Edition №4
In the early 90s I was a classical voice major at the University of North Texas, in Denton, Texas. It’s a small town, but it has one of the best jazz schools anywhere, so jazz all over the place. A coffee house, a couple of dive bars, One O'Clock Lab Band open rehearsals, a bar somebody retrofitted in a former Pizza Hut. I’d go hear amazing players, students from all over the world, UNT faculty and whoever was passing through our dusty little town.
For two years, I had a volunteer slot DJ-ing at the college radio station, which was an all-jazz format, and that’s really where I got into Miles. Before that I only knew his late electric stuff that was current at the time, and it never did much for me despite Bono’s support. A friend at the station told me to go back further and handed me a CD of “Someday My Prince Will Come”. I started digging and didn’t stop.
This album comes from a strange moment for Miles. For context, we go back to March 1961, in an old converted church on East 30th Street in Manhattan, the same room where he’d made “Kind of Blue” a couple of years earlier. His classic band had broken up. Bill Evans moved on. Coltrane had quit the year before, Mobley was Miles’ new tenor, and yet Coltrane came back for two days to play the title track and one more. Mobley takes a solo early on, and a few minutes later Coltrane, the guy he’d replaced, comes in over the same changes. I didn’t catch that detail the first few times through.
That was sixty-five years ago, and the tape’s been cut and recut more times than I can count, in stereo and mono both, which was the way Davis and Macero meant it to be released. The copies aren’t the same, and the easy one to find is almost never the one you want.
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