A Trio of Gems from Craft Recordings

At the time of these sessions the musicians themselves were celebrating the relatively recent advent of the long-playing record.

Miles Davis, Walkin’ (Prestige, Craft LP reissue) April 1954

Miles Davis, The Musings of Miles (Prestige, Craft LP reissue) June 7, 1955

Thelonious Monk and Gerry Mulligan, Mulligan Meets Monk (Riverside, Craft LP reissue) August 1957

Miles Davis. Photo: Michael Ullman

With these new reissues, Craft Recordings continues to celebrate some of the best of mid-’50s jazz in fine style, serving up clean, bright-sounding records that look like the original issues and sound a bit better. At the time, the musicians themselves were celebrating the relatively recent advent of the long-playing record. When, in 1950, Miles Davis recorded for Capitol the last of what became known as the “birth of the cool” sessions, the arrangements were tightly scripted and the solos restricted so that the music would fit on one side of a 78. Four years later, Miles Davis entered Rudy Van Gelder’s studio in Hackensack and made the fourteen minute cut “Walkin’,” which was based on a Gene Ammons piece the saxophonist called “Gravy.” The extended version feels liberated, as if a straightjacket was taken off the band, whose members were now free to take multiple choruses, and, in fact, act more like they were in a club.

The results were stunning. The “Walkin’” sextet consisted of J.J. Johnson on trombone, Lucky Thompson on tenor, and a rhythm section of Horace Silver, Percy Heath, and the great bebop drummer Kenny Clarke. Their “Walkin’” famously opens with a bright fanfare, a bold declaration from the horns who then play a jaunty, crisply stated version of a theme that is, oddly, credited to a non-musician named Richard Carpenter. Miles at this point seems content to nudge the melody along, his phrases perfectly inflected, pauses and all. Later, the underrated Thompson enters coyly and then makes good use of the allotted space to gradually build in intensity, especially when Miles and Johnson play riffs behind him.  Johnson’s solo is calmly enthralling, and Horace Silver plays a clever solo with some of his characteristic figures. There are no blues clichés in this blues, nor in the uptempo “Blue ‘N’ Boogie” that follows. This is one of my favorite recording sessions. The second side of Walkin’ was in fact made a few weeks earlier with a quintet that featured Davey Schildkraut on alto. Kenny Clarke’s brushes on “Love Me or Leave Me” are notable. It was another informal session: the piano introduction to “You Don’t Know What Love Is” is taken at a quicker tempo than the rest of the track. I find the transition awkward, but the solos make up for it.

The Musings of Miles was made a little more than a year later, on June 7, 1955 which, coincidentally, is a month earlier than Miles’s famous breakthrough appearance at the Newport Jazz Festival. Musings is a quartet album with two musicians who would become regulars in Miles’s band: pianist Red Garland and drummer Philly Joe Jones. The bassist is another bebop star, Oscar Pettiford.  The album consists of four ballads, a blues called “Green Haze” (Miles had already recorded “Blue Haze”), and the Dizzy Gillespie classic “A Night in Tunisia”. “Green Haze” is a highlight for this listener. It opens with Red Garland virtually quoting Charlie Parker’s “Parker’s Mood.” After Garland’s solo, Miles enters low on his horn as if he didn’t want to be noticed. The track is distinguished by a long solo by the bassist, who had been touring with Duke Ellington. (One of Pettiford’s early recordings as a leader was his Basically Duke). I find Davis’s evasion of the customary virtuosic break on “A Night in Tunisia” amusing, and we are treated to another long Pettiford solo.  I’ve always been a fan of what the hostile critic Philip Larkin called ‘the passionless creep” of a Miles Davis solo. He’s patient, intimate, and uses space brilliantly. Nonetheless, to my ears he sounds barely conscious on his version of “I See Your Face in Front of Me” here. The rest of the album rocks subtly.

Gerry Mulligan was a wit, an innovative arranger, and a band leader as well as a cool baritone saxophonist. He could also be an enthusiastic collaborator, co-leading at different times quartets with Chet Baker, Stan Getz, and Paul Desmond. In the late ’50s he made two records with Ellingtonians: Gerry Mulligan Meets Johnny Hodges and Gerry Mulligan Meets Ben Webster. Although one could argue that Thelonious Monk was also an Ellingtonian, though a highly eccentric one, Mulligan Meets Monk did not seem like an inevitable pairing.  Monk’s solos can sound like someone climbing over rocks, while Mulligan is as smooth as butter. On this recording they balance each other out. It was a good day for Monk technically: his downward runs in his right hand could sometimes be erratic — they are cleanly played here.  I love Monk’s deliberately clunky performance on “Sweet and Lovely” while Mulligan holds long tones until he is released on the bridge. The upbeat “Rhythm-a-ning” is a highlight, with Monk filling in with brittle-sounding chords behind Mulligan. It opens with a short solo by drummer Shadow Wilson. Monk seems to spill out his solo in a  tumbling opening line: he is alternately agile and emphatic. Bassist Wilbur Ware gets a chorus here. Mulligan’s composition “Decidedly” is a reworking of the standard “Undecided.” The new title suggests the purposefulness of the playing by all four members of the band. 

from https://artsfuse.org