Miles Davis’ music is the safe place where you can always find inspiration, meditate, get excited, or simply lay back and relax. If you get tired from the intense improvisation of his second great quintet, you could rest with the modal subtleties of Kind of Blue; then, if you want some adventures, go electric with his seventies period, and if you want to add some sexy mood to your dinner table, you can always rely on the music he made with Marcus Miller in the eighties. Miles is splendid and “easy as water rushing over stone” (this is a verse from Melody Gardot’s song “Our Love is Easy.” It has nothing to do with Miles, but I liked the metaphor). Anyway, in my recent visit to Davis’ recorded legacy, I put on “Miles Ahead,” his first collaboration with Gil Evans (after the cool jazz sessions, some eight years earlier) that would become one of the staples of the Third Stream in jazz music. Alongside subsequent collaborations “Porgy and Bess” (1959) and “Sketches of Spain” (1960), Miles Ahead shaped the new genre which was a fusion of jazz, European classical, and world music. For the purpose of the suite, which Gill Evans managed to assemble from ten separate compositions by Brubeck, J. J. Johnson, Kurt Weill, etc., Miles switched to flugelhorn throughout the whole record. He is the only soloist, backed up by a large ensemble consisting of sixteen woodwind and brass players. Art Taylor played drums on the sessions, and the then current Miles Davis Quintet member Paul Chambers was the bassist.
The original LP cover pictured a young white woman and child aboard a sailboat. Miles reportedly went to Columbia records and asked the executive there: "Why'd you put that white bitch on there?" The manager, George Avakian, later stated that the question was meant as a joke. However, for later releases of the record, the original cover photo has been substituted by a photograph of Miles Davis.
