Miles Davis
Milestones

"Milestones," the term with which Miles Davis chose to label this seminal work from 1958, is already a programmatic statement, a chronicle of the present and a tale of what will be. "Milestones," the six tracks of this record, the debut of the modal revolution, the era in which jazz meets itself and falls hopelessly in love. Milestones are those that Miles will scatter in the enchanted garden of his wandering, and by extension, in the Music of the past century. But to stop at the first verbal meaning belongs to the old jazz, anchored to canonical structures. It's time for dissociated thinking, and so "Miles tones" are the tones, the accents, the shades of Miles, his style. "Miles tones" is also Miles intoning, harmonizing, toning, giving vigor.

If bebop played on harmonic hypertrophy, on a baroque circularity reminiscent of the constrained movement of the spirograph, Miles's music no longer works around turns, but around modes. While the turn reiterates, always exhausting itself, the mode can combine without limit. And so, on the skeleton of very few, sparse chords, the musician has vast horizons to roam, generating structures that carry the thrill of the unexplored, the fever of creation. It's like talking about love: improvised phrases caress the main theme, stroke it, detach from it suddenly only to approach it again, a courtship dance that can be nothing but intoxicated. The leader (and God knows if Miles was) marks the times, through almost arcane signals, pacing the unfolding of the bacchanal around him: in the charisma of the officiant, in the semantic system through which he manages to keep the musicians with him, there, I find the modal miracle inhabiting, and I will never cease to marvel at it.

If the sublimation of this new canon would come a year later with "Kind of Blue" (another title with a plurality of meanings, the mode, indeterminacy, interpretation), the immense intrinsic value of "Milestones" lies in having broken the chains and created a new architecture of sound. The need to decline the tones according to new rules pushed Davis to launch the formula of the sextet, which especially in the immediately following years, knew how to produce so many wonders. John Coltrane, Julian "Cannonball" Adderley, Philly Joe Jones, Paul Chambers, Red Garland, an elite wild bunch following the leader. Off we go.

The first track, "Dr. Jackle," picks up a recording from three years before the Prestige era; it is still bebop, impetuous, claustrophobic. Jones creates a sound carpet where the silvery motifs of the cymbals intertwine with furious rolls, over which the three reeds ride possessed. Bebop that wants to tear its skin off in a sweat bath. "Sid's Ahead," an original composition by Davis, brings us back to earth amongst clouds, with the help of a celestial solo by Coltrane, with Garland's piano flowing beneath only to dissolve with the entrance of Miles, imposing, drawing on a refined 4/4 of the Jones/Chambers house a splendid, nervous web, concluded by a poignant dialogue with the bass.

Cannonball enters the scene, as recently mentioned on these pages, plumply, yet sharp in phrasing, a river, and then the absence of reeds, now it's up to keys, strings, and cymbals and skins, to which Davis affixes his signature. Complex, of a melancholic vitality, this piece returns all the charisma of Miles Davis, who seems to pervade the 13 minutes of the suite, now with breath, now with a gaze, now with mere thought. It is also the first exquisitely modal moment of the album, where the subtraction of binding elements translates into passionate introspection. Chapeau. "Two Bass Hit" raises the tempo, quick, magnificent blues, resting on the liquefied bass lines of a Paul Chambers in evident state of grace. It's just this, there seems to be something in the air that's contagious and palpable. Towards the end of his solo, Adderley hits one of his peaks, losing himself in a kind of trance, he is in the wild state when the Piper Miles comes to his aid, mounts him, brings him back to order with a theme of unspeakable grace. Those few, furious seconds wherein the two penetrate each other, contain everything: attraction, devotion, ecstasy, yoke. In hindsight, those few, furious seconds, seem to me to foreshadow the dissolution of Bitches Brew.

It's time for "Milestones," the event. It is music without a path, it's hard to venture a chronicle. Adderley and Coltrane are two astronauts putting their noses into the cosmos, held by two basic chords but free to roam like never before. Space. But more than anything, solemn are the sobs of Miles (Miles tones) that start the piece, allowing no alternative to indiscriminate exploration. For the slightly over thirty-year-old John Coltrane, who was just then spreading his wings, that solo must have meant a lot, suggesting to him the plot of his last glorious decade, that absence of constraints alone can lift us from a life too burdensome.

"Billy Boy" lives on a magnificent intuition by Red Garland, who designs on the piano a delightful theme, and Chambers and Jones desire nothing more than to hum around it discreetly. It is a sonnet, inspired by a climate of peaceful contemplation, and by the joy of someone who knows they have pulled something off only moments before. The fragmented style of Thelonious Monk was well known to Davis, who chooses his "Straight, No Chaser" to close the album. That succession of syncopations and offbeats is the ideal space for Cannonball's raids, whose sole goal seems to be to reach out in every direction to gather fruits of all sorts, tones of every shade. The metric suggested by Jones leads, with the leader's approval, to the last shovel blows: the milestone is planted, it will serve the heirs, but much more to the protagonists of the undertaking, heirs of themselves.

A fundamental episode in the journey of the one who more than anyone else traveled, crossed, and marked the jazz epic, "Milestones" communicates both the urgency of the post- and the pre-. Suspended between the spasms of bop and the formal perfection of Kind of Blue, the record narrates them both, equally nostalgic for the time that has passed and the one to come. But more than anything, though, a synchronous reading of this album moves deeply, faithful chronicle of a dawn, direct recording of an egg hatching.