Listening to The Musings of Miles

Listening to a Miles Davis record I never really heard before: The Musings of Miles. It's a lower profile item in Miles's catalog. These listening to albums posts are a test for me, because I normally don't feel I have a lot to say about what I hear. 

It was Miles's first LP album, recorded and released in 1955, with Red Garland and Philly Joe Jones, who would soon be members of Miles's regular quintet. Oscar Pettiford rounds out the quartet recorded here. 

Will You Still Be Mine
One of those tunes I've played many times, but nobody calls the titles so I can hear them, so I never learned a lot of them. Half my reason for writing this post is so I can finally memorize the title: WILL YOU STILL BE MINE.

WILL YOU STILL BE MINE. 

Bright little item, and they play it moderately fast, the tempo is about 256. They cruise through it. 

Form is a long AABA, 56 bars; A sections are 16 bars long, bridge is 8. On the head the last A has a four bar tag.  

Miles solos for two choruses, Garland plays a chorus and a half; Miles finishes his second chorus, then plays another chorus, and solos through the head out, finally playing the tune on the last A only. Pettiford pedals on the first 8 bars of the first two As of the head out.

Jones plays brushes behind Garland's solo; switching back to sticks for Miles to come in in the middle of Garland's second chorus, so I guess that was planned, or Miles signaled he was coming back in, and Joe was on it.

There's no mistaking his cymbal beat, is there? It's dominant on the recording, you don't hear the rest of the drums real well, though his left hand is very active— all his slick stuff is there. He seems more polished with that than players before him. 

I See Your Face Before Me
Lovely ballad I wasn't aware of, they really set a mood here. I'll have to dig up the Johnny Hartman recording of it. 

32 bars, form is ABAC, tempo 59 beats a minute. Walking ballad, Pettiford plays in 4 on all of it except the first 8 bars of the piano solo, where he plays in 2. They play two choruses total, all Miles except for the first half of the second chorus. Plus there's a four bar piano intro.

Jones is playing with brushes, obviously, mostly lovely long quarter notes, playing the bell of the cymbal with the metal loop especially during the piano solo. Skip note is present in his brush rhythm in a subtle way, and very late, suggesting double time— I think his skip note lands right before Pettiford's attack, and his downbeat right after. He double times the hihat briefly on the end of the C section.  

I Didn't
Cool Miles Davis tune based on Thelonious Monk's Well, You Needn't. I had to look that up, I figured it was based on a show tune, because Miles took it a whole different direction. But you can clearly hear Monk's changes happening on the solos. The title is a hip play on Monk's title. Form is 32 bars, AABA of course, tempo around 272. 8 bars of drums up front. 

At 1:10 you can hear a familiar cue Miles plays on later recordings. I don't know what the deal is with it, but you should recognize it. Like on Four & More Miles sets up Tony Williams's solo with it, and Tony cues the end of his solo with the rhythm figure. 

After the piano solo Miles and Jones do some irregular trading— Miles plays a chorus, gives Joe the bridge, Miles plays the last A; the next chorus they trade 4s, except Miles plays the tune on the last A. Then he solos for another chorus, and again plays the tune on the last A, and they're done.

Jones and Pettiford are kind of brawling in a nice way here— both playing very muscularly, not exactly together. Things don't have to be perfectly in unison to swing. 
 

A Gal In Calico
Kind of a mundane standard. Miles must have heard Ahmad Jamal play it. Maybe there's some interest in it for the horns, I find it a rather insipid, uninteresting tune. 32 bars, tempo is about 186. 

A Night In Tunisia
The centerpiece of the album, which it has to be. The tune is AABA with an interlude; the A sections are six bars Latin / two bars swing, the bridge swings. There's also a shout chorus that frequently gets played over the A sections the last time through, as it is here— I don't know where that originated. Tempo is about 174.  

There's a free time intro by Pettiford, with Jones playing jingle sticks, for a tambourine effect. On the head they do the normal Latin/swing switching thing, on the solos they swing, but it's pulling all kinds of directions. Pettiford's playing very independently at times.

On the solos they just play the AABA form— no interlude. Then they trade fours kind of roughly with Jones for 1 and a half choruses, sketching in the shout chorus line on the A sections. Actually on the last A of the first chorus, Miles plays the whole 8 bars— Jones doesn't get a break there. Then they play the head out from the bridge. The end gets drawn out, they're clearly winging it.

Green Haze 
12 bar blues, tempo about 78 beats per minute. Miles gets composer credit, but there's no tune that I can discern, it's just a blues. 

Piano plays two choruses, then Miles plays four, then Pettiford. Double time feel in 2 on the second chorus of Miles's solo, back to the slow 4 on Pettiford's solo, back to double time on the head out. Jones plays brushes all the way, except he plays time on the cymbal on Miles's solo. Again, his feel suggests double time even while he's playing the slow 4. 

Pettiford is doing hip stuff at the end of the first chorus of piano, and into the second and then third chorus of Miles's solo, where he forces the double time. He's playing like an arranger, and leader. To me he's the star of this record. 

There you go— you'll notice a lot of it simple description of what happened. It's important information, knowing the parameters of what happens when people play, and knowing what's out of the ordinary. You could ask for deeper insight to what they're really doing, beyond he's doing something hip here, but that's on the record, that's not translatable into words. Or if it were it wouldn't be communicable.