Miles ’56: The Prestige Recordings
There’s a paradox at the heart of this box set worth sitting with before you press play. The recordings collected here — drawn from two marathon sessions at Rudy Van Gelder’s Hackensack studio in May and October of 1956 — were made primarily as a contractual obligation. Davis was moving to Columbia and needed to clear his debt to Prestige before he could go. The quintet played through the material they’d been honing for months on the road, knocked out nearly everything in first takes and went home. What they left behind was, almost incidentally, some of the most important jazz ever committed to tape.
The sessions produced four of the most revered albums in hard bop history: Cookin’, Relaxin’, Workin’ and Steamin’, released by Prestige over the following years while Davis was already building his Columbia career. The musicians involved — Davis on trumpet, John Coltrane on tenor saxophone, Red Garland at the piano, Paul Chambers on bass and Philly Joe Jones on drums — were still ascending, their reputations not yet fully sealed, which in retrospect makes the assurance of these recordings all the more remarkable. You can hear a band that has played these tunes so many times in small, smoky clubs that the arrangements are almost unconscious, leaving space only for the music itself.
Released as part of a year-long centennial celebration, the box set reorders the material chronologically rather than by original album, which reshapes the listening experience in interesting ways. An earlier March session with Sonny Rollins — featuring a luminous reading of Dave Brubeck’s “In Your Own Sweet Way” and the slow-burning “Vierd Blues” — opens the collection, giving the first great quintet recordings that follow a sense of arrival. These were not rehearsed studio constructions but performances drawn from a shared live repertoire, and you feel that immediately.
The ballads remain the emotional centrepiece. “It Never Entered My Mind” opens with Garland’s arpeggiated introduction before Davis enters with his Harmon mute, close-miked and intimate, playing with a melodic economy that feels almost conversational. “My Funny Valentine” is similarly unhurried, Davis shaping the melody as though discovering it rather than interpreting it. On these tracks, the rhythm section functions less as support and more as atmosphere — enveloping the soloists without ever constraining them.
Newly remastered from the original analog tapes by Grammy-winning engineer Paul Blakemore, the box sounds exceptional — Chambers’ bass sitting in the mix with a physical weight that earlier pressings rarely captured, and Jones’ brushwork audible in its full textural detail. The accompanying liner notes by Ashley Kahn provide useful historical framing, though the music barely needs it. A hundred years on from the man’s birth, it doesn’t ask for context. It just plays.
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