Festival/Cruise News

Dreaming In Blue: Miles Davis Festival

Published: 2012-06-04

Smoke, the Upper West Side jazz club, has reserved this month for veneration of Miles Davis.

The kickoff, through Sunday, features a sextet led by Jimmy Cobb, the drummer on Davis’s landmark album “Kind of Blue”; among next week’s highlights is a hard-bop quintet led by the dynamic trumpeter Freddie Hendrix.

An original, lyrical soloist and a demanding group leader, Miles Davis was the most consistently innovative musician in jazz from the late 1940s through the 1960s.

In 1955 Davis appeared informally at the Newport Jazz Festival. His sensational improvisations there brought him widespread publicity and sufficient engagements to establish a quintet (1955-7) with Red Garland, Paul Chambers, Philly Joe Jones, and John Coltrane, who in 1956 was joined and later replaced by Rollins. In May 1957 Davis made the first of several remarkable solo recordings on trumpet and flugelhorn against unusual jazz orchestrations by Gil Evans. In the autumn he organized a quintet, later joined by Cannonball Adderley, that proved short-lived; in the same year he wrote and recorded music in Paris for Louis Malle's film Ascenseur pour l'echafaud.

Friday through June 30
At 8, 10 and 11:30 p.m.

Smoke
2751 Broadway, at 106th Street,
(212) 864-6662, smokejazz.com

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