Was Miles Davis too cool? The coolest ever? Was the man with the horn more stylish than you or I could ever hope to be? Maybe.
Was Davis' music, as suggested by the liner art in Cool & Collected, timeless, radical, provocative, sensual, revolutionary, and shocking? Yes, absolutely.
The compositions selected for this collection side toward the timeless and the sensual—though the revolutionary is there—you just have to know where to listen.
Listen no further than "So What," from the iconic album Kind of Blue, considered the reference standard for modal jazz. Davis and his amazing group (Cannonball Adderley, John Coltrane, Bill Evans, Paul Chambers, and Jimmy Cobb) squeezed the maximum amount of cool from a minimum of notes.
It's often said that Miles' genius was his ability to play just the right notes. True. Never one to overplay, Miles liked to sit back in the pocket and wait for the right moment. Listen to "Générique" (from the soundtrack to Ascenseur pour l'échafaud), a blues that contains as much reverberant space as sound. The same can be said for the classic & sultry "Round Midnight," and the sparse & romantic "Stella By Starlight."
Miles was certainly not the first to swing, but he did put his own stamp on it. "Fran-Dance," "Milestones," "Bye Bye Blackbird," and "E.S.P" could not have swung any harder.
Though there have been many arguments about what Miles was getting at in his electric period, there has never been any doubt about his ability to recognize a promising melody. From Michael Jackson's "Human Nature" to Cyndi Lauper's "Time After Time," Miles was instinctively drawn to material that reflected his own eclecticism and melodic taste.
Ah, but what about that electric era? Represented here only tangentially by "It's About That Time" (from the fusion Rosetta stone "In A Silent Way"), it's easy to hear into the future— a future that produced Bitches Brew, Dark Magus, and several brutal documents of hard funk. Miles might have lost some listeners by veering so close to rock music but, well...does cool really care about what anybody else thinks?
Cool & Collected is a great place to start for the Miles Davis neophyte. Though I usually recommend Kind of Blue, this collection give some tasty hints at other, more "advanced" areas of Miles' career. Will Cool & Collected make you a cooler person? Hey, it can't hurt.
Article comments
1 - Pico
Nice write-up, as always. Someday you should review Star People, I think we both agree it's one of his most underrated records of the electric period.
-P
2 - Mark Saleski
thanks. yea, true about Star People. i love the records from that era...Star People, Big Fun...