Jazz Articles about Barney Wilen

About Barney Wilen

Album Review

Miles Davis: Ascenseur pour l'Échafaud

Read "Ascenseur pour l'Échafaud" reviewed by Jack Kenny

by Jack Kenny
May 27, 2026

A legend has grown up around the music Miles Davis created for Louis Malle's debut film Lift to the Scaffold (Ascenseur pour l'échafaud). The story goes that Davis arrived at the Paris studio having never seen the film. He watched the rushes once, then improvised as the footage rolled with his European quintet--René Urtreger on piano, Barney Wilen on tenor saxophone, Pierre Michelot on bass, and Kenny Clarke on drums. The music was recorded on the night of December 4 ...

Album Review

Miles Davis Quintet: In Concert At The Olympia, Paris 1957

Read "In Concert At The Olympia, Paris 1957" reviewed by Ian Patterson

by Ian Patterson
January 7, 2024

Another live Miles Davis recording. Well, once the studio outtakes have dried up, this is the only seam left to mine. Happily, with advances in sound technology, old radio broadcasts are increasingly being dusted down and treated to a little digital TLC. Since 1983, Fresh Sounds Records has been a leading light in reissues and archival releases (see Fresh Sound Records and the Legacy of Recorded Jazz), in addition to producing many hundreds of contemporary artists. This one from Jordi ...

Album Review

Barney Wilen: Zodiac

by Chris May
May 28, 2022

Tenor saxophonist Barney Wilen's Zodiac is the soundtrack for a mid-1960s film that never got off the storyboard. The backstory... Like other French jazzmen who came of age in the second half of the 1950s, Wilen benefited from the penchant nouvelle vague film directors had for jazz soundtracks. Aged twenty years, Wilen cut his filmic teeth in 1957 recording under Miles Davis' musical direction on Louis Malle's Ascenseur Pour l'Echafaud. With Davis and Malle on his c.v., other film work ...

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Album Review

Barney Wilen and His Amazing Free Rock Band: Dear Prof. Leary

Read "Dear Prof. Leary" reviewed by John Kelman

by John Kelman
July 20, 2008

Any album combining '60s hits like “Ode to Billie Joe" and “Respect" with Ornette Coleman's “Lonely Woman" deserves more than a passing glance. The late French saxophonist Barney Wilen was already thirty-one when he recorded Dear Prof. Leary with His Amazing Free Rock Band in 1968 for the German MPS label. Best-known by then (and, likely, afterwards as well) as Miles Davis' saxophonist on the trumpeter's noir-esque soundtrack to director Louis Malle's Ascenseur pour L'échafaud (1958), Promising Music's reissue of ...