Music Monday: Some More Miles and Kenny Dorham

In my quest to get a better handle on Miles Davis’s discography as a way to celebrate his centennial, I’ve been listening to some of Davis’s mid-to-late 1950s material. Last week, for example, I posted about Relaxin’ (recorded in 1956 and released in March of 1958) and the first great Miles Davis quintet with John Coltrane, Red Garland, Paul Chambers, and Philly Joe Jones.

It made sense to continue to listen to the expansion of that group into a sextet in 1958, Milestones. This album saw the addition of Cannonball Adderley and, more importantly, marked the first gesture of Miles Davis toward modal jazz (which will become “kind of” a big thing the next year).  

At the same time, this album marks out a new direction for Miles, so did Miles Ahead (1957) which was the first album in collaboration with Gil Evans. Of course this collaboration would culminate in the classics Porgy and Bess (1959) and Sketches of Spain (1960).

I’ve become so fixated on Miles Davis that I sometimes overlook his contemporaries (or end up thinking of his contemporaries only in comparison to Miles). Kenny Dorham’s work in the mid- to late- 1950s offers a useful counterpoint. For example, Dorham plays Monk’s “‘Round About Midnight” on the live album of the same name from a 1956 date at the Café Bohemia in New York. If Miles tended toward the sparse and suggestive, Dorham had a fuller and even more energetic sound. Miles was already shifting to modal jazz whereas Dorham was exploring the frontiers of hard bop. Check it out here and then go and check out Miles’ contemporary album of the same name.