parker’s duality – the furiously rhythmic and aggressive aspect. Gil Evans and Gerry Mulligan, in their discussions during the winter of 1947, seemed more interested in exploring Parker’s other side, which had links with Lester Young – a gentler and more contemplative form of expression. They were also looking for a much more organic relationship between the orchestral score and the role of the various soloists. Evans and Mulligan worked out what they thought was the smallest number of instruments which could express the harmonic and tonal range of the Thornhill outfit, and wanted to get together a good little rehearsal band. Like so many musical happenings in America, this one was modest in its aims, was born from the enthusiasm of a few little-known individuals, and moved out of the obscure rehearsal rooms to influence the thinking of musicians all over the world.
Miles Davis had been thinking along parallel lines. He too was ready for change after the frenetic excesses of bebop, and drew a characteristic analogy: ‘It’s just like clothes. All of a sudden you decide you don’t have to wear spats and a flower up here, you know? You wear the flower and leave off the spats, and then pretty soon you leave off both of them . . .’7 Just as Evans and Mulligan were paring down instrumentation to the minimum, so Miles was purging his own trumpet style of excess. This quality of economy he recognized and admired in Gil Evans: ‘Gil can use four instruments where other arrangers need eight.’ So Miles began going round to Evans’s place, taking part in the discussions and meeting new faces:
I always wanted to play with a light sound, because I could think better when I played that way . . . I wanted Sonny Stitt and those nine pieces, but Sonny was working someplace, and Gerry [Mulligan] said get Lee [Konitz] because he has a light sound too. And Gerry was playing his baritone – in fact, I didn’t expect him to play. I didn’t know Gerry until I went down to Gil’s house and he was there. We wanted John Simmons because he wanted everything to be light, but Gil said Joe Shulman could play real light . . . But that whole thing started out as an experiment.8
Miles also wrote to the pianist and composer John Lewis, who was in Paris at the time, and asked him to write something for the line-up. Lewis was at home with both musical worlds. He had spent fifteen of his first twenty-two years in extensive music studies, and was deeply interested in the possibilities of integrating elements of classical music into jazz.
By mid-1948, external events hastened the genesis of this nine-piece band (trumpet, trombone, French horn, tuba, alto sax, baritone sax, piano, bass and drums). The second recording ban of the 1940s had begun on 30 December 1947 – hence Parker’s spate of recording sessions done that autumn and winter to beat the ban. The first recording ban of the decade had lasted from August 1942 until some time in 1944 – depending on when the various record companies signed the agreement with the American Federation of Musicians. The second ban, which ran throughout 1948, ending on 15 December, had powerful short- and long-term effects on jazz. It gave the coup de grâce to big bands (even Count Basie had to use a small group after the end of 1949), and because the ban did not extend to singers, it greatly increased the public’s taste for vocal music. This dealt a very hard blow to jazz and it was not until the late 1950s that the situation improved much. Meanwhile, a few small recording companies had defied the ban, which enabled Miles to record twice with Parker during the year. Miles also recorded with a septet led by Coleman Hawkins some time in 1948. Apart from these isolated exceptions, recording was not possible during the whole of that year. Claude Thornhill’s band was also hit by the slump, and when it disbanded for a while, Gil Evans took the opportunity to leave it for good. This meant that by the middle of 1948, Evans and all the gifted young musicians from Thornhill’s band were spoiling for something to absorb their energies.
During the summer, Miles had a fairly long residency at the Royal Roost, leading a band that included at various times Parker, trombonist Kai Winding, and tenor saxophonist Allan Eager. The promoter, Monte Kay, who along with disc jockey Symphony Sid Torin booked groups into the Roost, offered Miles a two-week engagement there with the nine-piece in September. With this prospect, rehearsals began in earnest.
It was both natural and logical that Miles should be the leader of the band, even though it had been born out of collective discussions. Miles had a ‘name’ and was a musician with outstanding potential; also, his organizing abilities were vital to the whole project. Mulligan comments: ‘He took the initiative and put the theories to work. He called the rehearsals, hired the halls, called the players, and generally cracked the whip . . . Miles dominated the band completely; the whole nature of the interpretation was his . . .’9 In a BBC Radio 3 interview, Mulligan also explained to jazz critic Charles Fox:
Left to our own devices, Gil, John Carisi and I would probably have procrastinated and maybe never gotten the rehearsals together – Miles was the prime mover. But another factor is far more important: thinking of Miles as the lead voice affected the way we all wrote for the band. Stylistically, Miles was the perfect choice. It’s hard to imagine other trumpet players having the same effect on the ensemble. If we’d had a trumpet player that had a more conventional open sound, it wouldn’t have had the same impact on the ensemble. Miles’s melodic approach and lead voice was a particular influence on the ultimate sound of the ensemble.
During the rehearsals, which took place over a period of several weeks in the late summer of 1948, the wisdom and knowledge of Gil Evans, and his musical conceptions, were very important to Miles. Mike Zwerin, who played trombone with the band during the live engagements, points out that, at rehearsals, ‘Miles was pleasant and relaxed but seemed unsure of how to be boss. It was his first time as leader. He relied quite a bit on Evans to give musical instructions to the players.’10 By the time the band was playing in public, however, Mulligan’s description of Miles’s musical dominance was probably correct.
In late August and early September, the band appeared for two weeks at the Royal Roost as a relief unit during a Count Basie engagement. Miles created a precedent by billing the arrangers’ names as well as his own in front of the club. His part of the evening was billed as: ‘Miles Davis Band, Arrangements by Gerry Mulligan, Gil Evans, and John Lewis’. It was the first time any experimental (and virtually unknown) arrangers in jazz, with the exception perhaps of Duke Ellington, had ever received this kind of credit. The nonet recorded a broadcast from the Roost on 4 September, and the personnel of the group was Miles, plus Mike Zwerin (trombone), John ‘Bill’ Barber (tuba), Junior Collins (French horn), Gerry Mulligan (baritone sax), Lee Konitz (alto sax), John Lewis (piano), Al McKibbon (bass), Max Roach (drums), and Kenneth Hagood (vocals). The last named had formerly sung with Dizzy Gillespie and was probably hired as a sop to the public’s penchant for vocals. Later in September, Miles brought the band back for a second residency at the Roost and a second radio broadcast was recorded. Some decades later, nine tracks from these two broadcasts were issued on record. The band failed utterly to interest audiences, however, and its stay at the Roost was not extended. The only other time it worked live occurred the following year when Miles took it into the Clique Club for a short stint. At the Roost in 1948, one or two critics and a few musicians were impressed with the band’s new music. Count Basie, with his typical enthusiasm for the work of good young musicians, was full of praise and was quoted as saying: ‘Those slow things sounded strange and good. I didn’t always know what they were doing, but I listened and liked it.’11
The live recordings taken from air-shots (broadcasts) are less tightly integrated performances than the studio recordings which took place a few months later, because the solo space – particularly that of Miles – is much longer in relationship to the written passages. In a live performance it is, of course, natural for soloists to stretch out more. Although the ensemble sound is fluid and relaxed even on the faster and more boppish pieces, the rhythm section, fired by Max Roach, and with some very muscular chord work from John Lewis, really drives along in the polyrhythmic bebop manner. The relationship of horns to rhythm section is a kind of ‘ice and fire’ situation which creates some marvellous tension. In his solos, Miles veers towards the fire, producing some fast, rhythmically aggressive phrases. Lee Konitz stays cool in all his solos.
These air-shots give the first real indication of just how tough musically and mentally Miles was becoming, and of how complete a musician he was even at that time. For the most part, his trumpet dominates the ensemble sound, dictating the phrasing of passages which are subtle and complex. The trumpet is also exposed because only the alto is anywhere near it in pitch. In such conditions of delicate balance, the lead player must have nerves of steel, for the slightest fluff or wrong note would be clearly audible and mar the whole ensemble sound. Miles is also the main soloist, often having to play the demanding written passages and then go straight into his solo. Even then, he often gets no respite because he has to go straight from the end of his solo into some ensemble passage or bridge to the next soloist. The fact that he does all this in a live session in September 1948, with hardly a falter, is quite remarkable. These air-shots also show how completely the band was ignored at the Royal Roost. There is an audible hubbub of conversation throughout the slower arrangements, and the audience doesn’t even seem to notice when a piece has ended.
With the financial failure of his nine-piece band, Miles was forced once more to work as a soloist and with occasional small ‘pick-up groups. Late in the year, he worked at a club called Soldier Meyers’ in Brooklyn, and then led a group which included Sonny Stitt, Wardell Gray, Bud Powell, Nelson Boyd (bass) and Roy Haynes (drums), at the Orchid Room (the old Onyx) on 52nd Street. Over the Christmas period he appeared at the Clique, which later became Birdland – with Fats Navarro, Lucky Thompson, Dexter Gordon, Kai Winding, Milt Jackson, Bud Powell, Oscar Pettiford and Kenny Clarke, in opposition to a similarly illustrious bill at the Royal Roost. In January 1949, he worked at the Audubon, a small New York jazz room, with Art Blakey and Sonny Rollins.
The recording ban ended in December, and early in 1949, Miles was once more in the studios as a sideman, recording a couple of tracks with the Metronome All Stars. He had made third place in the current Metronome poll which Dizzy had won, with Fats Navarro coming second. Miles also played on a couple of tunes recorded by Tadd Dameron’s band in April. He had been working on and off with Dameron’s band ever since he’d left Parker. But the most important event was the securing of his own personal recording contract for the first time. When the ban ended, two major recording companies. RCA Victor and Capitol, decided to go all out with bebop (or ‘modern’) recording programmes. Capitol signed Miles, Tadd Dameron, singers Babs Gonzales and Dave Lambert, pianist Lennie Tristano and clarinettist Buddy DeFranco. The last two had also won places in the Metronome poll. Miles had a contract for twelve sides at 78 r.p.m. The long-playing record had not yet been introduced, and there was much controversy between record companies over the relative merits of the 33 r.p.m. and the 45 r.p.m. disc.
Controversy continued to rage about bebop, but it was still a music with a minority audience, and had no obvious commercial potential. The really popular music in 1949 was traditional jazz – the old styles of New Orleans/Dixieland/Chicago. There had been a revival of interest in this at the beginning of the decade, and by the end it was sweeping America and Europe. It was played by old, and often resuscitated, blacks, and by young, romantically minded whites in search of some (totally imaginary) lost purity. The other commercially viable music of the time was largely vocal – crooners such as Bing Crosby and Frank Sinatra, and vocal groups such as the Andrews Sisters and the Inkspots. Given this climate, Capitol showed courage – even recklessness – in the people they signed. Miles Davis was a young trumpeter whose virtues were not at all easy to spot. He was not a virtuoso like Dizzy, and he had only recently been leading a nine-piece band which was a total financial flop. His performance in the January 1949 Metronome poll may have established him in Capitol’s eyes as a rapidly rising star – he had come only tenth in the previous year’s poll – but his signing was ultimately attributable to the chance enthusiasm of an individual who happened to have the ear of the record company. The arranger Pete Rugolo suggested that Capitol should sign Miles in order to record the library of the nine-piece band. The company agreed, and Rugolo supervised the three sessions which took place on 21 January, 21 April 1949, and on 9 March 1950. As the band didn’t exist except in the recording studio, the personnel differs on each of the sessions. Only Miles, Konitz, Mulligan, and the tuba player, John ‘Bill’ Barber, are present on all three dates.
The discipline of the 78 r.p.m. record, with its three-minute time span, had a salutary effect on the nonet’s music. Although many of the finest solos in jazz may have been played live, the finest examples of total performances – the integration of soloists with ensembles – have usually been done in the studio. The reasons for this are simple: to impose a time limit is to impose a form, and to make the most effective use of that form, a balanced sequence of events must take place. From the time of his earliest recordings with Parker, Miles Davis seems to have been aware of this, and there is often a great difference between his live performances and his studio recordings in any one period. In the studio recordings of the nonet, the solos are shorter and the rhythm section is much more restrained. The general atmosphere and ‘feel’ of the band has, therefore, a greater cohesion and relaxation, what Miles calls a ‘soft sound . . . not penetrating too much. To play soft you have to relax . . . you don’t delay the beat, but you might play a quarter triplet against four beats and that sounds delayed. If you do it right, it won’t bother the rhythm section.’12
Eight of the tracks were originally issued in pairings on 78s, and there was a ten-inch LP in the early 1950s, but it wasn’t until 1957 that all the tracks (except for the vocal ‘Darn That Dream’) were reissued on one twelve-inch LP, and entitled The Birth of the Cool. These performances received a great deal of critical acclaim which hindsight has shown to have been well justified because they have stood the test of time, and still sound fresh and full of sparkle. They offer an extraordinary variety of ideas and concepts. Mulligan’s composition and arrangement, ‘Jeru’, presents an asymmetry – odd numbers of bars and beats – which was new to jazz at the time. John Carisi’s piece, ‘Israel’, contains some brilliant passages of counterpoint and polyphony, and also plays off the lower instruments against the higher ones in an intensely dramatic way. Gil Evans’s arrangement of ‘Moon Dreams’, apart from a few bars of baritone solo, is an entirely composed (pre-composed may be a more accurate expression) piece which turns from mellow-textured ‘mood’ music into dissonance and jagged movement, producing a disturbing musical vision with dark undertones.
‘Boplicity’, composed by Miles himself under the pseudonym Cleo Henry (his mother’s name), and arranged by Gil Evans, is notable for the marvellous relaxation of the whole ensemble, the written variations on the initial melody, and the fluid way the ensemble passages are interwoven with the two soloists (baritone and trumpet). In 1951, Miles cited this as his own favourite: ‘That’s because of the arrangement. Gil Evans did it.’13
Even in these more compact performances, Miles still dominates the band. His clear, non-brassy sound gives the written passages a particular flavour, and he gets – and deserves – more solo space than anyone else. He sounds more at ease and poised on these studio recordings than he did on the Roost air-shots, and his flow of ideas is excellent. He alternates long melodic lines with lovely pauses, broken rhythms and longer notes with just a hint of vibrato which enhances their swing and their emotional power. His solo on ‘Godchild’ (Appendix A, Fig. 1) demonstrates all these qualities.
Some black musicians were angry that Miles had whites in his band. This was to be a recurring theme at intervals throughout his subsequent career, because in every decade he would employ one or two white musicians. His response was always that he hired musicians not for their colour, but for the music that was within them. Opinions were also expressed by some musicians and critics that the Birth of the Cool music had a basically white impulse and origin, but Miles insisted that it came from Duke Ellington via Claude Thornhill, who was influenced by Duke and Fletcher Henderson. In fact, the roots of this cool, self-communing, singable music go back to the 1920s and such classics as Louis Armstrong’s vocal dialogue with the clarinet in ‘West End Blues’, and Ellington’s ‘Mood Indigo’ and ‘Dusk’. From 1947 onwards, Miles’s music tended to be a critique of bebop, which he felt was unsingable by non-musicians, and lacked certain essential emotional dimensions.
The nonet recordings, however, spawned the cool ‘West Coast Jazz’ school of the 1950s. This was a largely white movement which received an enormous amount of radio play, and made records that were promoted vigorously by the record companies. The fact that much of the music was sometimes sterile and ephemeral did not seem to matter; it had a surface palatability which disc jockeys found easy to accept. From Miles’s own seminal band, John Lewis went off to form the Modern Jazz Quartet, Gerry Mulligan formed his pianoless quartet with trumpeter Chet Baker (who was influenced by Davis), and Lee Konitz worked with Lennie Tristano and formed groups of his own. These musicians were all at the centre of the movement and had the essential talent and vision to create something really valid. As had been the case with bebop, it was the second-raters who absorbed the mannerisms and missed the substance. But Miles’s nonet recordings had at least one deep and lasting influence: they raised the whole question of the relationship of the soloist to the ensemble. Miles and a few other leading musicians would spend the following decades finding various answers and solutions in this problematic area.
While the Birth of the Cool recordings did not win a great audience for Miles, they established him as someone separate from Charlie Parker. Before them, he had been regarded more or less as an interesting and talented acolyte, but now he began to gain more undivided critical attention, and the reviews in Down Beat, for example, were all appreciative. These recordings also raised Miles’s stock with other musicians; he was seen to be a leader with a flair for new sounds. Tadd Dameron, who only four years previously had been teaching Miles chords, said in 1949: ‘Davis is the furthest advanced musician of his day, and “Boplicity” is one of the best small-group sounds I’ve heard.’14 And musicians who were more in the mainstream of American music were also favourably impressed. The bandleader, Elliot Lawrence, for example, referred to ‘those great Miles Davis sides on Capitol’. Even the Chicago-style traditionalist, Eddie Condon, murmured approval. The band and its music were a critical success, but existed only on record. From the point of view of living music, which has a voluntary, paying public, the nonet was a non-starter.
It was to take Miles another five or six years before he could achieve enough know-how and financial backing to lead bands that functioned regularly both in the studio and in clubs and concert halls.