Richard Pite’s Jazz Repertory Company has updated and will be reviving its popular Miles Davis concert with a top-flight orchestra. The show was first performed in 2019, and this concert will again see trumpeter Freddie Gavita in a central role…
In the course of some 40 or more concerts at Cadogan Hall, Richard Pite’s Jazz Repertory Company has documented and recreated many of the most significant events and movements in jazz history. Each JRC jazz concert has deployed the best of our specialist UK performers with the content meticulously researched, and authenticity as their watchword. Now comes their celebration of the classic albums made by Miles Davis with Gil Evans as his collaborator in the 1950s. Stand by to be amazed.
Davis is, to use a much-overworked word, an icon. His every move has been documented – there’s a shelf of books devoted to him – his recordings constantly re-appear and can be heard as the soundtrack to television and movie features. You’ll even hear them emerging from the speakers in wine bars and restaurants.
He collaborated with some of the most innovative of jazz players and composers and in the process, created a series of recordings that culminated in 1959 with the best-selling album Kind of Blue. At one bound, or so it seemed, Davis had changed the working template for modern jazz expression.
It’s his sense of artistic fearlessness that is evident throughout the series of classic Davis albums that the Jazz Repertory Company will revisit at Cadogan Hall on 20 July. Aside from the glories of Davis’ unique trumpet sound which the hugely accomplished British trumpeters Freddie Gavita and Steve Fishwick will seek to evoke, there are the companion pleasures of hearing and experiencing the orchestrations created by Gil Evans for Davis for three seminal albums, Miles Ahead, Porgy & Bess and Sketches of Spain.
For these recordings, Evans chose to augment the time-honoured big band brass, reeds and rhythm sections with a range of woodwinds, plus French horns, and to deploy tuba, not as an adjunct to rhythm but as a mobile melodic voice and affirmed. Critical appreciation was effusive: “Evans recorded three albums which rank with the finest orchestral music of the twentieth century,” wrote the late trumpeter and Davis biographer Ian Carr.
All of this will be represented in the performances of the array of first-call British musicians specially assembled for this concert under the benign hand of Pete Long, as Musical Director, with erudite commentaries by music journalist and author David Hepworth.
If the Evans-Davis collaborations stand as a peak in orchestral writing and a master-class in the integration of a soloist with an ensemble, then Kind of Blue, from the Davis Sextet’s annus mirabilis, 1959, must represent the perfect stylistic apogee. “The group I had with Coltrane made me and him a legend,” said Davis, with some justification. He had brought sketches to the album session rather than finished pieces, none of them previously rehearsed, their form dictated by his interest in moving away from conventional harmonic ideas towards a modal approach. It took the existing alchemy between the trumpeter and his bandsmen, John Coltrane, Cannonball Adderley, Bill Evans, Wynton Kelly, Paul Chambers and Jimmy Cobb to ensure success. Ironically, none of the musicians involved had any idea that they had recorded a bestseller.
How one envies those who will be coming to all this ethereal, compulsive music for the first time. Consider it, as critic Robert Palmer put it, “Like a visit to heaven”.
LINE UP FOR 20 JULY
The Jazz Repertory Company/ Pete Long Orchestra
Musical Director: Pete Long
Presenter: David Hepworth
Trumpet soloists: Freddie Gavita and Steve Fishwick.
Trumpets: George Hogg, James Davison, Kevin Wedrychowski, Alan Berlyn.
Trombones: Mark Nightingale, Andy Flaxman, Daniel Higham, Andy Derrick.
Woodwinds: Martin Williams, Alan Barnes, Amy Roberts, Juliet Lewis, Paul Nathaniel.
French Horns: Mathew Gunner, Hugh Seenan, Carys Evans.
Tuba: Mark Easener.
Rhythm: John Horler, piano; Jerome Davies, bass, Richard Pite, drums.
Peter Vacher’s 2019 preview has been updated with his permission
