Between his first recording session in 1944 and his death in 1991, Miles Davis changed the course of music many times. The first of these came with the short-lived lineups he assembled for a New York residency and three studio sessions between January 1949 and March 1950. The nine-piece lineup was unusual – few jazz bands used a French horn – and the gigs attracted little attention. The sessions produced a handful of singles for Capitol Records, later collected as an album called Birth of the Cool – these ensured the band’s shadow would prove longer than all but a handful of its contemporaries.
The recordings were the result of hanging out after hours at arranger Gil Evans’s basement flat. The punchy, brightly coloured Venus de Milo was one of three tracks the group recorded that was composed by saxophonist Gerry Mulligan. The epithet “cool” isn’t entirely helpful, suggesting a prizing of style over substance: this music is never aloof or detached. Rather, this is what you got when you tuned down the frenzy of Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie and allied it to the kind of sophisticated big-band arrangements Duke Ellington pioneered. Davis was a fan – and a part – of both traditions: not for the first time, what he crafted was a fusion of preceding forms that changed what would follow.
