Miles Davis - 1958 - Live At Newport 1958


Miles Davis is famous for a lot of things and for a lot albums. From my anecdotal experiences on the internet people nowadays mostly get into his albums that are more electric, rock and roll or psychedelic. I personally like all of his eras but for some reason I didn't bother to check anything else he did after Kind Of Blue for a very long time. That's retarded and I'm very well aware of it but I didn't do it out of ignorance or elitism. I just thought the albums I have are plenty enough and I wasn't that much aware of his more adventurous outings later on in his career. Eventually I did realize that there's much more to his music than just modal or bebop jazz but I still hold his early "conventional" days closest to my heart and now that I'm familiar with most of his discography I'm not ashamed to admit that his "olden" days were still the best out of his lush career. At least to me.

Recently I've been digging through his live recordings, going chronologically to weed out the bad (as in badly recorded) and keep the good ones. Eventually I came upon this one which is a fresh new favorite of mine at the moment. Although the production isn't as stellar as it was in the studio it is more than serviceable but why I really like this record is because it is an interesting document of what is yet to come. This was recorded back when Miles had just formed his to be legendary group consisting of Coltrane, Cannonball, Evans, Chambers and  Cobb on drums. They're all here and they're all eager to lash out the fastest and the most intense jazz you'll ever hear. They came to prove themselves at Newport and it shows. The only disappointing thing on this record is that Bill Evans doesn't get to shine all that much and he does't really do justice to the Thelonious Monk composition featured on the album. Everything else though is top notch from one of the greatest groups in jazz at that point.

Get it here.

No comments:

Post a Comment