Детали релиза : Miles Davis - 55 (2025) [FLAC (tracks)]

Album review

Miles Davis recorded for Prestige for just four years, from October 1951 to October 1955. Those sessions were not only productive (they yielded 27 studio LPs), but also fundamental to his origin story. His earliest work for the label was hindered by his heroin addiction and erratic behavior, as well as his struggle to clearly define his post-bebop musical voice. By 1955, however, he was (mostly) clean, and also laser-focused on the rapid evolution of his sound. If the work that he recorded the previous year (collected on Craft's excellent Miles '54 box set) documented a growing confidence still hobbled by addiction, this even more superlative collection stands as a testament to just how quickly he was able to mount a post-addiction comeback and translate that confidence into the beginnings of a musical revolution.

Credit is due, of course, to Miles's wisdom in putting together what would become known as his First Great Quintet: John Coltrane, Red Garland, Paul Chambers, and Philly Joe Jones. Although it wasn't until the end of 1955 that the group fully came together, the Coltrane-less quartet laid down a session in June that would become The Musings of Miles—his only quartet album for Prestige—which kicks off this set. While Coltrane would join for some club gigs near the end of 1955 to coalesce the First Great Quintet, the beginnings of what they would create are very much heard in Miles's shift into the emerging hard bop sound: bluesy, swinging, and less frenetic than bebop.

Also featured are two other dates. In August, he recorded with Milt Jackson, Ray Bryant, Percy Heath, Art Taylor, and, on two cuts—"Dr. Jackle" and "Minor March"—Jackie McLean. In mid-November, he would enter the studio with the First Great Quintet for the session that would yield Miles: The New Miles Davis Quintet; four of that album's six cuts are here, including the only one that doesn't feature Coltrane, "There Is No Greater Love." It's worth noting that this very same group had been in Columbia's 30th Street studios just a couple weeks prior recording what would become Round About Midnight, Miles's debut for Columbia Records. (He had scored a contract with the label after his July appearance with Thelonious Monk at Newport Jazz Festival, but nothing could be released until he had completed his session obligations to Prestige.)

While Round About Midnight is far more well known than The New Miles Davis Quintet, the two sessions are—musically, at least—of the same high quality, even if the Prestige cuts are notably less refined. 1955 was the year that Miles shifted into one of the preeminent creative—and commercial—forces of modern jazz, with the personal and professional struggles of the early '50s firmly behind him. These Prestige sessions are an excellent musical documentary of just how quickly and comprehensively that transition took place.

© Jason Ferguson/Qobuz