Miles Davis
Walkin'

The year 1954 was a year of rebirth for Miles Davis, following the difficult period of drug addiction. Behind him was his apprenticeship at Charlie Parker's court, an epochal album like "Birth Of The Cool," and, from there on, a series of sporadic recordings, at times excellent ("Blue Haze"), at times haphazard and uncertain ("Dig"). As we said, 1954: Davis began the brief and fruitful partnership with the young pianist Horace Silver and the veteran bassist Percy Heath.

After several important recordings with Art Blakey on drums ("Lazy Susan," "The Leap," "It Never Entered My Mind" for example), the idea that dawned on Davis was to bring jazz back into the hands of black musicians, to emphasize its truly Afro-American nature, in contrast to the polished and well-mannered sound of the whites from the West Coast (who were, moreover, quite indebted to the sound of "Birth Of The Cool" itself!), who had, for a while, stolen the spotlight from the New York musicians. This is how hard-bop was born, an evolution/continuation of bebop in a simpler, more aggressive, catchy and warm guise, full of references to blues, gospel, work song, and in general to all the exquisitely black popular heritage. And not just structurally, but also and primarily in terms of expression. The explosive, burning hard-bop would soon become mainstream jazz, and it would be this album that served as a call to arms. And "Walkin'", in this music, is a manifesto.

The album comprises two sessions, one on April 3rd and the other on April 29th; in both, the harmonic simplification work is noted, favoring expressiveness and melody, which is one of the pillars of Davis’s aesthetics.

In the recordings of April 29th, we see an extraordinary sextet at work: besides the aforementioned Davis, Heath, and Silver, we have J.J. Johnson, an unsurpassed trombone virtuoso, and Lucky Thompson, a tenor saxophonist with a deep, vibrant instrumental voice, an ideal link between the generation of Coleman Hawkins and Ben Webster and that of Charlie Parker and Dexter Gordon.

The torrential title-track breaks the delay, a rhythmical blues with a relaxed, elastic pace, opened by the three horns in unison, creating a sound wall worthy of a small orchestra. Silver's piano underscores the colleagues' work with Ellington-like elegance, Heath and Clarke imprint it with an agile and vigorous cadenced rhythm, Davis takes the first solo in his balanced and essential style, marked by controlled irruption. The trumpeter no longer uses that muffled and gentle style he exhibited on "Birth Of The Cool": the unmistakable taste for sobriety, the preference for the middle register remains, but this time in service of fluid, bright phrases, with an exuberance worthy of the early Louis Armstrong. Johnson's solo naturally grafts onto Miles', continuing the discourse made of enveloping and sinuous melodic lines, with a particular warmth added by the instrument’s dark tone; finally, Lucky Thompson's sax arrives, overflowing, creamy, sensual, which matches with a strengthening of the rhythmic texture. Horace Silver then gives an example of his percussive, resonant piano style, strongly rhythmic and only seemingly simple, before Davis returns with an explosive high note; and shortly after, the whole group marches in unison again, closing this incredible and quintessential fourteen-minute blues jam with a fireworks finish.

Next, we find "Blue 'n' Boogie", Dizzy Gillespie's classic, for which the sextet provides an incendiary version: very fast, rhythmically frenzied, with a telepathic synergy between the soloists, and a crescendo of excitement and adrenaline hard to match. The first solo is again Davis's, and it’s notable how he prefers to keep controlled and properly doses notes and pauses, in a context where Fats Navarro or the rising star Clifford Brown would venture into serpentine high-note runs. After Johnson's turn, with a solo full of beautiful detached phrases, the main theme triggers Lucky Thompson's impressive saxophonic eruption, a marathon of inventiveness, taste, blues of black heat (…) that brings excitement to a climax, at times underscored by a vigorous trumpet and trombone riff. After a lightning-fast "funky" passage by Silver, it closes with the frenetic theme. Seven intensely exuberant minutes of hot, vulcanic, intense, and catchy jazz: hard-bop, as we were saying.

The April 3rd session sees, alongside Davis obviously, the usual super-rhythm section of Silver/Heath/Clarke and the little-known alto saxophonist Dave Schildkraut, a sort of less nervy Charlie Parker, somewhat in the manner of Paul Desmond. This quintet seems like a laboratory studying the timbral possibilities of muffled sounds in the context of the newly defined hard-bop. Throughout the session, Davis plays with a mute, while Clarke uses brushes: the overall sound is nuanced, dusky, fascinating. Three tracks, three different speeds to test the new solution: "Solar", a very rhythmic and brisk medium tempo on which the trumpet draws surreal suggestions and lunar landscapes, with a beautiful middle part where the trumpet floats suspended over bass and cymbals before Silver returns and the band returns to cruising speed; "You Don't Know What Love Is", an archetype of Davisian ballads, absorbed and lyrical, penetrating, with a magnificent theme developed superbly by Miles alone; and "Love Me Or Leave Me", a very fast flow of sound images where the theme is recursively varied, and the spotlight changes continuously between trumpet, sax, drums (splendid exchanges between Davis and Clarke), and piano (Silver retrospectively confirms his stature as a giant and, at the time, as a rising star). The session's merit is implicitly confirmed by later works of Alton's trumpeter, who would further explore and develop the ideas sown here. And Schildkraut, the mysterious saxophonist, thus ensures a niche in jazz history.

In conclusion, "Walkin'" is a cardinal work in the history of Miles Davis and jazz in general: it's the album that awakened New York jazz, that defined the hard-bop language, that set new archetypes, and it will serve as a battering ram for the resurgence of authentic black jazz—the great ensembles of Horace Silver (not coincidentally present here), Max Roach and Clifford Brown, Art Blakey, and Sonny Rollins's changing formations will follow with other splendid, unmissable albums until the flood.