This fancy package was the first studio box issued in Columbia’s Miles program. I can still remember bringing it home on the release Tuesday in 1996 and re-enjoying the classic Miles/Gil oeuvre, amongst the other contents. Along with the main trilogy - Miles Ahead, Porgy and Bess, and Sketches of Spain - these six discs also contain the aborted half-album Quiet Nights, other studio get-togethers from the ‘60s, and a slew of alternates and outtakes for the archive-obsessive. The remastered sound focuses on the smallest details while retaining a large dynamic space within the music.

Discs 1, 2, and 3 each present the three main albums in their original running sequences, followed by alternate takes at the end of each disc. Let’s examine the trilogy.

MILES AHEAD (1957). A jazz-oriented suite with a classical tinge in places. At the bottom of the 19-piece jazz orchestra is the solid swing of bassist Paul Chambers and drummer Art Taylor. Miles sits atop the brass and reeds on flugelhorn. Evans as arranger is mainly concerned with tone colors and contrast of sonorities, while his rhythmic sense is unpredictable. Sometimes the abstract orchestral shapes move forward in spite of themselves, and sometimes the accents are right on the linear money. Without wanting to make an unfair comparison, Evans is as masterful with detail as Ellington, albeit in a different way. The arrangements are interesting in themselves and yet they’re designed to house a soloist, which is where Miles comes in.

Johnny Carisi’s “Springville” gets the ball rolling as one of the best pieces Miles and Gil ever produced. There’s a cheery swing throughout and an evolving background of horn choruses. Fifteen seconds in, Gil’s depth of perception is already evident. The brass is supported and then answered by the reeds, and a slight trombone slide (the crowning touch) propels the next bout of phrasing, led by Miles. “Springsville” is indicative of the whole album’s attention to details, from the bass clarinet stratum up to the sustained trumpets at the end. In the delightful middle section, Miles shadows the orchestral figures. From “Springsville” we go to “The Maids of Cadiz” (tufts of soft impressionism) and Brubeck’s “The Duke”, a complex ditty that Evans drapes in a hifalutin score. The refined ballad “My Ship” extends the dramatic style Miles was developing with his small bands. This great performance leads via a snap of drum brushes into the Evans original “Miles Ahead”. I love the relaxed theme and the persuasive solo that Miles builds after it. Thus ends the first half, great so far.

“Blues for Pablo” is another Evans original, and as the title indicates, it mixes Spanish gestures with bluesy phrases. You may also detect trilling ghosts of Debussy therein. “New Rhumba” goes through some cheeky ensemble parts before settling into a swing that presages the feel of something like “Milestones”. Gil proves his jazz-rhythm savvy with syncopated horn kicks underneath Miles’ solo. The welding of “Meaning of the Blues” and “Lament” is as much a feature for Evans’ scoring as it is for Miles confidential lead lines. The arrangement of “Blues” rises and falls on droning tones and includes some classical touches. Same goes for the downcast “Lament”, and again, I hear a memory of Debussy’s “La Mer”, at 1:09. The album ends with the prissy pop song “I Don’t Want to Be Kissed”, not an auspicious finale, yet Evans emphasizes a dissonant closing chord just in time.

So that’s Miles Ahead, which I must admit I found dated when I first heard it years ago, but I warmed to it over time. The variety of material suggests the rewarding possibilities of Evans and Davis working together, and at least three of their finest tracks are here. The album has been released in different forms over the years, twice on CDs that tampered with the original LP presentation. This mix presents the original master takes in true stereo for the first time. The convoluted Miles Ahead story is best explained by the booklet essays in the box. More on that when we get to the bonus tracks.

PORGY AND BESS (1958). This album has more personalized playing from Miles (on both trumpet and flugelhorn), and it’s also a more consistent program, drawing from the Gershwin pop opera as its single source. It becomes an instrumental tour de force via Evans, who reconstructs the material for piano-less ensembles similar to those of Miles Ahead. Evans also contributes the original “Gone”, a drum feature for Philly Joe Jones that processes a phrase from the much slower “Gone, Gone, Gone”. The humid atmosphere of Catfish Row is summoned by the arrangements, and there are many sophisticated connotations, from hot jazz to light classical. The only downside is that some of the complex passages are less than perfectly executed by the ensemble, but the overall mood dwarfs the tiny flubs.

Almost every track is a highlight unto itself, the most famous being “Summertime”, with its laxed swing and clever counterline (flutes and French horns) that ghosts Miles’ melodies and coaxes the song along. “Prayer” is one of the best solos Miles has ever played: vulnerable, heartfelt blues inflections over a slowly developing 12/8 background. No trumpeter of the time could have matched the sensitivity Miles displays here, and I don’t know how many musicians period could have improvised with such honesty in a setting that tempts showboating. For poignancy, hear “I Loves You Porgy”, whose swirling fabrics and trumpet musings forecast the floating Silent Way sound. Evans’ classical gas is heard in the brass modulations of “Gone Gone Gone”, and his artful jazzyness is apparent in “Buzzard Song”, from blaring brass to plush accompaniment to a bass/tuba duet.

Instead of following the original order of the opera, Gil customizes his own program, just as he blends the mooched elements of “Fishermen, Strawberry and Devil Crab” into a virtually original piece. Yet Gershwin’s stronger melodies retain their emotional essence (“Bess You Is My Woman Now”), and Miles plays with an adoration of the material in addition to exploring his own stylistics. His straight jazz solo in “It Ain’t Necessarily So” speaks with the clarity that Kind of Blue would immortalize. As with Miles Ahead, the finale is a lighthearted pop song, “There’s a Boat That’s Leaving Soon For New York”. Less than a minute in, Gil references a lick from “Gone”, and the solo (flugelhorn) is backed by slick swing and brass kicks.

A couple of languid stretches notwithstanding, I consider Porgy and Bess one of the best Miles albums, for Miles’ unique playing, Gil’s rich orchestrations, and the overall humanity of the music.

SKETCHES OF SPAIN (1960). Setting sail for European classicism, the album is dominated by the “Adagio” from Rodrigo’s Concerto de Aranjuez, which becomes a transplanted concerto for Davis. For some, this lengthy piece is the apotheosis of the Miles/Gil catalog, although it drifts close to background music at times. I love the initial statements of the melody (Miles: “The softer you play it, the stronger it gets”), and the final minute has some nifty harmony. The middle sections have their moments, too, including a couple of Evans subplots that depart from Rodrigo. The piece leans heavily toward a classical interpretation and must be heard in that manner, despite Davis’ occasional liberties. Following the Adagio are two smaller tunes, “Will o’ the Wisp” and “Pan Piper”, that both swell repetitive folk melodies into grandiose jazz-orchestra figures. Their stiffness infects - or at least limits - Miles’ playing to some degree. I can’t help but notice that the outtake from the sessions, “Song of Our Country”, has more variety than both “Wisp” and “Piper” put together.

The second half relies more on Miles’ improvisations, even if it’s no less austere than the first half. “Saeta” features another of Miles’ all-time great solos, a pleading testimony in a dark, exotic mode. One of the bonus tracks is the full master take of this piece, which was chopped and remixed for the original LP release. The secret weapon of Spain is “Solea”, 12 minutes of Miles’ raw trumpet inflections backed by overlapping Spanish and swing rhythms. It’s looser than anything else on the album, although the ensemble playing is precisely controlled - a little paradox there. “Solea” gets closer to jazz than any other track, if those genre designations matter. Overall, the somber moods and pseudo-classical movements of Sketches of Spain pull Miles further away from straight jazz, but they heighten his improvisational scope (which is a good thing, and something the naysayers forget to note in their Gil-bashing frenzies), and I don’t think any of Miles’ trumpeting peers could have delivered this music as convincingly.

Sketches of Spain ended the duo’s main trilogy but not their partnership. 1962 saw them back in the studio for an aborted bossa nova project. They left behind a sequence of half-finished music that Columbia - in the absence of forthcoming Miles studio releases - released as Quiet Nights, much to the ire of Davis. Even with a small-band “Summer Night” tacked on, the LP ran less than a half hour. Disc 4 contains the six big band selections from Quiet Nights, the best of which is the hypnotic “Aos Pes Da Cruz”. Apart from that, it’s hard to judge anything because it all sounds incomplete; “Corcavado” is so slight that a re-run of “Aos Pes Da Cruz” is spliced into the end of it! The bossa craze of the day didn’t exactly push any musical frontiers, and not even Gil Evans is able to highbrow any magic out of it. His charts weigh down the music and his most stylized piece, “Song No. 1”, has little to nothing to do with bossa nova at all. Miles sleepwalks for the most part, and the two or three pleasing moments in the tracks are just statistical inevitabilities. It’s not that the Gil/Miles team ran out of spark, it’s that bossa nova was too cheap for them to bother with, and they apparently realized that in abandoning the project. Hearing Quiet Nights now, the music is harmless. For the superior “Summer Night”, look to the Seven Steps box set; it’s from the 1963 session with Victor Feldman.

In the midst of the Quiet Nights sessions, Miles and Gil hooked up with singer-songwriter Bob Dorough, he of twangy voice and eventual Schoolhouse Rock fame. Gil arranges streamlined instrumentation for these tunes - Miles, tenor sax (Wayne Shorter), trombone, bass, drums, percussion - and Dorough sings the execrable “Blue Xmas” (a humbugger co-written with Miles) and “Nothing Like You”. The latter ditty wound up on 1967’s quintet album Sorcerer in an act of perversity. Dorough’s hokey songs would seem to embody all that Davis detested in Ofay Americana, and yet he happily signed off on this nonsense. Maybe the two had an enjoyable booze-up together, who knows. The third and best track from the mini-session is “Devil May Care”, an uptempo tune that silences Dorough and gets top-notch solos from Miles and Wayne.

Still on Disc 4, we move ahead to 1963 and the proposed Miles/Gil music for a play called “Time of the Barracudas”. The segments of this suite-like track involve an exciting piano-trio improv from Miles’ new rhythm section (Hancock, Carter, Williams) and several short “cues” that make use of Gil’s thinned-out horn and rhythm section ensemble. (The love for the soft French horns continues.) Two main cues are actually proper tunes, one being the Evans gem “General Assembly”, aka “Barracudas”. This catchy, 6/8 modal number lets Miles stretch out; Wayne Shorter would cover the piece on his Etcetera album for Blue Note. There is also “Hotel Me Blues”, with a sexy horn vamp and piercing blues phrasing from Miles. We can hear Gil shouting out section cues to the band, but it isn’t a demo or rehearsal quality tape - the recording is quite good. Piecemeal as it is, “Time of the Barracudas” has more integrity than the whole of Quiet Nights and I rank it with the best of the pair’s work. It’s certainly some of their most modern music.

The last of the sessions (almost done!) is from 1968 and features four takes of one 4-minute piece, “Falling Water”. Low brass, reeds, strings (harp, guitar, mandolin), and rhythm section give Miles a swirling background that has been perfectly defined (I forget where) as an aquarium of sound. The piece is whimsical yet rich, a dreamlike excerpt from a life led in an imaginative world. All takes are loose enough to be imperfect, although it’s hard to tell what perfection would be for such a strange composition. Without any album context, “Falling Water” sits as a window into a possible future.

The remainder of Disc 4 and both Discs 5 and 6 delve into bonus tracks from the sessions, the lion’s share from Miles Ahead. Alternate takes, partial takes, inserts, overdubs, basic tracks sans overdubs, and studio discussion is all here in a “making of Miles Ahead” kind of brew. The reason for all the minutiae is the fact that the album had been released in different forms over the years; the 1987 issue attempted a stereo presentation of the original mono LP and used some alternate fragments in the process. Even the proper album is a product of studio assembly. To use one obvious example, notice how Miles’ solo in “I Don’t Want to Be Kissed” is spliced together? In the interest of being Complete, this box corrals everything that had seen release under the Miles Ahead name, along with the background studio work. To guide the listener through the details, the booklet has three helpful sections: a track-by-track description of all the fragments on Discs 5 and 6; a breakdown of the Miles Ahead album (via index points) that shows which takes and inserts were used for the master takes; and a sessionography that shows where each chronological take wound up being released or used, if at all. Granted, the epiphanies are somewhat trivial (“Aha, I hear where they spliced this part into the middle of that one!”) but they do sort out Miles Ahead's release history.

The other boon of the bonus tracks is that they illustrate the details of the music, such as Gil getting the correct contour into a “Springsville” phrase, or building up the grandeur of “Gone Gone Gone”, or Miles deciding mid-rehearsal that “I Loves You Porgy” will henceforth be played with a mute. Some overdubbed solos for Miles Ahead are heard in isolation; this might be totally excessive, but I enjoy the track where Miles’ lonely “Miles Ahead” solo is highlighted against the (very faint) backing track he’s dubbing to.

Porgy and Spain have a lesser supply of studio ephemera, mainly full alternate takes. (These start appearing on the first three discs, where each proper album program is followed by a supplemental mini-suite of alternates.) The sister versions of “Prayer” and “Porgy” and “Summertime” are decent, while a faster “Boat That’s Leaving Soon” is intriguing but has flubs. As do other tracks, like the tricky “Gone”, which is attempted in different tempos. As far as Sketches of Spain goes, the full master of “Saeta” beats the issued version, while a full alternate of the “Concerto de Aranjuez” is nearly useless, containing errors from the ensemble. (More interesting is the Disc 6 rehearsal half the “Concerto”, where Miles sits out.) “Song of Our Country”, heard in three versions, is a fine outtake that features Miles well.

The excesses of this box are admittedly indulgent, and a whole disc’s worth of bonus material could be shaved off, but one gets the feeling that the inclusion of the supplements stems directly from a reverence for the main albums. Nevertheless, the individual reissues are the way to go for the casual listener and even the Miles devotee who has no interest in how things are put together. For those who want the gory details (like me), the bonus tracks can be fascinating, although they’re not things that you’re going to listen to repeatedly.

Meanwhile, the three big albums sit undisturbed and still sound beautiful. Miles found a posh home on these efforts, and Gil Evans proved himself one of the wonders of jazz arranging. His scores stand tall vertically yet tell linear stories, and his knack for timbre and harmony is brilliant, bordering on genius at times. I always hear something new when listening closely to any of these tracks. The partnership of Miles and Gil was a once in a lifetime event, and we’re lucky to have its fruits preserved.


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