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Miles Davis · S1 E5
The Eckstine Visit
Billy Eckstine's band plays St. Louis in 1944. Dizzy Gillespie and Charlie Parker are in the orchestra. Miles sits in for their sick third trumpet. He hears Parker play and knows immediately: he has to get to New York
A basement apartment on West 55th Street, Manhattan, 1948. Gil Evans spreads orchestral charts across every surface while Miles Davis, barely twenty-two, leans over and points to a French horn part that will rewrite the rules of jazz.
Miles Davis, Move, from Birth of the Cool (1957). The bebop tempo is still there, but listen to what surrounds the trumpet: French horn, tuba, baritone sax. This is a nine-piece band that sounds like a small orchestra, and it is the first time anyone has heard jazz like this.
Move -- Miles Davis (1949)
Recorded in January 1949 at the first of three Birth of the Cool sessions for Capitol Records. The arrangement, written by John Lewis, keeps the energy of bebop but wraps it in cool, pastel textures. A nonet of nine players produces a sound bigger than most big bands. Miles's trumpet floats above the ensemble with a tone so controlled it feels like the calm center of a storm.
The Nonet
Gil Evans's apartment becomes the meeting place for a group of young musicians who want jazz to grow up. Miles, Evans, Gerry Mulligan, John Lewis, and others design a nine-piece band: trumpet, trombone, French horn, tuba, alto sax, baritone sax, piano, bass, and drums. The idea is to get the richness of a big band into a group small enough to improvise freely.
TAP TO REVEAL: How did the Birth of the Cool sessions actually go over at the time?
“I didn't write out the charts. Gil Evans and Gerry Mulligan did most of that. But the idea was mine. I wanted that sound.”
— Miles Davis, from Miles: The Autobiography (1989)
Donna Lee -- Charlie Parker
Recorded in 1947, two years before the Birth of the Cool sessions. Miles is on trumpet, the tempo is relentless, the melody a blur of sixteenth notes. This is the bebop world Miles was leaving behind when he picked up the phone and called Gil Evans.
Birth of the Cool: Fast Facts
Miles has just proven he can think bigger than bebop. But in the early 1950s, heroin is everywhere on the New York jazz scene, and the man who watched Charlie Parker self-destruct is about to follow the same path down.
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