{"id":18875,"date":"2020-06-09T05:30:28","date_gmt":"2020-06-09T09:30:28","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/?p=18875"},"modified":"2026-05-21T17:40:31","modified_gmt":"2026-05-21T21:40:31","slug":"album-review-miles-davis-music-from-and-inspired-by-birth-of-the-cool","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/2020\/06\/09\/album-review-miles-davis-music-from-and-inspired-by-birth-of-the-cool\/","title":{"rendered":"Album Review: Miles Davis \u2013 Music From and Inspired by \u2018Birth of the Cool\u2019"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"There\u2019s a trend in recent years: when releasing a film\u2019s companion audio, the CD is sometimes branded as \u201cMusic From and Inspired By\u2026\u201d That gives to compiler of the audio document a freer hand to include material that is conceptually relevant even if it didn\u2019t feature in the film itself. Such releases can\u2019t strictly be categorized as soundtracks, though they largely fulfill the same role.<\/p>\n

At their best, such quasi-soundtrack releases are more than a companion to the films with which they\u2019re connected. They expand upon the ideas of the film using the audio medium. That\u2019s the case with the, um, \u201csoundtrack\u201d CD for Miles Davis: Birth of the Cool<\/i>.<\/p>\n

(Note: This release should not be confused with a similarly-titled album, Complete Birth of the Cool<\/em><\/a>.)<\/p>\n

Within this discussion, I won\u2019t concern myself with the film itself, for a simple reason: I\u2019ve yet to screen it (though it\u2019s definitely on my must-viewing list). But the CD has virtues all its own. Customarily, I\u2019d look somewhat askance at a music CD that featured spoken-word commentary for 14 of its 28 tracks. Interesting though they might be, those bits of dialogue could hamper the flow of musical enjoyment. Oddly enough, in the case of this release, they\u2019re not altogether out of place. Moreover, many of the quotes — from Jimmy Heath, Ashley Kahn, Carlos Santana<\/a> and others — are quite brief; taken as a whole, they only add up to a few minutes.<\/p>\n

The sequencing of the music isn\u2019t strictly chronological, but as a whole it provides a good overview of Miles\u2019 body of work. It\u2019s not strictly a best-of; for my money such a collection would have to include at least some of Jack Johnson<\/i>. And there\u2019s only one Kind of Blue<\/i> track here.<\/p>\n

But the set does do a good job of hitting the high spots. The earliest track is a 1947 recording of \u201cDonna Lee\u201d featuring Miles with Charlie Parker. And (with an important exception I\u2019ll address in a moment) while there\u2019s only one post-1970 track, for some Davis fans, that\u2019ll be enough.<\/p>\n

As it happens, I had more or less written off late-period Miles after hearing an uninspired Cyndi Lauper cover some years ago. But the title track of 1986\u2019s Tutu<\/i> is better than I might have expected, and underscores the point that while you might not have loved everything Davis did (many hated and still despise the groundbreaking Bitches Brew<\/i>), he always, always<\/i> pushed forward. \u201cTutu\u201d features synthesizer programming from the always interesting Jason Miles<\/a>. Hearing it on this collection has piqued my interest in giving Davis\u2019 later work a fresh listen.<\/p>\n

And in some ways, that\u2019s the point of this album. Over the years, Miles Davis the personality has threatened to overshadow his work. It\u2019s a fair bet that many more viewers saw his 60 Minutes<\/em> interview in 1988 than ever heard a note of his music. And to be honest, there was little in that interview that would have endeared the musician to a viewer unfamiliar with him. And those who read (or even heard about) Miles\u2019 autobiography know that a great deal of it is variations on \u201cthat muthafucka owes me money\u201d and such.<\/p>\n

So a disc like Miles Davis: Birth of the Cool<\/i> largely sets all that aside and gives us the reason that his name is still spoken in reverent tones. At its best \u2013 which is often \u2013 the music here is transcendent. Spend five minutes with \u201c\u2019Round Midnight\u201d and you\u2019ll be entranced. Mere words cannot covey the beauty that lies therein.<\/p>\n

A defining characteristic of Davis\u2019 work with producer Teo Macero was his cut-up method of constructing finished recordings. Not quite a musical corollary to the manner in which William Burroughs wrote his books, what Davis and Macero did was take the best bits from a mass of recordings and then fly them into a finished track that \u2013 often as not \u2013 sounded nothing like what one would have heard being played live in the studio. That approach alone \u2013 as controversial as it was innovative – would be used to great effect by Frank Zappa, among others.<\/p>\n

And as a kind of tribute to that spirit of adventure (and to provide something special for the fan who has it all already), the CD includes a new track. The composition credit for \u201cHail to the Real Chief\u201d lists both Davis and synthesizer player Lenny White. Featuring a current-day band that included Davis scion Vince Wilburn, Jr., guitarist John Scofield, bassist Marcus Miller and others, the track features previously-unheard recordings of Davis himself on trumpet. It rocks. It\u2019s funky. And it hints at what Miles might have sounded like were he still alive and making music in 2020.<\/p>\n

That notable track aside, Miles Davis: Birth of the Cool<\/i> is perhaps marginally worthwhile for the Miles fan who has most or all of his recordings. But it is most highly recommended to those looking for a tidy entry point into the music \u2013 and (save those dialogue snippets) just<\/i> the music \u2013 of this pioneer.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

There\u2019s a trend in recent years: when releasing a film\u2019s companion audio, the CD is sometimes branded as \u201cMusic From and Inspired By\u2026\u201d That gives to compiler of the audio […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":18876,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_exactmetrics_skip_tracking":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[19,32,42,49,65,70],"tags":[1482],"class_list":["post-18875","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-compilation","category-fusion","category-jazz","category-new-release","category-review","category-soundtrack","tag-miles-davis","cat-19-id","cat-32-id","cat-42-id","cat-49-id","cat-65-id","cat-70-id","has_thumb"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18875","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=18875"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18875\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":31576,"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18875\/revisions\/31576"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/18876"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=18875"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=18875"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=18875"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}