Chronicle: The Complete Prestige Recordings, 1951-1956
The expanse of Miles Davis's recordings for Prestige Records, the California analogue to New York's Blue Note, is huge. In terms of artistic development, the eight CDs in this box span Davis's development from tentative searching through the full bloom of his first great quintet, whose frontline boasted Davis and a youngJohn Coltrane. The sessions captured onChroniclebegin in 1951, with Davis's grainy debut for the label in a sextet withSonny Rollins, and continue with the fascinatingLee Konitz-led quintet that Davis was eminently adaptable to, even with the kind of angular sounds Konitz's band drummed up. Listing the remaining sessions would be an exercise in boasting, given the presence of so many virtuoso bop and postbop giants. Given that Davis may well have piqued Prestige founder Bob Weinstock's interest through his playing withCharlie Parker, Bird shows up on a 1953 date, doubling tenor saxes with Rollins. Some have remarked that the pre-1954 Davis dates don't show nearly the smarts of the 1954 and after works, but for all that huff, there's some deep stuff in the early sessions, from the twined tenor saxes ofAl CohnandZoot Simsto Davis's own uneasily fragile tone that hadn't taken on the full heft of its later precision. Then there are the quintet recordings, which carve out a secure spot for Davis in the annals of ultracreative jazz. Recorded in three marathon 1956 sessions, the quintet works came out on several LPs, all of which remain in print today in their exact form. The group sculpts a liquid groove that's got sharp teeth, what with Philly Joe Jones's crackling drums, and immeasurable tonic depth. Davis stays active in the midregister, blasting off lines that do indeed sound slow and methodical but also emit unmistakable impressionistic qualities that would wow fans for decades. Coltrane, himself still in a developing phase, drops lots of hints that knew bebop's architectonics so thoroughly as to be on the brink of deconstructing them definitively (which he later did onGiant Steps). Given the full trajectory of the music and the artists on these sessions, this is a majestic collection.--Andrew Bartlett