Miles Davis ‎– Birth Of The Cool

Jazz

Bop, Cool Jazz

1957

Birth of the Cool is a compilation album by American jazz musician Miles Davis, released in 1957 on Capitol Records. It compiles twelve songs recorded by Davis's nonet for the label over the course of three sessions during 1949 and 1950. Featuring unusual instrumentation and several notable musicians, the music consisted of innovative arrangements strongly inspired by classical music, and marked a major development in post-bebop jazz. As the title implies, these recordings are considered seminal in the history of cool jazz. The majority of the recordings on the record are under three minutes. The album has since been reissued many times. Blue Note recently released a version using the original tapes from Rudy Van Gelder, who produced the album.

Gil Evans contributed some charts to the sessions, acting as an advisor to a group of musicians who had met in his small New York apartment above a Chinese laundry. Evans had gained a reputation in the jazz world for his orchestration of bebop tunes for the Claude Thornhill orchestra, including Davis's "Donna Lee". Davis was seeking an alternative to the small groups typical of contemporary jazz (he was a member of Charlie Parker's quintet at the time), and in 1947 started to organize the loose circle of musicians into a working group. Rehearsals and experiments took place over the next year.

The nonet performed live only briefly—initially for a two week engagement in late August and early September 1948 at the Royal Roost Club in New York. Billed as the "Miles Davis Band", the group at this time consisted of Davis (trumpet), Mike Zwerin (trombone), Bill Barber (tuba), Junior Collins (French horn), Gerry Mulligan (baritone saxophone), Lee Konitz (alto saxophone), John Lewis (piano), Al McKibbon (bass), and Max Roach (drums). Former Dizzy Gillespie vocalist Kenny Hagood was featured on a few songs. Unusually, the arrangers (Mulligan, Evans and Lewis) were given credit. The group returned to the Royal Roost later in September, and recordings from 4 September and 18 September 1948 were included on the 1998 Complete Birth of the Cool CD, alongside the later studio sides. There was a further short residency the following year at the Clique Club, but the nonet was not a financial success, and disbanded. In 1949 Davis had a contract with Capitol to record twelve sides for 78 rpm singles. He thus reformed the nonet to record three sessions in January and April 1949 and March 1950. Davis, Konitz, Mulligan and Barber were the only musicians who played on all three sessions, though the instrumental lineup was constant (excepting the omission of piano on a few songs). Originally released as singles, eight of the tracks were compiled in 1953 on a 10" vinyl record in Capitol's "Classics In Jazz" series (H-459), and Birth of the Cool was released in 1957 as a 12" LP that added the remaining three unreleased instrumental pieces ("Move", "Budo" and "Boplicity"). The final track, "Darn That Dream" (the only song with vocals, by Hagood), was included with the other eleven on a 1971 LP. Subsequent releases have been based on this last arrangement.

Musically, the songs on Birth of the Cool stand as an important reaction to the prominent bebop form in contemporary jazz. Though the break can be exaggerated—Charlie Parker participated in the discussions Evans led, most of the musicians were drawn from the bebop scene, and many continued to play in that style for years afterward—it inspired a whole school of jazz musicians, particularly in California in what is usually referred to as "West Coast jazz" or the "cool school".