Miles and Trane at 100
For the centennial of their births, albums to help you hear them differently
Miles Davis and John Coltrane were born 100 years ago this year, Davis in Illinois on May 26, Coltrane in North Carolina on Sept. 23. There were no more influential players in jazz after 1955 than these two. When I saw Miles’s trumpet and Trane’s tenor saxophone in a display case at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts’ mighty We Want Miles exhibition in 2010, I got a little emotional. Various musicians will be running Miles and Trane tribute tours all summer; I’ll list Montreal highlights at the end of this post.
What do Miles and Trane mean now, 71 years after they first recorded together? In general, I think both were prime examples of the postwar cultural ferment that Louis Menand labours mightily to sum up in his encyclopedic 2021 history of that period, The Free World. Neither Davis nor Coltrane was playing in the way most people understood the word, or the work of jazz’s greatest practitioners, only a few years earlier. This was serious new music for a bewildering new time. It’s no wonder that even the best writers of an earlier age, people like Ralph Ellison or Philip Larkin, never warmed to them. Davis was detached, critical, still heartbreaking but in the way an antihero at the movies might break hearts. Coltrane was so fervently invested in his work that he could be unnerving, too, in a different way.
Specifically what do we take from their legacies? Surely different people will take different things on different days. I’ve selected some albums by each man that reflect some things I’ve been thinking about them lately. The examples I’ve chosen are illustrative, not definitive. Kind of Blue and A Love Supreme aren’t on this list. Partly because you didn’t need me to tell you about them. Mostly because no talent this large should be reduced to one album.
I’ll get back to politics this week. Warmer days always make me think of jazz. Here’s some jazz.
Miles: Points of departure
The restless experimentation of his 1964-68 quintet, followed by the long use of amplified instruments and rock beats that followed, have earned Miles Davis a reputation as a ceaseless explorer. “I have to change,” he said. “It’s like a curse.” He often sounded aloof, not only from his audiences but from his bands, as though auditioning everyone for his favour.
Listening back to his records for the thousandth time, what I notice isn’t just how often he started something new. It’s also how thoroughly he refined whatever he’d been working on, before departing for the next thing. He wasn’t fickle. He rarely left material on the table unexamined. His charisma and record-industry success gave him advantages not every jazz bandleader could count on: he worked a lot, and musicians would stick with him for a long time if he’d have them. So he could work through a context or a group dynamic more thoroughly than most. This short list of Davis albums concentrates on those pinnacle moments, just before he moved on to something else.
1. Milestones, 1958
Kind of Blue, from 1959, is the Miles album everyone writes about. (Here’s my take from many years ago). Milestones is the album before it. Kind of Blue is approachable but experimental in its use of slow-changing harmonies and minimal compositions. Milestones is more conventional. To some ears it must sound like a misfire before the revolution. To me it functions as a summation of everything Davis had done since he arrived in New York City and joined Charlie Parker in 1944. It’s a graduate thesis, examining music his elders wrote for big bands (John Lewis’s “Two Bass Hit,” written for Dizzy Gillespie in 1947); the intricate bebop of the Charlie Parker era (Jackie McLean’s “Dr. Jackle,” taken at a faster tempo than almost anything Davis ever played later); and the work of two contemporaries (Thelonious Monk’s “Straight, No Chaser” and Ahmad Jamal’s arrangement of “Billy Boy,” on which Davis and the band’s other horns don’t even play). On “Straight, No Chaser,” Red Garland plays a Davis trumpet solo from 1945 note-for-note on piano. It’s high classicism of a sort Davis would later reproach in younger musicians. Only one tune, the title track, hints at Davis’s future directions. The quintet that brought Davis this far — courtly Garland on piano, impeccable Philly Joe Jones on drums — disbanded soon after. I’m not aware of a more persuasive valedictory document in all of jazz. This is how we got here, Davis is saying in effect. Here is the road travelled.
2. In Person Friday and Saturday Nights at the Blackhawk, 1961
By 1961, visiting a smoky San Francisco club, Davis was a celebrity shaken by changes he hadn’t asked for. Coltrane had left to launch a solo career. Davis wasn’t entirely satisfied with his new saxophonist, Hank Mobley, or drummer Jimmy Cobb, who were merely human. To compensate for Coltrane’s absence, Davis recast himself as the band’s extrovert. He plays more brashly than a year earlier, almost arrogantly. But the new players here are, at the very least, quick and game, as is the crystalline melodist Wynton Kelly on piano.
The Blackhawk sessions capture Davis on tunes he’d been playing for years, with musicians who knew the recordings like they knew their names, in a band that had honed its reflexes on the road. This is a music of gesture and convention — if Cobb plays this, Kelly lands here, and then Paul Chambers sets up this figure on bass so Miles or Mobley can go here. It’s improvisation, not as invention ex nihilo, but as shared vocabulary and context. This is the Davis album I recommend most often to friends. As a rule they’ve rarely heard it and they’re always glad to learn about it.
3. Filles de Kilimanjaro, 1969
In 1963 Davis hired a 17-year-old drummer from Boston, Tony Williams. Williams brought in pianist Herbie Hancock and bassist Ron Carter; after trying a few other saxophonists they settled on Wayne Shorter. Davis had his second great quintet. They had many adventures, which I’ll skip here. Of their half-dozen albums, Filles de Kilimanjaro is the last. It was recorded in two 1968 sessions; by the second, Chick Corea and Dave Holland had replaced Hancock and Carter. Electric bass and piano make appearances, but really this is the last time Davis played by the rules of acoustic small-group jazz. Soon everything around him would be plugged in.
Filles is mostly pensive and delicate. It dismantles assumptions of jazz but doesn’t yet replace them with assumptions from rock and roll. Instead it leans on the band members’ ability to solve musical riddles persuasively. In its structure and mood, though I think quite by accident, this album functions as a sequel to Kind of Blue. It’s the calmest recording Davis made in the 1960s. It doesn’t dare you, it draws you in. Special mention to Tony Williams. In performance he often used his drums to goad Davis out of his comfort zone. Here, by contrast, he often plays at a whisper, putting the subtlest scaffolding under the proceedings.
This short list of albums doesn’t include anything from Davis’s later electric period, but don’t let me stop you. I have long loved his albums We Want Miles (1983) and Decoy (1985), and if this were an essay about Keith Jarrett I’d use it to marvel at how Jarrett Plays on Miles’s The Cellar Door Sessions 1970 (released in 2005).
Trane: Never alone
Coltrane died young, at 40 in 1967. In his last couple of years he was trying to escape any formal structure, but before that his music sounds driven, complex — and tantalizingly susceptible to analysis, which helps explain why generations of saxophonists have sought to analyze and imitate his solos. If you spent a week in the basement with a horn and one of his solos, you could figure some of it out. And yet for all the logic in his music, an impenetrable layer of mystery remains. Not mystery he cultivated for drama’s sake. Just an unresolved question at the heart of him.
His 1961-65 quartet was perfect. Nobody played drums like Elvin Jones or piano like McCoy Tyner or bass like Jimmy Garrison, and even they didn’t play quite like that until they came together with Coltrane. Still, two of my selections here feature Coltrane in other settings besides that quartet. I guess I like the sound of Coltrane working out his relationship to others.
1. Miles Davis and John Coltrane — The Final Tour, released 2018
These performances were recorded in March 1960, in Paris, Stockholm, Copenhagen. It’s a year before the Davis dates at San Francisco’s Blackhawk club that I discussed above. The material is substantially the same. The only independent variable is Coltrane. Davis had to coax Coltrane into doing the tour. He knew Coltrane would leave the band when it was over. You can hear why. Coltrane’s playing was sometimes tentative when he joined Davis’s band in 1955, but by 1960 he had arrived at another level. He was impatient to see what he could do next.
“Nobody played more saxophone anywhere, ever, than Trane on this 1960 Miles tour,” Ethan Iverson wrote last year. And it’s not subtly more, not “I wonder whether I can hear what they’re talking about” more. Coltrane administers mauling after mauling to his colleagues. Listening last winter to remind myself after Iverson wrote his post, I was amazed once again.
2. Duke Ellington and John Coltrane, 1963
On the strength of strong early moves as a solo artist, Coltrane signed with Impulse! Records, the jazz subsidiary of a major label, in 1961. Impulse was cautious about introducing Coltrane to a larger audience: one early album featured only ballads, another teamed the quartet with a suave big-band crooner named Johnny Hartman. The third matched Coltrane with Duke Ellington, a legend, 27 years Coltrane’s senior.
I’ve read many times they were poorly matched. I don’t hear it. Their version of “In A Sentimental Mood” is definitive. Some tracks use Coltrane’s bassist and drummer, Garrison and Jones; some use Ellington’s, Aaron Bell and Sam Woodyard. Ellington brings most of the tunes, as you’d expect. There are stylistic differences but nobody sounds uncomfortable. Coltrane’s soprano saxophone solo on his tune “Big Nick” is entirely uninhibited. Ellington needs a half chorus to gather his thoughts when it’s done, but he rallies nicely.
Three years later, when Coltrane’s increasing experimentation chased Elvin Jones out of the band, the drummer’s next employer was Duke Ellington. There’s video. It lasted only three weeks. Jones had to work with another drummer, which was unusual in any band and unheard-of in Ellington’s. Having to work with another drummer was why he’d just left Coltrane. But I like the thought of Ellington thinking, He sounded so good on my tunes a few years ago. Might as well try.
3. Crescent, 1964
The album before A Love Supreme. Some musicians (though not all!) have always preferred this one. It’s just the quartet, with Coltrane playing only tenor saxophone, no soprano. There’s a solemnity here that the only uptempo tune, “Bessie’s Blues,” doesn’t quite dispel. Every other composition, even the closing feature for Jone’s drums, is a meditation. Crescent is a bit like Davis’s Filles de Kilimanjaro, although I think it’s indisputably the better of the two albums: in an era of rapid change, an important band pauses for a moment of calm assurance.
No album on this short list showcases the Coltrane quartet operating at full throttle. You can hear that on “Live” at the Village Vanguard from 1961, and on Live at the Half Note: One Down, One Up from nearly four years later. I strongly recommend the latter, which has an almost punk energy to it, especially from Tyner on piano.
Bassist Marcus Miller will convene three other veterans of Davis’ 1981 comeback band — saxophonist Bill Evans, guitarist Mike Stern and percussionist Mino Cinelu — for a concert at the Festival International de Jazz de Montréal on June 25. Coltrane’s A Love Supreme will be the basis for Chicago saxophonist Isaiah Collier’s Montreal concert on July 8. Montreal trumpeter Ron di Lauro has been touring with an excellent band playing Davis’s Kind of Blue; that tour comes home to Montreal on July 3. Tributes aside, I suspect that if Davis or Coltrane themselves were looking for the strongest musical personality they could find this year, they might bump into each other at singer Cécile McLorin Salvant’s concert on June 26, or even at this un-ticketed indoor concert by the Doxas Brothers of Montreal and Brooklyn, a day earlier.
Love this Paul. Thank you.
The things you notice about things you've been listening to all your life. Paul Chambers died at 33, Wynton Kelly at 39, Coltrane at 40, Cannonball Adderley at 46.