Jazz Track

Jazz Track brings together two pivotal but very different Miles Davis dates: the improvised score he recorded in Paris on December 4-5, 1957 for Louis Malle's "Ascenseur pour l'échafaud," and three standards cut in New York on May 26, 1958 with the sextet that would soon record Kind of Blue. The Paris session is one of jazz's most celebrated instances of scoring to picture on the spot, with Davis and a mostly French pickup band reportedly improvising while watching projected footage, yielding a spare, atmospheric music that helped define the vocabulary of jazz film scoring. The New York side documents the first studio pairing of Davis with Bill Evans alongside Cannonball Adderley, John Coltrane, Paul Chambers, and Jimmy Cobb, the same lineup that would shortly make Kind of Blue, and its reading of "Stella By Starlight" is widely regarded by musicians and critics as among the finest on record. Arriving at the hinge between Davis's hard-bop years on Prestige and his modal breakthroughs of 1959, the album shows him working in two starkly different contexts within months of each other. Assembling a European film score alongside a domestic studio date made for an unusual pairing, but it preserved both performances for American audiences before the film's own soundtrack saw domestic release. Critically the record has often stood in the shadow of Davis's more unified statements, yet the Evans-Adderley-Coltrane tracks are prized as essential precursors to Kind of Blue and the Paris material remains a touchstone of jazz-and-film history.