Spy vs. Jazz: Miles Davis- Miles in Berlin (1964)- EAC CD Rip (FLAC)

Here's some Miles to compliment the shadows.




From the liner notes:

On the evening of Sept. 25, 1964, Miles Davis began a bold new stanza in the epic poem that was his music. For it was on that evening, in the city then known as West Berlin, that the great trumpeter-bandleader recorded for the first time with what would come to be called his "second great quintet." With the addition of Wayne Shorter as his front-line partner, the most original-sounding of the post-Coltrane tenor saxophonists, Davis (1926-1921) had the ideal foil. Stimulated by the headlong rhythms and shifting accents of pianist Herbie Hancock, bassist Ron Carter, and 18-year old drum phenom Tony Williams, the quintet was poised to make the breakthrough that years later was dubbed "freebop." Although the group's choice of repertoire at the Berlin Philharmonie was not surprising (two standards, "Autumn Leaves" and the stunning, previously unreleased "Stella by Starlight," and three warp-speed renderings of "Walkin" and Davis' "So What" and "Milestones"), their multi-hued interpretations certainly were. During the next four-plus years, the second great Miles Davis quintet would brilliantly add to the tonal colors in their palette, and Miles in Berlin points towards the masterpieces to come.




Technical Information:

Artist: Miles Davis
Album: Miles in Berlin
Year: 1964

Audio Codec(s): FLAC8
Encoding: Lossless
Rip: EAC split tracks + .cue
Avg. bitrate: 415 kb/s
Sample rate: 44100 Hz
Bits per sample: 16
Channels: 2
File size: 170 MB
Length: 0:57:22


Personnel:

Miles Davis: trumpet
Wayne Shorter: tenor saxophone
Herbie Hancock: piano
Ron Carter: bass
Tony Williams: drums


Tracklisting:

01. Milestones (8:58)
02. Autumn Leaves (12:38)
03. So What (10:27)
04. Stella by Starlight (12:54)
05. Walkin' (10:40)
06. Go-Go (Theme and Announcement) (1:46)





Miles in Berlin Megaupload Link

Miles Davis- Ascenseur pour l'échafaud OST (1958)- EAC CD Rip (APE/FLAC)

Okay, okay. I'll cool it with the Miles Davis posts...for now. But first, here's the Ascenseur pour l'échafaud soundtrack in lossless for your listening pleasure.




From Thomas Jarvis at Sound on Sight:

It’s past midnight in the dark Le Poste Parisie recording studio. Miles Davis steps up to the microphone, his face illuminated by the flickering cinema screen in front of him. He sees Jeanne Moreau walking slowly along the Champ-Elysses on a stormy night, her face lit only by the lights glowing inside the cafes, bars and late night amusement arcades. Drawing breath, the first notes to emerge from Davis’ muted trumpet are sombre; a simple aching blues riff, that echoes the heartbreak and desperation of Moreau, as she searches for her lost lover.

Louis Malle’s first feature, Elevator to the Gallows (Ascenseur pour l’échafaud), was based on a pulp novel by Noël Calef, which he had picked up in a train station, and later adapted with Roger Nimier.

The narrative follows ex-paratrooper Julien Tavernier (Maurice Ronet) and his lover Florence Carala (Jeanne Moreau), whom devise a plan to murder her husband, an arms dealer, who also happens to be Julien’s boss. Having killed him, Julien gets trapped in the elevator and fails to arrive at their agreed rendezvous. A distraught Florence wanders the streets of Paris in search of Julien, afraid he has not carried out the plan and has abandoned her. Meanwhile, two teenagers steal Julien’s car and arrive at a new Motel on the outskirts of Paris, where they commit a double murder and inadvertently leave evidence behind that implicates him.

Malle, a fan of American film noir and Hitchcock, shot the film using the acclaimed cinematographer Henri Decaë. To update the traditional image of Paris and create a contemporary thriller, he incorporated office blocks, motels, and new highways into the backdrop. In a final touch of modernity, he disregarded the use of a conventional musical score, and used the cool, underground music of the day: jazz.




By the end of 1957, Miles Davis was moving away from the sound that he had created with Birth of the Cool. Influenced by George Russell’s theories on ‘modal’ music, he was looking to create music that stripped away the use of chord changes as the harmonic structure.

Without a solid band and these new musical concepts fermenting, Davis accepted an invitation from Marcel Romano to play at the Club Saint-Germain in Paris. Romano put together a group of musicians for him, consisting of René Urtreger (piano), Barney Wilen (saxophone), Pierre Michelot (bass) and the legendary Kenny Clarke (drums), an influential figure in the creation of Be-bop, playing alongside Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie.

Arriving in Paris, Davis found a culture open to jazz, where jukeboxes in bars and cafes had the latest be-bop records, and hip young kids were reading Faulkner and watching the movies of Nicholas Ray. Davis was introduced to Malle by the singer Juliette Greco, and agreed to record the score for Elevator To the Gallows, then in post-production. Malle, who was a knowledgeable fan of jazz music, asked Davis if he would improvise the music, and showed him just a few fragments of the first rough cut of the film. Davis quickly sketched down some basic ideas and musical themes, and that was it, until the day of the session.

On the night of the recording, December 4th, 1957, each member of the band set up in front of a cinema screen on to which the film was projected. Davis showed the musicians the basic themes he had written, over which he would improvise, and with Malle, they quickly identified the scenes requiring music. Finally, the studio engineers let the opening credits roll and the band began to play.




As the camera pulls away from Julien stood at his office window, speaking to Florence on the phone, we hear Davis’ trumpet play a simple blues melody that will overshadow the tragic lovers’ story. In keeping with his ideas on modal music, the chords are spare, minor key, and the bass line a simple looping motif. Later in the film, as Florence stalks the night searching for Julien, she is seen muttering, almost mouthing the notes of Davis’ trumpet melody to herself. The trumpet follows and speaks for her, when all she can do is shake her head in the rain and mournfully roll her eyes.

In some of these scenes, Davis asked Urtreger not to play piano. He wanted the music to be more abstract and airy, detached from chord sequences. Urtreger described it as ‘a painter taking out the lines’. This abstraction gave his playing an almost human voice; when Florence enters a busy local café, a dialogue emerges between Davis’ chattering trumpet and the rarely heard saxophone of Wilen, that mimics the murmur of the after hours conversation.

In the last third of the film, Davis’ trumpet disappears and the only music used is Clarke’s sizzling hi-hats and Michelot’s bubbling bass, as two detectives interrogate Julien in a shadowy room. Malle leaves the trumpet out until the final scene, when Florence turns up at the Motel dark room just as photos of her and Julien are developing in the water. The detective explains that she is charged as an accomplice to her husband’s murder, and Davis repeats the blues theme from the opening credits, thus bookending the film, in which we never actually see the two lovers together save for in photographs.




The recording of the score was started and completed on the same night, and although Miles Davis’ music is only in the film for twenty minutes, its mood remains with the viewer throughout. Malle’s sparing use of the music echoes Davis’ sympathetic use of space in his playing; Malle doesn’t fill each scene with music, but leaves many sequences silent and brings the music in later on, to add layers of suspense or emotional impact.

After Elevator to the Gallows was released, Malle and Moreau both became ‘stars’ and the film helped pave the way for the Nouvelle Vague. Louis Malle remained humble enough to state that “without Davis I don’t think the film would be as good.”

Miles Davis returned to New York and formed a new band featuring John Coltrane and Cannonball Adderley. With them, he recorded the albums Milestones and Kind of Blue, the latter perhaps the most well know and influential jazz record of all time. He used his new techniques derived from the ‘modal’ system – basic sketches, minimal chord progressions, simple melodic themes, and improvisation – all ideas that first bore fruition on the Elevator to the Gallows score.




Technical Information:

Artist: Miles Davis
Album: Ascenseur pour l'échafaud/Elevator to the Gallows OST
Year: 1958

Audio Codec(s): APE/FLAC8
Encoding: lossless
Rip: EAC APE + .cue/FLAC8 split tracks
Avg. bitrate: 517 kb/s
Sample rate: 44100 Hz
Bits per sample: 16
Channels: 2
File size: 98.7 MB/132 MB
Length: 0:26:22




Personnel:

Miles Davis: trumpet
Barney Wilen: tenor saxophone
Rene Urtreger: piano
Pierre Michelot: bass
Kenny Clarke: drums


Tracklisting:

01. Generique (2:52)
02. L'assassinat de Carala (2:12)
03. Sur l'autoroute (2:21)
04. Julien dans l'ascenseur (2:13)
05. Florence sur les Champs-Elysees (2:53)
06. Diner au Motel (3:59)
07. Evasion de Julien (0:55)
08. Visite du vigile (2:05)
09. Au bar du petit bac (2:55)
10. Chez le photographe du Motel (3:56)





Elevator to the Gallows OST Megaupload Links:

APE + .cue
FLAC8 split tracks

Miles Davis- Kind of Blue (1959)- Superbit Audio- EAC CD Rip (APE/FLAC)

I'm in the middle of a late fifties Miles Davis jag, so I don't have much to say, as I'm wrapped up in the moment. That being said, here's a Superbit version of Kind of Blue that can be played on a normal CD player. It's almost as warm as a vinyl rip, but without the 24-bit hassle. Now if you don't mind, I'll get back to riding my jag. Enjoy.




From Fred Kaplan at Slate Magazine:

Miles Davis' Kind of Blue, which was released 50 years ago today, is a nearly unique thing in music or any other creative realm: a huge hit—the best-selling jazz album of all time—and the spearhead of an artistic revolution. Everyone, even people who say they don't like jazz, likes Kind of Blue. It's cool, romantic, melancholic, and gorgeously melodic. But why do critics regard it as one of the best jazz albums ever made? What is it about Kind of Blue that makes it not just pleasant but important?

On March 2, 1959, when its first tracks were laid down at Columbia Records' 30th Street Studio (the album would be released on Aug. 17), Charlie Parker, the exemplar of modern jazz, the greatest alto saxophonist ever, had been dead for four years, almost to the day. The jazz world was still waiting, longing, for "the next Charlie Parker" and wondering where he'd take the music. Parker and his trumpeter sidekick, Dizzy Gillespie—Bird and Diz, as they were called—had launched the jazz revolution of the 1940s, known as bebop. Their concept was to take a standard blues or ballad and to improvise a whole new melody built on its chord changes. This in itself was nothing new. But they took it to a new level, extending the chords to more intricate patterns, playing them in darting, syncopated phrases, usually at breakneck tempos. The problem was, Parker not only invented bebop, he perfected it. There were only so many chords you could lay down in a 12-bar blues or a 32-bar song, only so many variations you could play on those chords. By the time he died, even Parker was running out of steam.




When Miles Davis came to New York in 1945, at the age of 19, he replaced Gillespie as Parker's trumpeter for a few years and played very much in their style. A decade later, he, too, was wondering what to do next. The answer came from a friend of his named George Russell (who died just last month at the age of 86). A brilliant composer and scholar in his own right, Russell spent the better part of the '50s devising a new theory of jazz improvisation based not on chord changes but on scales or "modes." The kind of music that resulted was often called "modal" jazz. (A scale consists of the eight notes from one octave to the next.* A chord consists of three or four specific notes in that scale, played together or in sequence: For instance, a C chord is C-E-G.) This distinction may seem slight, but its implications were enormous. In a bebop improvisation, the chord changes (which occur when, usually, the pianist changes the harmony from one chord to another) serve as a compass; they point the direction to the next bar or the next phrase. Chords follow a particular pattern (that's why it's easy to hum along with most blues and ballads); you know what the next chord will be; you know that the notes you play will consist of the notes that comprise that chord or some variation on them. Playing blues, you know that the sequence of chord changes will be finished in 12 bars (or, if it's a song, 32 bars), and then you'll either end your solo or start the sequence again.




Russell threw the compass out the window. You could play all the notes of a scale, which is to say any and all notes. "It is for the musician to sing his own song really," Russell wrote, "without having to meet the deadline of a particular chord." In other words, he continued, "you are free to do anything" (the italics were his), "as long as you know where home is"—as long as you know where you're going to wind up. One night in 1958, Russell sat down with Davis at a piano and laid out his theory's possibilities—how to link chords, scales, and melodies in almost unlimited combinations. Miles realized this was a way out of bebop's cul-de-sac. "Man," he told Russell, "if Bird was alive, this would kill him."

In an interview that year with critic Nat Hentoff, Miles explained the new approach. "When you go this way," he said, "you can go on forever. You don't have to worry about changes, and you can do more with time. It becomes a challenge to see how melodically inventive you are. … I think a movement in jazz is beginning, away from the conventional string of chords and a return to emphasis on melodic rather than harmonic variations. There will be fewer chords but infinite possibilities as to what to do with them."

Davis needed one more thing before he could go this route: a pianist who knew how to accompany without playing chords. This was a radical notion. Laying down the chords—supplying the frontline horn players with the compass that kept their improvisations on the right path—was what modern jazz pianists did. Russell recommended someone he'd hired for a few of his own sessions, an intense young white man named Bill Evans.




Evans was conservatory-trained with a penchant for the French Impressionist composers, like Ravel and Debussy, whose harmonies floated airily above the melody line. When Evans started playing jazz, he tended not to play the root of a chord; for instance, when playing a C chord, he'd avoid playing a C note. Instead, he'd play some other note in, or hovering around, the chord, suggesting the chord without locking himself into its restraints. Davis hired Evans for his next recording date, the session that became Kind of Blue, which would be the perfect expression of this new approach to playing. The clearest example of its novelty is a piece, composed (without credit) by Evans, called "Flamenco Sketches." At most jazz sessions, the sheet music that the leader passes around to the band consists of "heads"—the first 12 or so bars of a tune, with the chords notated above. The band plays the head, then each player improvises on the chords. But for "Flamenco Sketches," Evans had jotted down the notes of five scales, each of which expressed a slightly different mood. At the top of the sheet, he wrote, "Play in the sound of these scales." For the band's two saxophone players, John Coltrane on tenor and Julian "Cannonball" Adderley on alto, it was a particularly bizarre instruction. Both were astonishingly adept improvisers, but they built their creations strictly on chords, Adderley as an acolyte of Charlie Parker (with a gospel-infused tone), Coltrane as an almost spiritual explorer, searching for the right sound, the right note, mapping out his voyage on charts of chords, piling and inverting chords on top of chords, expanding each note of a chord to a new chord, not knowing which combinations might work and therefore trying them all.A few months after the Kind of Blue sessions, Coltrane led his own band on an album called Giant Steps, which pressed this quest to its ultimate degree—literally.




Giant Steps marked the end of the bebop frontier; Coltrane knew this, and, afterward, would go in a whole new direction, less tethered to structure, more "free," than even Russell's concept envisioned. But on Kind of Blue, especially "Flamenco Sketches," he took his first—and most lyrical—step out on that brink. The departure from bebop is clear from the album's opening tune, "So What," which would emerge as this new sound's anthem. Evans describes it on the album's liner notes as "a simple figure based on 16 measures of one scale, 8 of another and 8 more of the first … in free rhythmic style." (Loose as it is, this was more structured than some of the pieces. Evans writes that, for "Flamenco Sketches," the improvisations on each scale can last "as long as the soloist wishes.") In this 30-second clip from "So What," Davis improvises on a single scale for all but the last few seconds, when Evans signals a shift to a different scale.

Compare this with "Freddie Freeloader," the album's only conventional blues. (For this track alone, Miles let his usual pianist, Wynton Kelly, a straight blues-and-bebop keyboardist, sit in for Evans). Structurally, it's similar to the early bebop tunes that Davis played with Parker in the mid-1940s, the melody latched to the pianist's chord changes, which occur nearly every bar, as in the 1946 Parker recording of "Ornithology" with Davis as sideman. Now contrast these conventional bop pieces with the most fully developed piece of "modal" jazz" on Kind of Blue, called "All Blues".It has the same feel as the other blues tunes, but listen closely: The horns, blowing harmony in the background, are playing the same notes in each bar; they're not shifting them to follow the chord changes; there are no chord changes. It sounds (hence the album's title) kind of blue.




So Kind of Blue sounded different from the jazz that came before it. But what made it so great? The answer here is simple: the musicians. Throughout his career, certainly through the 1950s and '60s, Miles Davis was an instinctively brilliant recruiter; a large percentage of his sidemen went on to be great leaders, and these sidemen—especially Evans, Coltrane, and Adderley—were among his greatest. They came to the date, were handed music that allowed them unprecedented freedom (to sing their "own song," as Russell put it), and they lived up to the challenge, usually on the first take; they had a lot of their own song to sing. The album's legacy is mixed, precisely for this reason. It opened up a whole new path of freedom to jazz musicians: Those who had something to say thrived; those who didn't, noodled. That's the dark side of what Miles Davis and George Russell (and, a few months later, Ornette Coleman, in his own even-freer style of jazz) wrought: a lot of noodling—New Age noodling, jazz-rock-fusion noodling, blaring-and-squealing noodling—all of it baleful, boring, and deadly (literally deadly, given the rise of tight and riveting rock 'n' roll). Some of their successors confused freedom with just blowing whatever came into their heads, and it turned out there wasn't much there.

Another appealing thing about Kind of Blue, though it's also a heartbreaking thing: There was no sequel. Soon after the recording date, the band broke up. Evans formed his own piano trio; Adderley went back to playing gospel-tinged bop; Coltrane (after making Giant Steps) took his own road to freedom; Davis, too, retreated to earlier forms for the next few years, until he formed his next great band, in the mid-'60s, with younger musicians who pushed him on to more adventurous experiments. Kind of Blue is a one-shot deal, so dreamily perfect you can hardly believe someone created it. Which is why it remains so deeply satisfying, on whatever level you experience it, as moody background music or as the center of your existence. Listen to it 100 times or so, and you still marvel at its spontaneous inventions; now and then, you'll even hear something new.




Technical Information:

Artist: Miles Davis
Album: Kind of Blue (Superbit Audio)
Year: 1959

Audio Codec(s): APE/FLAC8
Encoding: lossless
Rip: EAC APE + .cue/FLAC8 split tracks
Avg. bitrate: 790 kb/s
Sample rate: 44100 Hz
Bits per sample: 16
Channels: 2
File size: 259 MB/266 MB
Length: 0:45:36


Personnel:

Miles Davis: trumpet/bandleader
Bill Evans: piano (except Freddie Freeloader)
Wynton Kelly: piano (Freddie Freeloader)
Jimmy Cobb: drums
Paul Chambers: double bass
John Coltrane: tenor saxophone
Julian "Cannonball" Adderley: alto saxophone


Tracklisting:

01. So What (9:11)
02. Freddie Freeloader (9:48)
03. Blue In Green (5:38)
04. All Blues (11:37)
05. Flamenco Sketches (9:22)





Kind of Blue Megaupload Links:

APE + .cue
FLAC8 split tracks

Miles Davis- The Cool Jazz Sound (1959)- DVD5 (NTSC Format)

Here's some great Miles Davis and John Coltrane video from Robert Herridge's Studio 61 television program from 1959. There is some serious smoking going on in this set, both from the standpoint of musicality and tobacco consumption. I felt as if I was watching an episode of Mad Men.

So pour yourself a scotch on the rocks, light up a soothing "doctor approved" Lucky Strike, and enjoy some Kind of Blue era Miles and Coltrane.




Technical Information:

Title: Miles Davis: The Cool Jazz Sound
Artist: Miles Davis
Date: April, 1959
Location: Robert Herridge's Studio 61, New York, NY

Source: DVD5 Retail
Pro-shot: yes
DVD Format: NTSC
DVD Size: DVD5
Container: .iso + mds
Size: 1.80 GB
Length: 0:25:37
Programs used: ImgBurn

Resolution: 720x480
Aspect Ratio: 4:3
Video: MPEG2 @ ~8900 kb/s
Frame Rate: 29.97

Audio: Dolby AC3 stereo 48000 Hz English @ 192 kb/s
Subtitles: none

Menu: untouched
Video: untouched
DVD extras: personnel




Personnel:

Miles Davis: trumpet, flugelhorn
John Coltrane: tenor sax, alto sax
Wynton Kelly: piano
Paul Chambers: bass
Jimmy Cobb: drums

feat. the Gil Evans Orchestra


Setlist:

01. So What
02. The Duke
03. Blues for Pablo
04. New Rhumba




(Use JDownloader to automate downloading)

Miles Davis Megaupload Links