Miles Davis - Birth of the Cool

Birth of the Cool is one of the greatest albums of all times. It is timeless and as relivent today as ever. This is a great first album for anyone getting into Miles or Jazz.

When you realize that these sides were cut in 1949, you can only but marvel at the both the sophistication of both the music and the sound. For those of you that might think that anything recorded almost 60 years ago must sound primitive, think again. This is modern music, timeless music, and will pay dividends on a good sound system. How many 58 year old recording can say that?

This is great stuff, period.

... but I do like and own almost all of Miles Davis's albums. I really don't care for "Birth of the Cool". The sound quality is great, the musicianship is excellent but it feels clinical and cold. Again, I am not an avid fan of jazz; I do not have the background or education of a jazz fan, but the reason I have such a deep Miles collection is that his music, by and far, is very moving. Not this album. Though technically proficient "Birth of the Cool" does not have a mood or "feel" to it that I associate with Miles Davis. If you are not a big-time jazz fan per se I would not recommend this as a starting point for Miles Davis; save it for the experts!

For ANYONE who is considering collecting any of the All-Time Classics THIS is a Must-Have to complete it!!! This has even been used in an epidsode of The Simpsons, so that should tell you something. This 'Flows' from the start to the finish. Although this has been released on an Expanded Edition with an poorly recorded Unreleased 'Live' Session, but THIS is The One to have in your collection.

This is simply beautiful music;
fresh from the be-bop academy of Charlie Parker, Miles Davis has finally proven himself as an carismatic leader...

Having spent some time at Julliard and (according to his own autobiography), having studied some classics of the classical western music, Miles also drew from some earlier interesting models of jazz arranging - Claude Thornhill is mentioned most of the time, but young Gerry Mulligan has heralded this style even in some arrangements for Gene Krupa's big band (not to mention some of the "advanced" tracks by Henderson, Ellington and other classical bands).

This is therefore a beautiful blend of the be-bop musical language and more subdued and subtle arranging ("neo-classical"), creating a genuine and very influential cool breeze that will influence future cool and west-coast jazz artists. Gerry Mulligan seems to be the best arranger of the album (although Gil Evans is also excellent), while Miles, Mulligan and Konitz give the most inspiring solos if you want my humble opinion...

Well, since other have put it so eloquently, I'll only add my 5 stars...
Naturally, if you liked Porgy and Bess or Sketches of SpainSketches Of Spain you're bound to love this as well...

The songs on The Birth of the Cool are like the ninja of old. They do what they need to, fast, and leave. But unlike ninja attacks, these songs (which include classics like "Jeru", "Venus de Milo" and "Boplicity") are not painful in the least. The arrangements are tight and the songs are melodic, slightly Hollywood-esque but quite beautiful and well-performed. The songs themselves are also quite brief, as I implied a few sentence back - nothing over five minutes, in fact. The nonet plays together quite well, complementing each other throughout. They all have the mellow sound down - the album kinda sounds alike, but with great songs like "Rogue", "Rocker" and "Israel" on hand, who can complain? Now the only song I don't really like is "Darn That Dream", which falls in my list of Ten Songs We've All Heard Too Many Times Before. As for the rest? Get it. Not before Kind of Blue, 'Round about Midnight or In a Silent Way, but still get it!

can't go wrong with this Miles Davis recording in your collection. With arrangements by Gerry Mulligan, Gil Evans and John Lewis this is a compilation of 12 sides recorded by the Miles Davis nonet(nine musicians). This legendary recording is a jazz classic. The music moves away from bepop which tended to smaller groups of musicians and the music from this compilation led to the birth of the cool West Coast Sound of jazz though it originated on the East Coast. Beautiful arrangements and lively tunes. Gil Evans would meet with musicians in his apartment on the top of Chinese laundry and help compose the arrangements. The list of musicians on these recordings includes Miles Davis on trumpet, Gerry Mulligan on baritone sax, Lee Konitz alto sax, Max Roach on drums. A must for any jazz collection and jazz beginner. Gil Evans would later team with Miles on Porgy and Bess, Sketches of Spain.

These recordings are a must have for an understanding of the shear evolution of jazz, but not the best.

There a few good songs on the ablum but it isn't great

Having only recently jumped on the Jazz scene as a 24 year veteran of the drum, i don't know as if i am qualified to write a review for those into this boat, but i must say that as a neophyte, i am and will be for a long time to come, a Davis fan. And this, the birth of the cool is an album that i will treasure as one of my own. very smooth sounds, breathy on the horns and completely listenable, a must have for any burgeoning collection.

The auspicious title really does say it all for this collection of trumpeter Miles Davis' 1949 nonet dates. In these dozen performances a whole new school of jazz was created, as former beboppers Davis and drummer Max Roach joined forces with progressive composers, arrangers and players such as Gil Evans, Gerry Mulligan and John Lewis to explore the subtler and moodier side of the genre from a vituoso's standpoint. Mellow as the results are for the most part, there's a world of complexity and detail to be found here which no self-respecting jazzhead (nor anyone else who really cares about music) can afford to miss.
As would often be the case throughout his long and varied career, Davis is featured on these sessions primarily as a player and crafter of atmosphere. Despite having brought the sizeable combo (which also featured such famed blowers as Lee Konitz on alto saxophone and Kai Winding on trombone) together and serving as its nominal head, the Maestro takes only one half-credit as a composer on these dates, with the bulk of the charts coming from Mulligan, Lewis and of course Evans, whose big band orchestrations had provided Miles with his initial inspiration. These other gentlemen would also incorporate the innovations realized on the BIRTH OF THE COOL sessions far more extensively into their respective subsequest careers than would the trumpeter himself, thus marking this classic set of recordings as not only a once-in-a-lifetime supergroup summit, but a truly pivotal moment in jazz history.

The Whole cd Is Great,But Boplicity Is By Far The best thing on the disc-the most innovative,swinging,cool,hip mid tempo blocked harmony track of it's era.Years ahead of it's time,i couldn't beleive it dates back to 1949.What a landmark- still hip as hell 56 years on,and written only 8 or so years after the much squarer(But still great in it's way)In The Mood.

Kind of Blue is an infinitely more appealing album for fans of jazz small-groups and improvisation. That's why I'd suggest that if you have to spend your money on ONE Miles album, you go buy "Kind of Blue".

But once you understand "Kind of Blue", and get the concept that Miles was aiming for with that album, go explore what he was doing before he got there. And start here.

This album is the sound of jazz that I fell in love with at age 14, after listening to the likes of Tommy Dorsey and Frank Sinatra for years and years. I didn't even know "Kind of Blue" existed at that time, but I loved the soft sounds this album was throwing on my young ears.

What I didn't realize at the time was how harmonically complex and staggeringly innovative this album is/was. Miles plays with a nonet, uses a tuba for a few baselines, strips jazz of its aggressiveness, and STILL manages to make an album that Swings with genuine purpose.

This is a soft album that is not a soft album. This is a soft album that is accessible, sure. But it has got something underneat its softness: soul.

I was ordering some other stuff on Amazon, T.V. on in the background. I heard Lisa Simpson say something about Miles Davis, Birth of the Cool and ordered the CD to get the order over $25 for free shipping or some other impulsive reason. My third-grade students really enjoyed listening to this CD while they worked on their assignments. Very accessible jazz and should be in every collection.

Miles Davis is awesome - Birth of the Cool deserves 50 stars.

This is one those records that on hearing the first time, one might wonder "What is going on here?" Even now, it has a unique , fresh sound, with some very interesting harmonics and solos, not to mention rhythms that don't swing, but may be like a mellow bop. You can tell all the players are right on target thruout. It may seem a bit dissonent on first hearing, but no doubt this CD deserves its reputation as innovative and timeless.Some very nice listening once you've gotten the feel for it!

I really like miles davis but this cd I listen to the least it's just to structured for miles and simple awesome jazz it's just I'am more of a fan of kind of blue and [...]brew songs like spanish key and so what are my favorites

This is one of the most unique jazz albums ever produced and is an essential. Miles's first essential album has him with a nonet (Two saxes (an alto and bari), one trombone, one french horn, one tuba, a rythymn section, and of course Miles himself). There are three different nonets on this cd with that instrumentation, and he is joined by such greats as John Lewis, Gerry Mulligan, Max Roach, Lee Konitz, J.J. Johnson, and Kai Winding. Each of the twelve tracks is unique in its own way, even though the same mood is sustained throughout the remainder of the album. Even though all of the tracks are good, some highlights are: "Move", "Jeru", "Boplicity", and "Israel". So if you're a fan of Miles's quintet/sextet stuff of the fifties and sixties, and want to hear him in a different setting than "Birth of the Cool" is for you!

The music on this CD was recorded in 1949/50, but acquired its famous album title only retrospectively, in 1957. As a jazz term, `cool' means something more specific than the vague, all-purpose adjective-noun it has since become. It came to particular prominence in the 1950s to describe a more cerebral, less impassioned way of playing jazz. It's generally supposed that these sessions were part of the inspiration for the `cool school' of jazz.which flourished especially on the West Coast in the 1950s. That's possibly the main reason for the historical importance of the `Birth of the Cool' sessions and the album may therefore be of more appeal to those interested in the historical development of jazz than to listeners who merely enjoy Miles's own playing.

The historical interest centres primarily on these pieces as examples of jazz composition and arrangement. Along with the work of composer-arranger Tadd Dameron and some of Gil Evans's arranging for the Claude Thornhill Band, these scores were innovative in adapting the procedures of `Be-Bop' to orchestrated jazz and in the ways in which they deployed the instruments of the nine-piece band, which included, unusually, French horn and tuba alongside trumpet, trombone and alto and baritone saxes. They skilfully exploit the variety of timbres and tone colours to create a sound suggestive of a larger band. This is especially true of Evans's pieces, which show his interest in rich, unusual and shifting chord voicings, although Mulligan's more ingenious arrangements also create some full-sounding, inventive passages. There's a brilliant moment in Evans's arrangement of `Boplicity' when, within the space of just a few bars, a thematic figure spreads through the instrumentation with a kind of `rippling' effect as a bridging section between Mulligan's and Miles's solos. It is inspired scoring in its own right, but it also seems to anticipate in miniature some of what Evans was later to do with larger jazz orchestras. His slow ballad arrangement, `Moondreams', makes use of a favourite Evans technique of varying the chord voicings for different sections of a composition, to give the piece a sense of variety and continuous development. In the final bars he also employs a kind of `impressionist' technique when the music seems to dissolve into little asymmetrical fragments of melody and rhythm before resolving itself in a brief, quiet coda.

Some of the other tracks - like John Lewis's arrangement of the up-tempo, `Move' - are entertaining as scaled-down `big-band' performances without being as strikingly original as Evans's scores. John Carisi's contribution, `Israel', is one of the most adventurous themes on the album, seeming to point a way forward from `Be-Bop' to a more advanced harmonic style, but doing so by means of a skilful variation on one of jazz's most `traditional' forms, the 12-bar blues. It may be that Gerry Mulligan's arrangements tend to be underrated by comparison with Evans's - perhaps because they sound more influenced by the styles and procedures of mainstream jazz. But his scores have their innovative touches, like the rhythmic and harmonic `dislocation' he gives to the middle-eight section of `Jeru'. In their own right they are characterful, enjoyable pieces, and since he contributed most of the arrangements he was a major factor in the success of the album and its subsequent influence. He contributes an interesting reminiscence of the sessions as an addition to the liner notes.

Another interesting `historical' dimension of Birth of the Cool is the collaboration of three composer-musicians who in the 1950s went on to make major contributions to modern jazz through their subsequent individual projects: Lewis with the Modern Jazz Quartet, Mulligan with his pianoless quartets and Concert Jazz Band, and Evans with his later collaborations with Miles and others.

This was, I believe, Miles's first album under his own name; but it's his early-fifties small-group sessions that best document his progress as a jazz improviser, particularly those which produced such classics as "Walkin", "Bemsha Swing" and "Bags' Groove" - as well as a series of fine ballad performances (there is little ballad playing on this album). Arguably, Miles had been a `cool' musician from the start of his career with Charlie Parker. If so, these sessions can be seen as part of a process (begun during his time with Parker) of his adapting the `hot' medium of Be-Bop to his own stylistic purposes. However, the liner note argues a contrary view: that Miles could not really be categorised as a `cool' player. For me, Miles's improvised solos here are less interesting than his later work was to become, when the overt expression of feeling had became more prominent in his music. He was some way from developing that individual sound, with its brooding `flat' tonality and emotive colouring, which from the late 1950s was to make him one of the most immediately identifiable soloists in jazz. An additional limitation is that the soloists were restricted to very short solos, so that one of the strengths in Miles's later music - his ability to `build' an improvisation over two or more choruses - was not possible in these sessions. Nevertheless, there are some well-constructed solos from Miles, especially on "Jeru", "Godchild" and "Rocker", suggesting that the need for brevity encouraged him to make short solos as structured and `eventful' as he could.

So, historically significant though it is, Birth of the Cool won't necessarily appeal to those who have discovered Miles's music via Kind of Blue, Milestones, Sketches of Spain, etc. Less immediate in its appeal than that later work, it is perhaps music that you have to `learn to like' - though maybe that's generally true of modern jazz.