Porgy and Bess | ||||
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Studio album by | ||||
Released | March 9, 1959 [1] | |||
Recorded | July 22 & 29 and August 4 & 18, 1958 | |||
Studio | Columbia 30th Street (New York City) | |||
Genre | ||||
Length | 50:53 | |||
Label | Columbia | |||
Producer | Cal Lampley | |||
Miles Davis chronology | ||||
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Alternative cover | ||||
![]() UK 45 rpm release |
Porgy and Bess (CL 1274) is a studio album by jazz musician Miles Davis, released in March 1959 on Columbia Records. [4] The album features arrangements by Davis and collaborator Gil Evans from George Gershwin's 1935 opera of the same name. The album was recorded in four sessions on July 22, July 29, August 4, and August 18, 1958, at Columbia's 30th Street Studio in New York City. It is the second collaboration between Davis and Evans and has garnered much critical acclaim since its release, being acknowledged by some music critics as the best of their collaborations. [5] Jazz critics have regarded the album as historically important. [6] [7]
In 1958, Davis was one of many jazz musicians growing dissatisfied with bebop, seeing its increasingly complex chord changes as hindering creativity. [8] Five years earlier, in 1953, pianist George Russell published his Lydian Chromatic Concept of Tonal Organization , which offered an alternative to the practice of improvisation based on chords. [9] Abandoning the traditional major and minor key relationships of classical music, Russell developed a new formulation using scales or a series of scales for improvisations. [9] His approach to improvisation came to be known as modal in jazz. [9] Davis saw Russell's methods of composition as a means of getting away from the dense chord-laden compositions of his time, which Davis had labeled "thick". [10] Modal composition, with its reliance on scales and modes, represented, as Davis put it, [8] "a return to melody". [11] In a 1958 interview with Nat Hentoff of The Jazz Review , Davis remarked on the modal approach:
When Gil wrote the arrangement of "I Loves You, Porgy," he only wrote a scale for me. No chords... gives you a lot more freedom and space to hear things... there will be fewer chords but infinite possibilities as to what to do with them. Classical composers have been writing this way for years, but jazz musicians seldom have. [12]
— Miles Davis
In early 1958, Davis began using this approach with his sextet. [13] Influenced by Russell's ideas, Davis implemented his first modal composition with the title track of his 1958 album Milestones , which was based on two modes, recorded in April of that year. [14] Instead of soloing in the straight, conventional, melodic way, Davis’s new style of improvisation featured rapid mode and scale changes played against sparse chord changes. [15] [9] Davis' second collaboration with Gil Evans on Porgy and Bess gave him more room for experimentation with Russell's concept and with third stream playing, as Evans' compositions for Davis featured this modal approach. [8]
The musical, commercial and critical success of 1957's Miles Ahead helped make future Davis/Evans ventures possible, as it impressed Columbia Records enough for them to bestow further artistic control upon Davis and Evans. At that period, Davis' girlfriend Frances Taylor was in the New York City Center's production of the George Gershwin/DuBose Heyward/Ira Gershwin opera Porgy and Bess , [16] and the Samuel Goldwyn film adaptation was in production, set for release in June 1959. The advance publicity for the film was considerable, and with the late-1950s vogue for recorded "jazz versions of...", a number of Porgy and Bess jazz interpretations were released. These ranged from an all-star big band version arranged and conducted by Bill Potts to one by Bob Crosby and the Bobcats. Following the first collaboration with Evans, Davis followed up on these efforts with much interest in symphonic readings, which, at the time, jazzmen were not known for, and neither were some classically trained musicians known for interpreting jazz scores. Nevertheless, Davis enlisted members of his sextet, including Cannonball Adderley and Paul Chambers.
Review scores | |
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Source | Rating |
AllMusic | ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() |
DownBeat | ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() |
The Encyclopedia of Popular Music | ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() |
Entertainment Weekly | A [20] |
The Penguin Guide to Jazz | ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() |
The Rolling Stone Album Guide | ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() |
Tom Hull – on the Web | B+ [23] |
The second in a series of Davis/Evans collaborations, Porgy and Bess was well received upon its release by music critics and publications, including The New York Times and Los Angeles Times . [24] [25] Music writer Bill Kirchner wrote "In this century's American music, three partnerships have been most influential: Duke Ellington/Billy Strayhorn, Frank Sinatra/Nelson Riddle, and Miles Davis/Gil Evans." [26] As one of Davis' best-selling albums, Porgy and Bess has earned recognition as a landmark album in orchestral jazz. Davis biographer Jack Chambers described the album as "a new score, with its own integrity, order and action". [27]
The album's appeal was more widespread among critics following its reissue in 1997. Robert Gilbert of All About Jazz praised Porgy and Bess, describing it as "one of many great albums that Miles Davis recorded over his lifetime. It reaches a higher plateau than most, though, in its way that it can reach the listener on both a musical and emotional level. That the album is still able to do this after almost forty-five years is a testament to the rare magic that occurred in a New York studio over four days in the summer of 1958." [28]
In August 1997, JazzTimes magazine called Porgy and Bess "possibly the best of the collaborations between Miles and Gil Evans ... Evans is justly regarded as the master of modern orchestration and Porgy and Bess shows him at his best." [29] The album was included in Elvis Costello's "500 Albums You Need" ( Vanity Fair , Issue No. 483 11/00) [30] and was ranked No. 785 on the Virgin "All-Time Top 1000 Album" list. [31]
All compositions written by George Gershwin, except otherwise noted. (Although Ira Gershwin and DuBose Heyward wrote lyrics to the opera Porgy and Bess , these recordings are instrumental.)
Track | Recorded | Song | Writer | Time |
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1. | 8/4/58 | "Buzzard Song" | George Gershwin | 4:07 |
2. | 7/29/58 | "Bess, You Is My Woman Now" | George Gershwin | 5:10 |
3. | 7/22/58 | "Gone" | Gil Evans | 3:37 |
4. | 7/22/58 | "Gone, Gone, Gone" | George Gershwin | 2:03 |
5. | 8/4/58 | "Summertime" | George Gershwin | 3:17 |
6. | 8/4/58 | "Oh Bess, Oh Where's My Bess" | George Gershwin | 4:18 |
Track | Recorded | Song | Writer | Time |
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1. | 8/4/58 | "Prayer (Oh Doctor Jesus)" | George Gershwin | 4:39 |
2. | 7/29/58 | "Fisherman, Strawberry and Devil Crab" | George Gershwin | 4:06 |
3. | 7/22/58 | "My Man's Gone Now" | George Gershwin | 6:14 |
4. | 7/29/58 | "It Ain't Necessarily So" | George Gershwin | 4:23 |
5. | 7/29/58 | "Here Come de Honey Man" | George Gershwin | 1:18 |
6. | 8/18/58 | "I Wants to Stay Here (a.k.a. I Loves You, Porgy)" | George Gershwin | 3:39 |
7. | 8/4/58 | "There's a Boat That's Leaving Soon for New York" | George Gershwin | 3:23 |
Bonus cuts featured on the 1997 compact disc reissue.
Track | Recorded | Song | Writer | Time |
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1. | 8/18/58 | "I Loves You, Porgy" (take 1, second version) | George Gershwin | 4:14 |
2. | 7/22/58 | "Gone" (take 4) | Gil Evans | 3:40 |
Region | Certification | Certified units/sales |
---|---|---|
United Kingdom (BPI) [32] sales since 2007 | Silver | 60,000^ |
United States | — | 286,000 [33] |
^ Shipments figures based on certification alone. |
Modal jazz is jazz that makes use of musical modes, often modulating among them to accompany the chords instead of relying on one tonal center used across the piece. Although precedents exist, modal jazz was crystallized as a theory by composer George Russell in his 1953 book Lydian Chromatic Concept of Tonal Organization.
William John Evans was an American jazz pianist and composer who worked primarily as the leader of his trio. His interpretations of traditional jazz repertoire, his ways of using impressionist harmony and block chords, and his trademark rhythmically independent, "singing" melodic lines, continue to influence jazz pianists today.
Kind of Blue is the fifth studio album released on Columbia, and twenty-eighth overall, by the American jazz musician, trumpeter, composer, and bandleader Miles Davis. It was recorded on March 2 and April 22, 1959, at Columbia's 30th Street Studio in New York City, and released on August 17 of that same year by Columbia Records. For the recording, Davis led a sextet featuring saxophonists John Coltrane and Julian "Cannonball" Adderley, pianist Bill Evans, bassist Paul Chambers, and drummer Jimmy Cobb, with new band pianist Wynton Kelly appearing on one track – "Freddie Freeloader" – in place of Evans.
Porgy and Bess is an English-language opera by American composer George Gershwin, with a libretto written by author DuBose Heyward and lyricist Ira Gershwin. It was adapted from Dorothy Heyward and DuBose Heyward's play Porgy, itself an adaptation of DuBose Heyward's 1925 novel Porgy.
Ian Ernest Gilmore Evans was a Canadian–American jazz pianist, arranger, composer and bandleader. He is widely recognized as one of the greatest orchestrators in jazz, playing an important role in the development of cool jazz, modal jazz, free jazz, and jazz fusion. He is best known for his acclaimed collaborations with Miles Davis.
Miles Ahead is an album by Miles Davis that was released in October 1957 by Columbia Records. It was Davis' first collaboration with arranger Gil Evans following the Birth of the Cool sessions. Along with their subsequent collaborations Porgy and Bess (1959) and Sketches of Spain (1960), Miles Ahead is one of the most famous recordings of Third Stream, a fusion of jazz, European classical, and world musics. Davis played flugelhorn throughout.
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Porgy and Bess is a studio album by jazz vocalist and trumpeter Louis Armstrong and singer Ella Fitzgerald, released on Verve Records in 1959. The third and final of the pair's albums for the label, it is a suite of selections from the George Gershwin opera Porgy and Bess. Orchestral arrangements are by Russell Garcia, who had previously arranged the 1956 jazz vocal recording The Complete Porgy and Bess.
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