The performance was given in 1959, three years after Miles' legendary album The Birth of Cool, around the same time that he released the seminal Kind of Blue. John Coltrane, Wynton Kelly, Paul Chambers and Jimmy Cobb, and the Gil Evans Orchestra, among others, all joined Davis at the show. This is an important document of a musician who was responsible for changing the face of the American music scene many times over, and will be an appreciable addition to the collection of any jazz enthusiast. The song list includes “So What," “The Duke," “Blues for Pablo," and “New Rhumba."
Stars Of Jazz is a DVD series featuring some of the greatest jazz legends of all time, from Duke Ellington, Count Basie, Billie Holiday, B.B. King and many more greats. The first feature is Miles Davis- The Cool Jazz Sound, Rerelased in 2004 DVD.
This 25-minute DVD, rescued from an old television program, is one of the best and most essential jazz videos. The last Miles Davis video featured him in the midst of his horrible 1980s synthesizer period.
But The Cool Jazz Sound captures him, young and angry, in 1959, right around the time of his masterpiece “Kind of Blue." Miles performs four tunes in the studio, and a handful of cameras swirl and swoop around, trying to capture visually the mood of the music. If that's not enough, another genius, John Coltrane, is right by his side contributing tenor sax to the tune “So What." The fuzzy black-and-white video looks as if it were mastered from a kinescope, that is, filmed from a television monitor during a live taping. But, more importantly, the sound is excellent.
For more information contact All About Jazz.
