A rare 1957 Christmas Day broadcast of https://www.hindustantimes.com/brunch/why-miles-davis-s-kind-of-blue-is-one-of-the-greatest-jazz-albums-of-all-time/story-ZZnB0cJloYePIoW6tJWQGK.html" rel="nofollow - Miles Davis ,
reportedly the earliest surviving televised images of the jazz great,
has been unearthed in France, ahead of Friday’s release of a posthumous
record.
France’s National Audiovisual Institute (INA) posted the
four-minute video on its website this week, saying it had turned up
during an inventory of one of its vaults.
It shows the https://www.hindustantimes.com/music/indian-music-is-very-intricate/story-e4eckeJ6u2DTjTzelzH3oI.html" rel="nofollow - 31-year-old virtuoso trumpeter
with the French musicians he assembled to record the avant-garde
soundtrack to the Louis Malle crime classic Elevator for the Gallows.
The
show was recorded on December 7, 1957 -- just a few days after the
musicians completed the film soundtrack -- and broadcast on Christmas
Day.
For the first two and a half minutes Davis is in the
background, the musicians playing against an other-worldly
black-and-white moonscape.
The camera then zooms in on Davis, his
body hardly moving in a trim black suit and white shirt, as he begins a
solo for the frantic rendering of the Dig theme by saxophonist Jackie
McLean.
“These images are not only the only ones showing the quintet at work, but also the oldest known images of https://www.hindustantimes.com/books/zakir-hussain-never-has-a-priest-or-a-mullah-taught-me-what-they-say-is-the-only-truth/story-RGDQboAQIQJAqsIGPcPdDP.html" rel="nofollow - Miles Davis playing on a television show,” INA said.
INA
director Pascal Rozat told AFP that previously the earliest surviving
footage of Davis playing was a German television programme with German
big band composer Erwin Lehn from December 18, 1957.
The newly
found footage “is indeed the oldest of Miles Davis, even though it’s
said he appeared earlier on American television, which hasn’t been
conserved,” Rozat said.
The discovery comes as Warner Brothers
released on Friday the unfinished Rubberband, a funk-soul album of
tracks recorded on-and-off in the mid-1980s.
But Davis abandoned the project for other work and never returned to it before his death in 1991.
from www.hindustantimes.com