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Miles Davis. Birth of the Cool

You knew I'd get around to this. These are little masterpieces, none of them longer than three and a half minutes. The playing of Miles is really well complemented by the alto sax of Lee Konitz and the baritone of Gerry Mulligan. Max plays on some of these tracks. The absence of piano on some tracks is compensated by the fullness of the horn arrangements, with French horn and Tuba.

I would have named this blog "Boplicity," after a tune here, but the name was already in use of several other things.

Whatever you think Miles's racial attitudes might have been, I think nobody looked more purely at musical talent. The collaborations with Gil Evans, his work with Konitz and Mulligan here, his hiring of Bill Evans (no relation) for Kind of Blue. His hiring of Dave Holland and numerous other up and coming musicians in the later phases of his work... He really had the most racially mixed groups of any comparable figure of his time, I would argue.