After Hours

Miles Davis & Gil Evans. Blues for Pablo

This is a really superb clip from 1959 with Miles playing Gil Evans' arrangements for the album Miles Ahead. This is just part of a larger televised session. If I can find decent-sounding clips (that's kind of a challenge), I'll post them all. In his autobiography (which is really hilarious at times), Miles describe Gil Evans as an obsessive perfectionist. He claimed that it would often take Evans several weeks to write just a few measures of music. He would write and rewrite until it was perfect. And that's what you hear in this track - and also on Evans' solo albums. Out of the Cool is particularly good. It was recorded just a year after Miles Ahead. The band is smaller and the instrumentation is more diverse. But Evans' arrangements are just as well-constructed as they are here. I heartily recommend it. Anyhow, I really like this clip, because you're there at the session. There's all this intimacy and intensity of the real thing happening in real time.