Miles Davis: Birth Of The Cool (Blue Note Tone Poet series) [BLUE NOTE / EMI]

Why you'll love it

This Tone Poet edition is cut straight from the original analog tapes by Kevin Gray, pressed on 180g mono vinyl at RTI and dressed in a gatefold tip-on jacket with archival session photos, for the Miles Davis centennial. The music, recorded by his nonet in 1949 and 1950, is the foundation stone of cool jazz.

This edition

• Blue Note Tone Poet series
• 180g vinyl
• Mono
• Mastered by Kevin Gray from the original analog tapes
• Gatefold tip-on jacket
• Archival session photos

About the album

In the late 1940s the hottest action in jazz was bebop, played as fast as humanly possible. Miles Davis, Gil Evans and a circle of friends who gathered in Evans's basement apartment on 55th Street decided to go the other way: slower, softer, with a nine-piece band that included French horn and tuba.

The nonet featured Gerry Mulligan, Lee Konitz, John Lewis, Max Roach, Kai Winding and J.J. Johnson, and its three-minute arrangements still sound new. Mulligan wrote "Jeru" and "Venus De Milo," Evans shaped the dreamy "Moon Dreams" and "Boplicity," and "Move," "Israel" and "Godchild" glide along with a lightness nobody had heard in jazz before. Capitol gathered the sides together on one LP in 1957 and gave it the name that stuck.

Joe Harley supervised this reissue for the Tone Poet series, and it sounds wonderfully present. Putting a tuba in a jazz band and calling the result cool remains one of music's finer acts of confidence.

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

Tracklist

Listen

On Capitol / Blue Note (cat# T762), a reissue of the 1957 compilation.