on green dolphin street -- 4/26/24

26 Apr 2024

on green dolphin street -- 4/26/24

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Today's selection -- from 3 Shades of Blue by James Kaplan. One of the greatest jazz classics of the 1950s received a new birth of sorts from Miles Davis and his sextet in May of 1958:

“On Monday, May 26, 1958—Mile’s thirty-second birthday— [his new] sextet made its first recording, for Columbia, at Thirtieth Street. It was a cool, pretty spring morning: the players filtered in, made small talk, took their places. In the booth in place of George Avakian, who'd gone to Los Angeles to start a record label for Warner Bros., was a new producer named Cal Lampley, a Blackman who in a certain way represented Miles's road not taken—he was a Juilliard-trained pianist and composer whose job at Columbia put bread on the table. (He would also be the first Black producer to work with white musicians.)

“An ordinary Monday record date; yet, Peter Pettinger writes, ‘no one could have anticipated the outcome of this session, which produced playing of such intensity, spirituality, and Olympian beauty that it ranked as one of those crucial moments in the history of art after which things were never quite the same again.’

“The band recorded three ballads that day: the Polish composer Bronislaw Kaper's ‘On Green Dolphin Street,’ a Miles sort-of original called ‘FranDance,’ and Ned Washington and Victor Young's standard ‘Stella by Starlight.’ The ballads would take up the entire second side of an LP,Jazz Track, that Columbia would issue in late 1959. Side 1 contained the soundtrack Miles had recorded for Elevator to the Gallows.

“The Kaper and Young tunes both had cinematic origins: ‘On Green Dolphin Street’ came, rather improbably, from Green Dolphin Street, a 1947 MGM historical disaster movie (based on a nineteenth-century earthquake and tsunami in New Zealand), for which Kaper had written the score. Similarly, Victor Young had scored a 1944 horror film, The Uninvited, which contained a played-but-not-sung song within the story titled ‘Stella by Starlight.’ Two years later Washington wrote lyrics for it, and it caught on both as a popular song and as a basis for jazz instrumentals.

“‘On Green Dolphin Street’ hadn't been much recorded before Miles came to it—some say Cannonball Adderley brought the tune to his attention. Jimmy Dorsey and his orchestra did the movie soundtrack, including a vocal version of the number; Ahmad Jamal and the guitarist Barney Kessel had each recorded the song in trio settings. Yet the Davis sextet's reading stands alone as a thing of magnificence: it would turn the tune into a jazz standard.

“Miles muffs the melody almost immediately, as he so often did to lay claim to a song, then continues his solo, which proceeds in different weathers, like an early-spring day with dark clouds swiftly scudding across a clear sky: by turns haunting, melancholy, joyous. Adderley solos, Coltrane solos (one blending seamlessly into the next, Adderley astonishingly fluid, Coltrane equally so, only wilder and stranger), Evans solos, all gorgeously. Chambers guides them with quiet urgency, often standing on a single note in pedal point to convey hushed suspense. Cobb swings happily throughout.

Davis in his New York City home, c. 1955–1956; photograph by Tom Palumbo

“Miles's new pianist brought far more to the party than virtuosity. ‘Touch is everything,’ the pianist and bandleader Jon Batiste told me. ‘Touch is the thing that most people will recognize. Touch is your voice.’

“Evans's voice, fully realized on the first song recorded at this historic session, was one altogether new in jazz. ‘With the very first chord [ on 'On Green Dolphin Street'], he hit his true vein, refuting those piano technicians who maintain that the instrument is incapable of individual expression.

“There is a way of weighting the touch, distributing the timbre, and breathing the approach that says, listen. The imagination can manipulate ivory, felt, steel, and spruce to sublime ends. Evans called it putting emotion into the piano, and he proved that it can be done; it is the artist's mind over matter. The sounds he created on this date were so incredible that he might have invented a new instrument. This was no ordinary piano but a new breed of animal, the familiar instrument transcended. As a matter of fact, the studio piano was sadly out of tune, but we hardly notice; on the contrary, the enduring impression is of beautiful piano sound, such is the depth of the player's message.

“It was a message that Evans had only recently found himself capable of delivering. Like Bird, like Miles, like Coltrane, he'd discovered that technical facility was only a way station on the road to the summit of the art: ‘You have to spend a lot of years at the keyboard before what's inside can get through your hands and into the piano,’ he said.

“For years and years that was a constant frustration to me. I wanted to get that expressive thing in, but somehow it didn't happen. When I was about twenty-six-about a year before I went with Miles—that was the first time I had attained a certain degree of expressiveness in my playing. Believe me, I had played a lot of jazz before then. I started when I was thirteen. I was putting some of the feelings I had into the piano. Of course, having the feelings is another thing, another matter.

On ‘Green Dolphin Street,’ Evans's hard-won lyricism met Miles's and began a brand-new conversation. ‘Fran-Dance’ (Davis's take on the old children's song ‘Put Your Little Foot Right In’) and ‘Stella by Starlight’ continued it. Miles was in love again that spring, having recently run into Frances Taylor, who was performing on Broadway in West Side Story, and started seeing her regularly. By May she had moved into his big loft at 881 Tenth Avenue, between Fifty-seventh and Fifty-eighth Streets; they would marry the following year.

“Part of the quiet revolution that Miles was engineering was a new emphasis on solos. ‘I used to use the solo as a secondary thing, more or less, to the band,’ Cannonball Adderley would later tell Ira Gitler, in an interview for the magazine Jazz.

“The ensembles were the thing; cleanliness, the ensembles, all the fundamentals of music. And listening to Miles—who is not a good trumpet player but a great soloist—you know what I mean. All of a sudden the fundamentals don't mean that much to me because he's so brilliant otherwise. A solo is like the way he thinks about the composition and the solo became the thing ... he's tired of tunes. You know, he says, ‘You play the melody, then everybody blows and you play the melody and the tune is ended and that's a jazz performance.’ He thinks a solo can be a composition if it's expressed the right way.

“Adderley came to this understanding gradually; Coltrane got it immediately. And there was immediate blowback. ‘When Jazz Track reached France,’ Szwed writes, ‘a letter from CBS International complained that on side 2, tracks 1 and 2 [‘Green Dolphin Street’ and ‘Fran-Dance’], one of the saxophone solos was “off,” and that the quality control department had checked to make sure that there was no mechanical distortion in the tracks. [Columbia producer] Teo Macero wrote back that “nothing was wrong, and John Coltrane is a great musician.”’

“And great is how his May 26 solos sound—to our ears. But it's useful to remember, as Szwed tells us, that while ‘today, this music has the sound of classic ballads, coming straight from the roots of jazz ... at the time, these recordings had the power to shock.’ And the shock of the new—as the art critic Robert Hughes would later describe the unsettling power of American abstract expressionist painting, which was evolving along a postwar arc similar to that of American jazz—would keep getting more shocking.”