Birth of the Cool released anew: YRB’s Jonn Nubian talks to the next Miles Davis generation
Before Kind of Blue, the best jazz album of all time, the Miles David Nonet released Birth of the Cool. That groundbreaking album gets featured in a new release today. YRB‘s executive editor Jonn Nubian talks about it with the son and a nephew of Miles Davis .
“70 years ago, in a nondescript basement room behind a Chinese laundry located at 14 West 55th Street in midtown Manhattan, a group of like-minded jazz modernists formed a groundbreaking collective,” reads the interview intro about The Complete Birth of the Cool.
“Among them were jazz headliners soon-to-be: Gerry Mulligan, Lee Konitz, Max Roach, John Lewis, the arranger Gil Evans and significantly, the 22-year-old trumpeter Miles Davis…”
Miles Davis became the leader and soon a legend.
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More about Birth of the Cool
Featuring unusual instrumentation and several notable musicians, the music consisted of innovative arrangements influenced by classical music techniques such as polyphony, and marked a major development in post-bebop jazz. As the title suggests, these recordings are considered seminal in the history of cool jazz. Most of them were originally released in the 10-inch 78-rpm format and are all approximately three minutes long. As of 2019, Lee Konitz is the only surviving member of the Birth of the Cool sessions.
Wikipedia
Miles Davis Nonet
[…] No surprise, in a room set aside for videos, conversation turned to Miles Davis and the seminal jazz album, Birth of the Cool. […]