Miles Davis - Birth Of The Cool (Blue Note Tone Poet Series)

Birth Of The Cool joins the Blue Note Tone Poet Series on 180 gram vinyl, arriving in 2026 as the jazz world marks Miles Davis's centennial.

The music was recorded in 1949 and 1950 for Capitol by a nine-piece band that sounded like nothing else in jazz at the time. Alongside the usual horns, Davis added French horn and tuba, and leaned on arrangers Gil Evans, Gerry Mulligan and John Lewis to write charts that favoured texture and restraint over bebop fireworks. The sides were gathered as an LP in 1957, and the title stuck to a whole movement.

Gil Evans's arrangement of "Boplicity" is a masterclass in soft-edged voicings, while Mulligan's "Jeru" swings with quiet confidence. "Moon Dreams" drifts almost into chamber music, and "Israel" shows how much drama the group could find at low volume.

The playing is just as remarkable, with Lee Konitz's airy alto, Mulligan's baritone and Max Roach's drums giving Davis plenty of space to shape his cool, lyrical lines.

More than seventy years on, this remains one of the essential foundations of any jazz shelf, the record that showed how much a soft touch could say. The Tone Poet treatment gives it a setting worthy of its reputation.