Miles Davis: Ascenseur pour l'échafaud (10", red vinyl) [WAX TIME]

Why you'll love it

This red 10" pressing is remastered and sized like the original French issue. Davis and his Paris quintet improvised the music live against the film, and it pointed straight ahead to Milestones and Kind of Blue.

This edition

• 10" record
• Red vinyl
• Remastered
• Stereo mix

About the album

Most film scores take months. This one took two nights. In November 1957 Miles Davis was in Paris for a run at the Club Saint-Germain when Jean-Paul Rappeneau, Louis Malle's assistant and a jazz fan, introduced the two men. Davis watched a private screening, agreed on the spot, and on December 4 and 5 walked into Le Poste Parisien Studio with four local players and nothing written down but a few chord sequences sketched in his hotel room.

The film's key scenes were looped on a screen while the band played along, so every cue is a reaction to Jeanne Moreau wandering the night streets or a man stuck in a lift. Barney Wilen's tenor, René Urtreger's piano, Pierre Michelot's bass and Kenny Clarke's drums leave plenty of room for Davis's muted trumpet, and "Générique," "Florence sur les Champs-Élysées" and "Dîner au motel" are as cool and smoky as jazz gets.

Fontana issued it in France in 1958, and in America it became one side of Jazz Track, which earned a Grammy nomination. It's also proof that the best way to score a thriller is to turn up without any homework.

Also at Kops: more Miles Davis on vinyl · browse Classic Jazz

Tracklist

Listen

On Wax Time (cat# 213014), a reissue of the 1958 soundtrack.