Seven Steps to Heaven

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Seven Steps to Heaven
Studio album by Miles Davis

Publication
(s)

1963

Label (s) Columbia Records

Format (s)

CD, LP

Genre (s)

jazz

Title (number)

6/8

running time

46:29

occupation

production

Teo Macero

Studio (s)

Hollywood / New York

chronology
Quiet Nights
(1962) 		Seven Steps to Heaven Miles Davis in Europe
(1963)

Seven Steps to Heaven is a jazz album by Miles Davis that will be released in different line-ups on 16./17. April in Hollywood and on May 14, 1963 in New York and was released in the same year by Columbia Records .

The album

The album Seven Steps to Heaven is considered a transitional work in the trumpeter's oeuvre. In 1962 and early 1963 Miles Davis worked without a "working band", had appearances with Wynton Kelly , Paul Chambers , JJ Johnson and Jimmy Cobb and worked with Gil Evans , with whom he - under the impression of the Boss Nova wave - for "Columbia "recorded the (unsatisfactory) album Quiet Nights . Miles was so dissatisfied with the results that he did not consent to a release, which his producer Teo Macero ignored. In order to bring the record to an acceptable length, Macero also recorded the track Summer Nights , which Miles Davis - while looking for a new permanent band - had recorded in April 1963 with a short-lived formation on the west coast of the USA .

Miles Davis had appeared in early 1963 with a new formation at the Blackhawk jazz club in San Francisco , in which tenor saxophonist George Coleman , alto saxophonist Frank Strozier and pianist Harold Mabern played, and for the first time bassist Ron Carter , who then became Miles' "second quintet" 1968 should belong. The downbeat time-author Russ Wilson wrote:
"The presence of unfamiliar players seemed under Miles a fire to ignite. He made so many amazing fiery forays into the upper register that some listeners wondered if he was using a new, smaller mouthpiece (he didn't). "

The West Coast musician Frank Butler temporarily worked in the drummer's chair , because Davis actually wanted the young Tony Williams in the band, who was still under contract with Jackie McLean . The trumpeter later wrote in his autobiography,
“And then I heard this little seventeen year old drummer who was working with Jackie McLean. His name was Tony Williams and it literally took my shoes off, he was that crazy. I wanted him to come to me in California right away, but he had to fulfill his obligations with Jackie McLean. But after these jobs, he told me, he would have Jackie's blessing to join me. As I said before, trumpeters need great drummers, and I could hear right away that Tony was becoming one of the greatest drummers who has ever sat behind a drum kit. "

Davis in the mid-1950s

Miles Davis soon realized during his Blackhawk appearances that Strozier and Mabern did not fit into the sextet; After a guest appearance in the "It Club" he took Victor Feldman into the band for pianist Mabern , and then made his first recordings with the new band in Hollywood. During this first session, Feldman performed two compositions, Seven Steps to Heaven and Joshua . Miles' companion on April 16 and 17, 1963 were George Coleman, Frank Butler, and Ron Carter. In addition to the aforementioned Summer Night , the quintet recorded a total of six tracks that were to appear on the album So Near, So Far . Without the involvement of Coleman, he eventually recorded three ballads , two of which surprisingly came from New Orleans jazz , the Basin Street Blues and Baby, Won't You Please Come Home ? , which he used to transform familiar material succeeded, also in the ballad I Fall in Love So Easily . The Basin Street Blues, which he played with mute, appeared - according to Davis biographer Eric Nisenson - “in its elegiac bitterness like a melancholy meditation on New Orleans and its greatest son, Louis Armstrong . These moving ballad interpretations showed, as his work with the short-lived sextet had already done, that Miles was not exploring new horizons at this point in his career, but rather wanted to refine and deepen the style he had created up to then. "

A month later, on May 14, 1963, Miles returned to New York and played three of the tracks, Seven Steps to Heaven, So Near, So Far and Joshua again, this time with a different line-up. Vic Feldman was replaced by Herbie Hancock , who had caused a stir the year before with his composition Watermelon Man , and Butler was replaced by seventeen-year-old Tony Williams . The new rhythm section with Hancock, Carter and Williams formed the core of the "working band" with which Miles Davis was to record classic albums such as ESP , Nefertiti , Miles Smiles and his legendary Plugged Nickel recordings in 1965 over the next five years . Seven Steps to Heaven was the last Miles Davis album to be based heavily on standard material; When Wayne Shorter joined the band, his compositions determined the repertoire of the Davis band.

Reception of the album

Davis biographer Peter Wießmüller wrote that the Seven Steps sessions gave the opportunity to compare the two recordings of So Near and So Far : “Miles' enthusiasm is clear, because while the West Coast group presents the topic straight and unadorned This is structured much more dynamically and variedly by the new rhythm section, with Tony Williams' wonderful, floating cymbal work being admired. "

Scott Yanow and Thom Jurek awarded the album the second highest rating in Allmusic ; they particularly highlight the classic tracks Seven Steps to Heaven, Joshua, and the slower versions of Basin Street Blues and Baby, Won't You Please Come Home . The authors Richard Cook and Brian Morton , who only gave the album three stars, are more critical in their judgment and see the transitional album Seven Steps to Heaven only as a harbinger of the revolutionary Davis albums of the mid-1960s.

The titles

Ron Carter live in the old pawn shop in Cologne, Germany, October 7, 2008
  • Miles Davis: Seven Steps to Heaven (Columbia CS 8851)
  1. Basin Street Blues ( Spencer Williams ) - 10:30
  2. Seven Steps to Heaven ( Victor Feldman , Miles Davis) - 6:26
  3. I Fall in Love Too Easily ( Jule Styne , Sammy Cahn ) - 6:46
  4. So Near, So Far ( Tony Crombie , Benny Green ) - 6:59
  5. Baby, won't you please come home? ( Charles Warfield , Clarence Williams ) - 8:28
  6. Joshua (V. Feldman) - 7:00

Tracks 1, 3 & 5 were written on April 16, 1963 in a quartet with Feldman, Butler, Carter and Davis (without Coleman).

The CD re-release contained as "alternate take" a version of So Near, So Far (from the session on April 16 in a quintet line-up) and Summer Night, which was recorded with the West Coast quintet on April 17, 1963 and was originally was released on the LP Quiet Nights .

All tracks of the three sessions appeared in 2005 on the seven-CD Columbia Edition Seven Steps: The Complete Columbia Recordings of Miles Davis 1963-1964 (C7K 90840).

literature

Web link

Remarks

  1. ↑ See Davis / Troupe, p. 353.
  2. ↑ Russ Wilson, cit. after Nisenson, p. 144.
  3. ↑ cit. after Davis / Troupe, p. 354 f.
  4. ↑ Quotation Nisenson, p. 144 f.
  5. ↑ cit. after Wießmüller, p. 133.
  6. ↑ Yanow in the Allmusic Guide 1996 with the highest rating of five stars
  7. ↑ appeared in the 1970s on the Davis compilation Directions (Columbia KC 36472)