Ken Burns JAZZ Collection: Miles Davis

Miles Davis

First emerging in Charlie Parker's quintet and the hothouse of bop in the late 1940s, Miles Davis soon became the dominant trendsetter in modern jazz, creating new settings for his spare, lyrical trumpet in the cool, hard bop, modal, and fusion movements. This career-spanning collection (an accompaniment to Ken Burns's 10-part documentary, Jazz), then, contains not only Davis's landmarks, but also some of modern jazz history's mileposts. The 1949 Birth of the Cool nonet sessions, represented here by "Boplicity," heralded the cool school with its airy, transparent textures. The tougher, hard-swinging "Walkin'" from 1954 is an extended masterpiece of hard bop with a trumpet solo that shows Davis's command of construction, while the beautiful "I Loves You, Porgy" illustrates Davis's collaboration with arranger Gil Evans, the most influential partnership between soloist and orchestrator in modern jazz.

Even that, however, may pale beside "So What" from 1959's Kind of Blue session. With a band that included saxophonists John Coltrane and Cannonball Adderley and pianist Bill Evans, Davis was both creating the modal school of improvisation and recording its most enduring works. A decade later, Davis took another epoch-defining step, layering electric keyboards and percussion for "Miles Runs the Voodoo Down" from the Bitches Brew sessions. There are other exalted performances here, like the live version of "My Funny Valentine," one of his most enduring ballads, and a host of stellar sideman performances by such influential stylists as Gerry Mulligan, J.J. Johnson, Wayne Shorter, Herbie Hancock, and Tony Williams. --Stuart Broomer