A flugelhorn is not a trumpet. It is wider, softer-edged, less piercing. On October 21, 1957, Columbia Records released Miles Ahead, an album on which Miles Davis, the most famous trumpeter in modern jazz, played no trumpet at all. Instead he stood in front of sixteen woodwind and brass players and blew only the flugelhorn, a choice that gave every note a rounder, more muted glow. The record ran just over thirty-seven minutes, but it changed what a jazz album could sound like.
On October 21, 1957, Columbia Records released Miles Ahead, an album on which Miles Davis, the most famous trumpeter in modern jazz, played no trumpet at all.
A producer's idea for a bigger sound
Why would the sharpest soloist of his generation soften his sound? The answer started with a producer's idea. George Avakian had watched the February 1957 reissue of Birth of the Cool, the 1949–50 nonet sessions Davis had made with arranger Gil Evans, find a new audience. Avakian wanted Davis in a larger setting than his usual quintet, aiming for both artistic weight and commercial reach. So Davis, Evans and Avakian met over a meal and sketched a plan.
The plan was risky because Evans had been absent from jazz arranging for years. Between 1953 and 1956 he had stepped away from the scene, returning only recently to arrange for singer Helen Merrill and to work, uncredited, on Davis's Round About Midnight. For Miles Ahead he arranged ten pieces from wildly different sources: a melody by Léo Delibes, a Kurt Weill song, a Dave Brubeck tune, an Ahmad Jamal rhumba, plus original material by Davis and Evans himself. Evans treated other people's music as raw material for reinvention, and his biographer Larry Hicock called this album the finest example of that gift.
Two suites and a third stream
Davis was the only soloist. Every other musician existed to frame him. The album was split into two suites, with tracks flowing into each other without pause except after the title piece, which closed the first side of the vinyl. The second suite opened with a direct nod to the dissonant start of the second movement of Alban Berg's Violin Concerto — a gesture that made the album's name, third stream, feel earned. Third stream meant mixing jazz with European classical forms and world music, and Miles Ahead did it without sounding like a lecture.
Evans scored for a large ensemble of sixteen instruments, and his working method was famously obsessive. He could spend three days on ten bars, refining every voice until the texture was exactly right. That care shows in Blues for Pablo, built on themes from Manuel de Falla and Carlos Chávez, and in the way the ten varied pieces hold together as a single, continuous mood. The record was cut at Columbia's 30th Street Studio in New York across sessions in May and August 1957, with Davis later re-recording some solos as overdubs to fix mistakes.
Critics did not hesitate. DownBeat gave the album five stars in December 1957. The British magazine Disc called it one of the best records of the decade and awarded it five-plus stars. The Penguin Guide to Jazz later gave it four out of four and called it a quiet masterpiece. Davis himself remembered Evans phoning him at three in the morning to say that if he ever felt sad, he should just listen to Springsville, the piece that opens the first suite.
Miles Ahead did not end the partnership. It began the most celebrated arranging relationship in Davis's career, and in 1997 Columbia/Legacy released an edition in full stereo with four alternate takes. The flugelhorn stayed with Davis as a color he returned to when he wanted that softer, more singing tone. But on October 21, 1957, the statement was new: a jazz soloist could be quiet, deliberate and surrounded by orchestral color, and still sound more dangerous than anyone playing louder.