Bluing: Miles Davis Plays the Blues (1951-1956)

Bluing was one of the first CD's I purchased of Miles, It was a logical entry point for me within the Miles Davis discography.

 At the time I was into classic blues artists, such as Muddy Waters and John Lee Hooker. I was looking to broadened my musical horizons, I wanted to look to the past for inspiration.

 I knew Bluing would be right up my alley: I remember listening to it on a daily basis for several weeks before I moved on to other Miles stuff.

Now having listened to all this music many times over in its original form, from the albums this CD is compiled from, Bluing is a fantastic compilation of the Prestige sessions. It's Just straight ahead Hard bop, 8 of the 9 tracks are actually from the 1954-1956 time period, and only one from 1951.

 The title track is from an all-star compilation called Conception from 1951. The rest of the tracks are drawn from various Prestige albums like Bag's Groove, Conception and Collectors Items.

 Ironically though, the most famous Blues possibly of all of his pre Columbia Records years "Walkin" is not included, which is a glaring omission in retrospect.

That Lucky Thompson composed tune just oozes with hard bop swagger, maybe their thinking was to not give away the store with one compilation, but it's nice to hear Jackie McLean and John Coltrane with Miles in their early stages of development.

 Both McLean and Coltrane definitely still have influences of Charlie Parker and Dexter Gordon in their sound on these 1950's tracks.

If you are just now trying to warm up to the sound of small group jazz, I think Bluing does an admiral job of easing you into the style. You can always go further into the catalog later on.

Quiet Nights with Miles Davis and Gil Evans

Quiet Nights was an album Miles was not pleased with upon its release.

In fact, he was furious that Columbia Records and producer Teo Macero patched enough music together to release a brief album of what Miles considered an inferior rough draft of stuff from the cutting room floor.

Miles was also looking for Someone to replace Hank Mobley as the tenor man in the group, Mobley replaced Coltrane in the working band.

Hank did not bring enough revolutionary ideas to the band to satisfy Miles.

Hank is a fine hard bop player, probably one of the most underrated of all time. In fact, his Blue Note releases are really quite remarkable the high quality... but I must concede he never did fit in with Miles for some reason.

 Other than a few tracks on 1968's Files de Kilimanjaro, Quiet Nights would be the last time Gil and Miles would work together, or at least lay anything to tape anyway.

Gil went on to form his own large orchestra, his impulse album Out of the Cool, is a spectacular album on Impulse that every jazz collector must own.

Gil recorded many fine albums throughout 60's, 70's, and 80's. Many of Gil's Albums fused rock and funk elements.

One of the more unusual albums is the RCA Label issue, Plays the Music of Jimi Hendrix, this is an album that actually has a version of "Voodoo Chile" (Slight Return) where Howard Johnson Plays the intro on tuba! Yes a tuba, and it is quite remarkable how well he pulls it off. Quiet Nights may be uneven, but still pretty good to my ears.