TT 560 (c): Miles Davis and Bill Evans, "On Green Dolphin St." and "Stella by Starlight"
the dawn of scalar theory
The previous pianist, Red Garland, finished tracking Milestones with Miles Davis in March 1958. Soon after, Bill Evans replaced Garland in the band.
Peter Losin has a wealth of detail on the Miles Ahead site.
The Davis Sextet was booked for two weeks at the Café Bohemia (April 25-May 18). Bill Evans replaced Red Garland on piano just before this engagement, and Philly Joe Jones left the group afterward to form his own group. He was immediately replaced by Jimmy Cobb. Evans himself left the group in November, and was replaced by Wynton Kelly.
The second half of 1958 was a very busy time for the Sextet:
Café Bohemia, New York (April 25-May 4)
Storyville, Boston (May 5-11)
Café Bohemia, New York (May 12-18)
Red Hill Inn, Pennsauken NJ (May 20-25)
Village Vanguard, New York (May 27-June 1)
Spotlite Lounge, Washington DC (June 10-15)
Small’s Paradise, New York (June 24-29)
Newport Jazz Festival (Thursday, July 3, 8:30 pm)
Montréal Theatre Maisonneuve (July 10, with other dates in Montréal and Quebec City)
Village Vanguard, New York (July 22-August 3)
Spotlite, Washington DC (August 5-10)
Comedy Club, Baltimore (August 12-17)
Randall’s Island, New York (August 23: Third Annual NY Jazz Festival)
Showboat, Philadelphia (September 1-6)
Persian Room, Plaza Hotel, New York (Tuesday, September 9)
Modern Jazz Room, Cleveland (September 15-21)
Clarence’s Blue Bird Inn, Detroit (September 23-28)
Apollo Theatre, New York (October 17-23)
Spotlite Lounge, Washington DC (October 29-November 2)
Village Vanguard, New York (November 4-16 -- Evans left the group after this gig, and was replaced by Wynton Kelly)
Town Hall, New York (Friday, November 28, 8:00 and 11:00 pm)
Mosque Theatre, Newark NJ (November 29)
Howard Theatre, Washington DC (December 12-18)
Town Hall, New York (Saturday, December 27, 8:30 and 11:00 pm)
To sum up:
Milestones with Red Garland is March ‘58.
Bill Evans joins April ‘58, plays a whole slew of gigs, does a bit of recording.
Wynton Kelly replaces Evans late November.
Evans returns for Kind of Blue in March ‘59, although Kelly plays on “Freddie Freeloader.”
The title track “Milestones” from 1958 usually gets credit for the first composition of modal jazz, a way of improvising that uses scalar theory in place of tonal harmonic movement. Red Garland was obviously uncomfortable with “Milestones,” he comps the material from the head in a literal fashion and doesn’t solo. (Garland would never again do anything modal.) Somewhere in the background of “Milestones” was Miles talking about scales with George Russell and Gil Evans; there is also Cuban music to be considered, where a montuno would stay in one key. (The 1940s saw the explosion of the mambo; Dizzy Gillespie worked simultaneously with Chano Pozo and George Russell.)
A year after Milestones, Kind of Blue significantly amplified the modal ethos, especially the opening selection “So What.” The fluid approach of Bill Evans was a crucial element: Indeed, Evans almost deserves co-composer credit for the overall atmosphere of Kind of Blue.
However, there is at least one other session in this conversation, the truly wonderful first recording of Miles Davis and Bill Evans together on May 26, 1958. They were joined by the sextet with Cannonball Adderley, John Coltrane, Paul Chambers, and Jimmy Cobb; the repertoire included “On Green Dolphin St.” and “Stella By Starlight.” In terms showing the way forward with modal/scalar thinking within common-practice jazz, these two pieces were just as important as “So What” from a year later.
Jazz is improvised, but jazz is also a language. Every phrase by every major stylist is in conversation with a lineage.
Miles played with Charlie Parker, the avatar of bebop. As a generic term, “bebop” can cover a lot of terrain, but Parker himself created a specific melodic language, a specificity only matched by Bud Powell. Bird and Bud do not play the same phrases, but they share some mysterious higher ideal when it comes to the improvised line. I don’t know what it is, and I have never seen an accurate description of it, either…for myself, I call it “high bebop” or “true bebop.”
The excellence of Bird and Bud was completely obvious for a whole generation, many of whom were able to see Bird and Bud live. (In some cases, like Miles, they literally even played with Bird and Bud.) There are a seemingly endless number of amazing jazz records from the 1950s; many of these terrific records are the product of the best and brightest musicians capable of reframing Bird and Bud in their own image.
From the beginning, Miles was looking for something spacious and melodic. On January 17, 1951, Miles recorded twice: once with Bird, and once on his own with Sonny Rollins. Each session generated a favorite track showing exactly where Miles was headed.
“K. C. Blues” (Charlie Parker with Miles Davis, Walter Bishop, Teddy Kotick, Max Roach) Bird plays especially well, offering a mix of deep blues and blistering double time phrases outlining bebop changes. Miles responds with a lyrical solo that carves out a more diatonic space in the music.
“I Know” (Sonny Rollins with Miles Davis on piano, Percy Heath, Roy Haynes) The title is a pun, for the changes of this themeless piece are based on Charlie Parker’s “Confirmation.” The first chorus is “as is,” meaning a lot of chords. In the second chorus Davis and Heath start with low C pedal point, which reduces the feeling of a lot of chords.
A precious few pages document exactly what Bill Evans advised Floris Nico Bunink to practice:
Bach “little” preludes and fugues, two- and three-part Inventions
Bartók Mikrokosmos Vol I-IV (Evans: “also folk songs, dirges etc.”)
Scriabin 5 Preludes Op. 73 (Evans: “Short, not too difficult but gems of insight into the thinking of the man who represents the gateway to 'modern' music”)
Beethoven two “easy” sonatas (one is G major, the other G minor)
Scarlatti sonatas (Evans: “Also in Schirmer collections of pre-Bach or post-Bach”)
Schoenberg six “little” Pieces op. 19
Mozart Fantasia D minor, also many movements of both Mozart and Haydn piano sonatas
Debussy, Ravel, Satie: anything relatively easy to read, including Debussy Children’s Corner, Ravel Sonatine, Satie Gymnopedies
Hindemith Sonata no. 1 and Ludus Tonalis (Evans: “Great contemporary composer in class with Brahms, Bach? Difficult but musically worth investigation”)Evans: “Also composer Milhaud…There are also inexpensive collections of composers like Stravinsky, Ravel, Scriabin, Rachmaninov, etc. that are easily worth the investment – although difficult. Offers much musical insight”
Conventional wisdom suggests that Bill Evans owes the most to Debussy, Ravel, Satie, and Scriabin, a perspective confirmed by his list above (although it is nice to see Schoenberg and Hindemith there as well).
Arturo Benedetti Michelangeli recorded the Ravel Piano Concerto in 1957. Miles Davis said that he and Bill Evans listened to this album together; the relevant movement is Adagio assai, with an opening piano statement in an even plain of E major (the first accidental is in bar 18). However, that is not to imply that not much is going on: rather, each slowly placed note within the diatonic scale is lonely and mournful.
Lester Young was also part of what Miles Davis was thinking about, as Miles makes clear in his autobiography:
And then I met “The President,” Lester Young, when he would come down from Kansas City to play in St. Louis. He’d have Shorty McConnell on trumpet in his band, and sometimes I’d come over with my horn to where they were playing and sit it. Man, playing with Pres was something. I learned a lot from the way he played the saxophone. As a matter of fact, I tried to transpose some of his saxophone licks over to my trumpet.
(….)
He called me Midget. Lester had a sound and an approach like Louis Armstrong, only he had it on tenor sax. Billie Holiday had that same sound and style; so did Budd Johnson and that white dude, Bud Freeman. They all had that running style of playing and singing. That’s the style I like, when it’s running. It floods the tone. It has a softness in the approach and concept, and places emphasis on one note. I learned to play like that from Clark Terry. I used to play like he plays before I was influenced by Dizzy and Freddie, before I got my own style. But I learned about that running style from Lester Young.
(….)
Bird never talked about music, except one time I heard him arguing with a classical musician friend of mine. He told the cat that you could do anything with chords. I disagreed, told him that you couldn’t play D natural on the fifth bar of a B flat blues. He said you could. One night later on at Birdland, I heard Lester Young do it, but he bent the note. Bird was there when it happened he just looked over at me with that “I told you so” look that he would lay on you when he had proved you wrong.
Miles says, “It has a softness in the approach and concept, and places emphasis on one note.” With Bill Evans in a Ravel mode, he found the ideal harmonist: Miles could place a single trumpet note over a soft piano chord, and the audience would melt.
In tonal music, including bebop, every pitch relates to incoming or outgoing harmonic direction. Part of the way the high bebop works is relating pitch not to just to harmony, but to clave.
With scalar theory, pitches simply suspend, and any note in the scale can be made to work over the base tonality, not unlike the way Ravel interrogated the E major scale at the top of Adagio assai. For major and minor chords, Evans used diatonic scales, and for dominant chords, Evans frequently used the diminished scale (beloved of Scriabin and others) and the altered scale (a minor scale starting on the 7th degree).
This scalar approach is all over the two standards at the 1958 session, “On Green Dolphin St.” and “Stella by Starlight.” Both tunes were sourced from Hollywood movies released in the previous decade: Green Dolphin Street (1947) was scored by Bronislau Kaper, The Uninvited (1944, with “Stella” over the main title) by Victor Young.
Both also featured notable structural factors that promoted scalar theory. “On Green Dolphin St.” offers a chromatic decent over a pedal point: each station along the way requires a new scale. The long through-composed form of “Stella by Starlight” is hard to follow by ear, and foreshadows future jazz compositions by someone like Wayne Shorter, where complex chords sit next to each other without implying a clear tonic.
Bird and Bud essentially worked with supersonic riffs within a major key. (If you can’t deal out hooks and ladders on uptempo Kansas City drone in a major key, you can’t play bebop.) While Bird and Bud could play have played on “On Green Dolphin St.” or “Stella By Starlight” (and in fact both recorded “Stella” as a ballad with the original Victor Young changes) they are not associated with this luminous Miles/Evans/Ravel feeling, partially because Bird and Bud rarely played straight diatonic, diminished, or altered scales. (However, that original uptempo Kansas City feel requires more literal major scales than most modal jazz.)
I suspect the harmonizations of both standards are authored by Bill Evans, although Evans’s “Stella” seems to have been influenced by the version by Chet Baker and Russ Freeman in 1954. (The Ahmad Jamal “On Green Dolphin St.” is probably why Miles played the tune, but Jamal’s harmonization is quite different.) In short order, both standards were embraced by jazzers everywhere, along with a scalar approach to harmony.
Footnotes:
— Describing a major or minor chord with a scale offers easy melodic access to the upper partials. Traditional harmony goes up in thirds, 1, 3, 5,7; modal thinking easily adds in 9, 11, and 13. Diminished and altered scales do not have a natural 5, and thus have more suspended qualities from the outset. While earlier jazz musicians certainly used all this material—Art Tatum for starters—I believe that consistently naming the scales began after 1958. It was the behemoth of jazz education that then ensured that naming scales was the only way forward, and something of Kansas City riffs and elusive bebop logic was lost.
— Bronislau Kaper composed several standards with notably iconic interpretations: for “All God’s Chillun Got Rhythm,” go to Bud Powell; for “Invitation” go to Joe Henderson. Kaper himself recorded his themes on piano at his home in the 1970’s, offering interpretations that have little to do with jazz.
— After decades of Bill Evans’s harmonization being the only way to play “Stella,” modern musicians have discovered Young’s original, which begins with a fat diminished chord on the tonic. I myself have played it both ways on varied gigs. FWIW, I spent some time being proud of myself playing Young’s original, but after learning of Evans’s extraordinary performance in 1958, I have accepted his ruling as the higher truth, at least for now.
Miles Davis trio includes
a) Miles Davis and John Coltrane in Europe, 1960
b) Wynton Kelly at the Left Bank
c) Miles and Bill Evans, “Green Dolphin St.” and “Stella by Starlight”
What a beautiful trio of essays. Thank you Ethan!
Ive been going back to “basics” and committed to learning all the 2 part inventions (and some sinfonias tho I haven’t yet selected which). The inventions are so edifying!
There’s endless evidence of Bach’s brilliance and the inventions are of course not the peak of his artistry. As instructional material, though, they’re astounding. There is SO much to learn from them in all aspects of musicianship. The improvisational aspect’s waned, but his students would have improvised their own ornaments and I suspect he’d be dismayed to learn that that doesn’t happen anymore.
I recommend them to everyone. You can even swing them! F major is so fun when you swing it! The E major one has this really cool chromatic line on off beats. They really offer a path to improving all aspects of musicianship and keyboard playing.