Miles Davis: Miles Ahead
One of my perpetual complaints is the treatment of the 1950s in popular lore, in journalism and entertainment. The way some of these people talk, you’d think they really do not understand that Ozzie and Harriet and Leave it to Beaver were sitcoms, not documentaries, the silly pap of their time just as Desperate Housewives is of ours. Or even that physical reality was very much the same then as now: that colors, for instance, existed, and that human beings were physically the same creatures we are now, although they dressed differently. The usual view is that life was gray, repressed and miserable from roughly 1945 until 1964, when, as Philip Larkin tells us, sex was invented.
In fact that twenty-year period was very fertile culturally and produced some enormous artistic achievements (granted, much of it was devoted to criticizing the society that produced it—still, it was produced). Data supporting that statement is maybe a project for another day, but this album is one instance. The art of jazz reached some kind of pinnacle in the 1950s, and Miles Ahead is a summit among a number of towering peaks. It’s one of Miles Davis’s best, and that means it’s one of the best, period.
As even casual jazz fans know, this, like several other Davis classics, is a collaboration with Gil Evans, who produced and arranged it and by most accounts deserves a great deal of the credit for it. It could be described as big-band art jazz and for me it’s the pure sound of sophisticated American culture in the 1950s: the instrumentation is like that of the old big bands, but the music is considerably more adventurous; it’s tremendously energetic and inventive, yet still somehow cool and elegant. It’s music for intelligent adults—for grown-ups, not adolescents and especially not for those who have made it their mission to remain adolescents far past their teens.
If you don’t know it, you need to. Here’s the AMG page.
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Light On Dark Water 
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