Miles Davis Quintet featuring Wayne Shorter, Herbie Hancock, Ron Carter, and Tony Williams. Recorded at Berlin, West Germany, on November 4, 1967. Posted by Miles Davis Performance Album
I doubt if Thelonious would care for this rendition, since both Shorter and Hancock use his most famous composition as little more than a jumping-off point. Davis at least plays the introduction that he first used with Monk more than a decade before at the Newport Jazz Festival in 1955, recording it for Prestige in 1956 and then using it as the title track—as “Round About Midnight”—for his first album for Columbia in 1957. Neither the Prestige nor the Columbia session included Monk, and it’s the Newport version, which I’m posting below (audio only), that intrigues me.
The recording, which sounds as if it were done in the studio, was part of an “all star” closing session, including all the leading musicians of the night, who had appeared earlier with their own groups—Monk, Davis, Zoot Sims, and Gerry Mulligan. But the performance of “Round Midnight” is the precise opposite of a blowing session, and white boys Zoot and Gerry don’t make a sound. Furthermore, Davis’s stunning out of tempo introduction couldn’t have been spontaneous. What happened?
Monk and Miles had one studio recording session, the famous/infamous December 24, 1954 session that produced the classic first take of “Bags Groove” that features one of Monk’s most beautiful solos, endlessly reworking a single phrase to perfection. Davis, conscious, I suspect, of his limited range, worked constantly to surround himself with superior musicians but found he couldn’t abide Monk as an accompanist. One can certainly guess that they planned to record “Round Midnight”, easily Monk’s best-known composition, during that session, but it never came off. The Newport “reunion”, which they may or may not have been expecting, gave them the opportunity to revisit the tune, with spectacular results. The performance is widely credited with igniting Davis’s lagging career—“people were looking at me like I was a god,” was Davis’s humble take—and landing him the contract with Columbia.
Miles Davis (tp) Zoot Sims (ts) Gerry Mulligan (bars) Thelonious Monk (p) Percy Heath (b) Connie Kay (d) Posted by end88888888
- The original classic trumpet intro for “Round Midnight”—a cascade of double-time virtuosity—had been created by Dizzy Gillespie. Davis couldn’t compete with that, but found his own way to shine. ↩︎
