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Miles Davis album

Birth of the Cool is a compilation album by the American jazz trumpeter and bandleader Miles Davis, released in February 1957 by Capitol Records. It compiles eleven tracks recorded by Davis's nonet for the label over the course of three sessions during 1949 and 1950. By 1948, Davis had three years of bebop playing under his belt, but he struggled to match the speed and ranges of the likes of Gillespie and Parker, choosing instead to play in the mid range of his instrument. In 1948, Davis, becoming increasingly concerned about growing tensions within the Parker quintet, left the group and began looking for a new band to work with. At the same time, arranger Gil Evans began hosting gatherings of like minded, forward looking musicians at his small basement apartment, located on 55th Street in Manhattan, three blocks away from the jazz nightclubs of 52nd Street. Evans had gained a reputation in the jazz world for his orchestration of bebop tunes for the Claude Thornhill orchestra in the mid 1940s. Keeping an open door policy, Evans' apartment came to host many of the young jazz artists of late 1940s New York. The participants engaged in discussions about the future of jazz, including a proposed group with a new sound. According to jazz historian Ted Gioia:
[The participants] were developing a range of tools that would change the sound of contemporary music. In their work together, they relied on a rich palette of harmonies, many of them drawn from European impressionist composers. They explored new instrumental textures, preferring to blend the voices of the horns like a choir rather than pit them against each other as the big bands had traditionally done with their thrusting and parrying sections. They brought down the tempos of their music they adopted a more lyrical approach to improvisation

The nonet recorded twelve tracks for Capitol during three sessions over the course of nearly a year and a half. Davis, Lee Konitz, Gerry Mulligan and Bill Barber were the only musicians who played on all three sessions, though the instrumental lineup was constant (excepting the omission of piano on a few songs and the addition of Kenny Hagood on "Darn That Dream"). The first session occurred on January 21, 1949, recording four tracks: Mulligan's "Jeru" and "Godchild" as well as Lewis's "Move" and "Budo". Jazz critic Richard Cook hypothesizes that Capitol, wanting to get a good start, recorded these numbers first because they were the most catchy tunes in the nonet's small repertoire. That date Kai Winding replaced Zwerin on trombone, Al Haig replaced Lewis on piano, and Joe Shulman replaced McKibbon on bass. The second recording date came three months later on April 22, 1949 with Davis filling in for Fats Navarro in Tadd Dameron's band with Charlie Parker during the interim. The band returned to the studio with five substitutions in personnel: J. J. Johnson on trombone, Sandy Siegelstein on French horn, Nelson Boyd on bass, and Kenny Clarke on drums, and John Lewis returning to piano. At this session, the nonet recorded Mulligan's "Venus de Milo", Lewis's "Rouge", Carisi's "Israel", and "Boplicity", a collaboration between Davis and Evans, credited to the pseudonym "Cleo Henry". The band did not return to the studio again until March 9, 1950. Davis did not call the band for any rehearsals or live performances between the second and third recording dates. The March 1950 date featured Mulligan's "Darn That Dream", "Rocker", and "Deception", and Evans's arrangement of Chummy MacGregor's "Moon Dreams", which had been released in a jazz arrangement by Glenn Miller and the AAF Band in 1944 on V Disc. The band saw more substitutions, with Gunther Schuller on French horn and Al McKibbon on bass. Hagood returned for vocals on "Darn That Dream".

One of the features of the Davis Nonet was the use of paired instrumentation. An example of this can be heard on the John Lewis arrangement "Move". In "Move", Lewis gives the melody to the pairing of trumpet and alto saxophone, baritone saxophone and tuba supply counterpoint, and trombone and French horn provide harmonies. Gerry Mulligan's "Jeru" demonstrates another Nonet hallmark: the use of a unison sound and rich harmony throughout the horns. Though the album is seen as a departure from traditional bop, the recordings do feature tunes that are considered close to the bop style, such as "Budo" which has the band bookending solos by Davis, Mulligan, Konitz, and Winding, similar to a bebop head arrangement.

One of the largest stated influences on the sound of Birth of the Cool was band leader Claude Thornhill and his orchestra. Out of Thornhill's band came Lee Konitz, Bill Barber, Gerry Mulligan, and Gil Evans, Miles Davis calling the Konitz Barber Mulligan Evans incarnation "the greatest band", second only to "the Billy Eckstine band with Bird." According to Evans: Miles had liked some of what Gerry and I had written for Claude. The instrumentation for the Miles session was caused by the fact that this was the smallest number of instruments that could get the sound and still express all the harmonies the Thornhill band used. Miles wanted to play his idiom with that kind of sound. Davis saw the full 18 piece Thornhill orchestra as cumbersome and thus decided to split the group in half for his desired sound. As arrangers, both Evans and Mulligan gave Thornhill credit for crafting their sound.

The band's debut performance at the Royal Roost received positive, but reserved reactions. Count Basie, the Roost's headliner during the Nonet's brief tenure, however, was more open to the group's sound, saying, "Those slow things sounded strange and good. I didn't always know what they were doing, but I listened, and I liked it." Winthrop Sargeant, classical music critic at The New Yorker, compared the band's sound to the work of an "impressionist composer with a great sense of aural poetry and a very fastidious feeling for tone color The music sounds more like that of a new Maurice Ravel than it does like jazz it is not really jazz." Though he did not recognize the record as jazz, Sargeant acknowledged that he found the record "charming and exciting". as well as creating a new and viable alternative to bebop. In 1957, after the release of Birth of the Cool, Down Beat magazine wrote that the album "[influenced] deeply one important direction of modern chamber jazz." Several tunes from the album, such as Carisi's "Israel", have gone on to become jazz standards. The album was included in the book 1001 Albums You Must Hear Before You Die. Birth of the Cool was voted number 349 in Colin Larkin's All Time Top 1000 Albums 3rd Edition (2000). Many members of the Miles Davis Nonet went on to have successful careers in cool jazz, notably Gerry Mulligan, John Lewis, and Lee Konitz. Mulligan moved to California and joined forces with trumpeter Chet Baker in a piano less quartet, before creating his Concert Jazz Band. Lewis would become music director of the Modern Jazz Quartet, which would become one of the most influential cool jazz groups. Evans would go on to collaborate with Davis again on the Davis albums Miles Ahead and Sketches of Spain. Capitol Records were at the time disappointed with the sales of the nonet recordings, and did not offer Davis a contract extension. Instead, Davis signed with the new jazz specialty record label, Prestige, for whom he would record his first album in 1951.

Arrangements by the composer unless otherwise noted.