My Funny Valentine (Album)

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My Funny Valentine
Live album by Miles Davis

Publication
(s)

1964

Label (s) Columbia Records

Format (s)

CD, LP

Genre (s)

jazz

running time

62:33

occupation

production

Teo Macero

chronology
Miles Davis in Europe
1963 		My Funny Valentine Miles in Tokyo
1964

My Funny Valentine is a jazz album by Miles Davis , recorded at a concert at Lincoln Center in New York on February 12, 1964 and released by Columbia Records that year.

Prehistory of the album

After a transition phase with a Californian band ( Seven Steps to Heaven ), Davis formed a new quintet in New York with Ron Carter and George Coleman , which included the pianist Herbie Hancock and the only 17-year-old drummer Tony Williams . In the summer of 1963 the new formation went on a European tour and made guest appearances at the jazz festival in Antibes ( Miles Davis in Europe ). On February 12, the band played at the Philharmonic Hall (now Avery Fisher Hall ) at a charity event for the NAACP , the Congress of Racial Equality and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee for voter registration in Mississippi and Louisiana . Miles Davis saw his participation in the concert as a form of memory of John F. Kennedy, who was murdered in November of the previous year . This act had dashed the hopes of many members of the civil rights movement. Davis had repeatedly expressed his admiration for the Kennedys.

The album

The concert recordings of the evening appeared on Columbia Records on two separate albums. The "Up-tempo" tracks were released under the title Four & More, while the album My Funny Valentine contains the slower and medium-tempo tracks.

Davis biographer Peter Wießmüller wrote that the Four & More titles were played too quickly, which seems monotonous in the long run , while the title track Funny Valentine has a great depth and brilliance that Miles had not yet achieved Ian Carr thinks the album is one of the real greatest recordings of a live concert. The album contained "all those beautiful and subdued ballads by Miles Davis" that were missing on Four & More . This is particularly noticeable in the changes that the 15-minute version of "My Funny Valentine" undergoes compared to the September 1959 recording with Bill Evans : this version “is determined by a powerful movement away from romance (the Evans version ) to more abstraction. The gain in differentiated emotional expressiveness is unmistakable. Despite the occasionally only hidden references to the original melody and the very free harmonic approximation (Davis: "We use the whole title like a tone scale"), the structure is maintained. In contrast to earlier recordings, Miles plays with the horn open in the highest registers, without losing his personal touch, the lyrical sound. "

The speed of some of the songs this evening was partly due to the tensions surrounding free play. Some band members would rather have their fees and then decide for themselves how much to donate; but Miles Davis was stubborn on the matter. Herbie Hancock later described the psychological pressure that weighed on the young band members from playing in the new Carnegie Hall for the first time .

Tenor saxophonist George Coleman left the band soon after. After an interim solution with Sam Rivers, who accompanied Davis on a Japan tour, but did not fit into the band concept, Miles Davis managed to get his favorite Wayne Shorter to join. In September 1964 the classic "second Miles Davis quintet" was created, which was to be effective until 1968.

Discographic Notes

The live recordings from the "Philharmonic Hall" first appeared in 1964 under the title Miles Davis: Four & More - Recordes Live in Concert (Columbia CS 9106) and My Funny Valentine - Miles Davis in Concert (Columbia CS 9253). When the CD was released ( CBS. 471246-2), the two albums were combined under the title The Complete Concert 1964: My Funny Valentine + Four & More . The recordings also appeared together with other (live) recordings by the Miles Davis Formations from 1963/64 on the "Columbia" compilation Seven Steps - The Complete Columbia Recordings of Miles Davis 1963-1964 (C7K 90840)

The titles

  1. "Introduction by Mort Fega" - 1:40
  2. " My Funny Valentine " ( Richard Rodgers , Lorenz Hart ) - 14:55
  3. "All of You" ( Cole Porter ) - 14:40
  4. “Go-Go” (Theme & Re-Introduction) - 1:43
  5. " Stella by Starlight " ( Ned Washington , Victor Young ) - 13:03
  6. "All Blues" ( Miles Davis ) - 8:51
  7. "I Thought About You" ( Johnny Mercer , Jimmy Van Heusen ) - 11:14 am
The album "Four & More" contains the tracks
  1. So what
  2. Walkin '
  3. Joshua
  4. Go-Go (Theme & Announcement)
  5. Four
  6. Seven Steps to Heaven
  7. There is no greater love
  8. Go-Go (Theme and Announcement)

Literature / sources

Remarks

  1. ^ "African-American Civil Rights Movement" (1955–1968)
  2. ↑ In 1962 he said: “I like the Kennedy brothers; they're swinging people. "Carr, Miles Davis, p. 194
  3. ↑ cit. after Ian Carr ("were played with more depth and brilliance than Miles had achieved before.") Carr, Miles Davis, p. 194
  4. ↑ "one of the very greatest recordings of a live concert ... The playing throughout the album is inspired, and Miles in particular reaches tremendous heights. Anyone who wanted to get a vivid idea of ​​the trumpeter's development over the previous eight years or so should compare [earlier recordings of My Funny Valentine and Stella by Starlight ] with the versions on this 1964 live recording. "Ian Carr, Miles Davis, S 195
  5. ↑ cit. after Wießmüller, p. 138
  6. ↑ published on the album Jazz at the Plaza, Vol. 1 (Columbia PC 32470)
  7. ↑ cit. after Wießmüller, p. 136 f.
  8. ^ Miles Davis, pp. 359 f.
  9. ^ "That was my first time playing at the Philharmonic Hall and that was, like, a big deal, because the new Carnegie Hall was the Philharmonic Hall. Just from the prestige standpoint i really wanted to play good - the whole band really wanted to play good because that was the whole band's first time playing there ... although Miles had played at Carnegie Hall before ... but it was really a special concert. Only the New York Philharmonic plays there ... and I tell you something ... it was really funny ... when we walked away from that concert, we were all dejected and disappointed. We thought we had really bombed… but then we listened to the record - it sounded fantastic! ", Quoted. after Ian Carr, p. 194 f
  10. ↑ Miles Davis wrote in his autobiography: “George was dissatisfied because the boys often had to play as a quartet because I couldn't show up for jobs because of my hip pain. He often complained about how freely Herbie, Ron, and Tony got going when I wasn't around. As soon as I didn't show up, they just didn't want to play traditionally and that was where George got in the way. He could play freely too, he just didn't want to and preferred the traditional one. "Miles Davis, p. 363
  11. ↑ Shorter still had contractual obligations to fulfill as "musical director" at Art Blakeys Jazz Messengers .