Recorded in the same October 1956 Rudy Van Gelder sessions that are heard on Miles Davis' Cookin' and Steamin' albums, these alternate takes with his quintet of John Coltrane on tenor saxophone, Red Garland on piano, Paul Chambers on double bass and Philly Joe Jones on drums give us a unique view on the consistency and strength of the famous and foundational hard bop band.
Label: ezz-thetics by Hat Hut Records Ltd Catalog ID: ezz-thetics 1140 Squidco Product Code: 32590
Format: CD Condition: New Released: 2022 Country: Switzerland Packaging: Cardboard Gatefold Recorded at Rudy Van Gelder Studio, in Hackensack, New Jersey, on October 26th, 1956.
"It's almost impossible now to screen an ambitious wildlife documentary series without running a little "how it was done" segment at the end. We are invited to marvel at the patience and skill of cameramen who lie in cold/hot/dangerous/wet/sandy conditions for days on end to catch a precious ten seconds of mating or predation. And sometimes we feel that the magic of the original images has been dented a little. We might even feel a little betrayed if some photographic trickery or set-up has been involved.
We are, as a culture, process-obsessed. We need to know how every blockbuster stunt was set up, how CGI effects were created, how a Method actor gained two stone and ate spaghetti three times a day to play a gangster don. In a sense, music has always been the leading edge of this obsession. Young men spent hours lifting and replacing the needle, trying to work out how a particular sound was made. I personally recall the almost obsessive interest I showed after learning that a soft, slightly buzzed note on Miles Davis's Ascenseur pour l'échafaud, a record which is all about process, was caused by a fragment of lip-skin in the mouthpiece.
And then the CD came along and hungrily needed to be filled, and we were treated to "alternate" takes that the artist never expected or wanted us to hear, breakdown, false starts, studio chat ... whole "box sets" of the stuff. Few artists seemed to invite such an approach more than Miles. For a start, everyone does an impression of that infamous husky whisper, and everyone knew, when he went to Columbia that his new way of working was to get his men to play, put on the studio light and tape sometimes industrial lengths of abstract jam, leaving it to Teo Macero to assemble into releasable tracks. The coming of the box set meant we could now hear the jams in their original form.
We'd always known that this was a process he'd learned while in France and invited to make music for Louis Malle's underrated thriller; it's become a cliché that the only good thing about Ascenseur pour l'échafaud is Miles's improvised score. And we'd been aware that while still working for Bob Weinstock's Prestige label, but anxious to move on to the more prestigious Columbia, Miles had attempted to fulfil contractual obligations by recording several albums' worth of material in single marathon sessions. We were expected to understand that this was a slightly cynical move, more about paperwork than music. Records with titles like Cookin', Relaxin', Steamin', Workin', had come off a production line, admirable in its focus and application but constrained by an extra-musical narrative about business arrangements.
Consequently, the recordings made at Rudy Van Gelder's studio in Hackensack, New Jersey, on October 26 1956 have become the plaything of the discographers, whose pleasure it is to tell us that "If I Were A Bell", item #995, was issued as a jukebox 45 before finding its way onto Relaxin', thence to a Greatest Hits package, and the museology of The Legendary Prestige Quintet Sessions. "Sessions", plural, because Miles and his men had recorded a similar marathon on May 11, on which occasion, knowing that he was to turn thirty in two weeks' time and having wasted a least some of his most productive years chasin' sensation in the form of drugs and women, he perhaps needed to get a move on.
Process-obsessed as we are, there is a danger that the music disappears behind an interference wave of anecdote and detail. Here is an opportunity to reflect that, far from being a mere contractual convenience, Miles's marathon recording sessions of May and October 1956 were among his first attempts, a year earlier than the Louis Malle soundtrack date, to allow his music to emerge and evolve in real time by making the recording studio a performance space rather than an artisanal workshop. In later years, associates such as Chick Corea, Keith Jarrett, Herbie Hancock severally - though they must have talked about it - likened Miles to a Zen master whose control over the music was through intuition and flow rather than a strict observance of chords. Those who have tried to elevate Ascenseur pour l'échafaud into an epiphany about the potential of free and abstract playing sometimes fail to recognise that the 1956 sessions, and those of October 26 most particularly, already have something of that quality. Tonally and expressively, they blend into one another when heard in sequence. Though Miles later relied on producers and labels to package his work in marketable bathes, here, it might be argued, the astonishing consistency of vision achieved in these concentrated bursts of music-making, which must have become trance-like as the clock ticked on, was violated when tracks were selected and written down in columns under different release titles.
Here is a chance to hear Miles Davis in something close to real time. Small matter that most collectors of hard bop will have these sides already and will be familiar with a particular running order. Perhaps those who have invested in the complete sessions will have a clearer sense of the continuity of these remarkable sessions, but that now familiar obsession with the burrs and swarf of the studio process may win out over musical appreciation. What happened at Van Gelder's on October 26 1956 is one of the great performances of modern jazz. Surrender to it."-Brian Morton, July 2022