Listen to it. That familiar buzz, soothing and yet forever backed by those electric crackles. Miles with a mute in his horn. As he digs into the leadoff verse of “‘Round Midnight,” he proves he’s one of the luckiest motherfuckers to walk this earth. Few midwife for even one birth of the cool; here he readies round two. Already the mind behind a slew of classic 45s - “Jeru,” “Budo,” “Boplicity” - that counterbalanced the bebop our hero woodshedded on. And now, after stumbling for a few years (and cutting a couple smokin’ tunes, like “Walkin’” and “Bags’ Groove”) he’s all the way back. With a fresh new band behind him, natch, already the most enviably collected cats in town. Give the core a couple more years, and let Miles make the appropriate swaps. He’ll cut the best-selling and most acclaimed album in jazz’s storied history just four years after this session. But he wouldn’t have got there without this brooding nightsong, so pretty on its surface and so roiling underneath.
In these opening notes, the Miles we all know arrives. An aloof impressionist, forever suggesting more than he says; the music, of course, all the better for it. He plays like he knows that ‘Round About Midnight will mark the start of a run like no other. Classic after classic and revolution after revolution, his every band a nebula that birthed countless jazz stars. Bill Evans and Cannonball Adderly and Wayne Shorter and Herbie Hancock and John McLaughlin and Chick Corea and Ron Carter and Tony Williams and so many more. Little wonder that Miles takes his time between each of Thelonious’ notes, because oh do we got a helping of the good stuff coming in, and we might as well get comfortable while he strikes up the overture. Kind of Blue’s muted elegance, Sketches of Spain’s play with texture, Miles Smiles’ serpentine dances, and the vindictive funk of Bitches Brew all begin here.
But for all those names who swept through his ranks, he never found another costar like Coltrane. Few of us ever will. Even the song knew he was onto something different; you can tell because it perks up as Trane sweeps in. He’s usually in a hurry, but he makes you want to follow, even if it means you’ve got to hang on as tight as you can. Notes and ideas alike spiral out of his sax. Each barely finished before the next one comes out. But dig it - this man understands the art of the pause. His playing’s half the conversation and those breaks, just long and just strategic enough, that’s who he’s listening to. And each time he comes back in, he sounds a little different. Here he’s all fired up and there he’s laughing his ass off, and every so often he even slows down. Sometimes just so he can take it in, but when Trane gets his lyric side cooking he’ll nourish you like nothing else in this world.
Even if nobody told ya, you already know that someday he’ll go off on his own. Four years down the road he cut Giant Steps, which reinvented jazz harmony by pushing it to its logical conclusion. That kept him occupied for a spell, but then he started pulling it from damn near everywhere. The Middle East and Western Europe, the subcontinent and sub-Saharan Africa. Two years after Giant Steps they’ll brand him anti-jazz, and he’ll push into it even harder, his songs staggering in their length and abrasive in their tonalities and magnetic in their awe and audacity and nigh-inexplicable beauty. And so he’ll force the critics to find different names for it. Free jazz, they’ll call it, or avant-garde jazz, or my personal favorite, spiritual jazz. And eventually, after he leaves this earth, the African Orthodox Church canonizes him. What’s more, he gathers disciples, each titans in their own right. McCoy Tyner. Eric Dolphy. Pharoah Sanders. That indomitable rhythm section, Elvin Jones and Jimmy Garrison. And the one and only Alice Coltrane. He’ll become that rarest of Miles acolytes: the one who broke out, who built his own system.
Still, we are quite a long way from all that. So let’s leave the future aside for now and dwell in “‘Round Midnight” another moment. Because Miles is creeping back to restate Monk’s most lyrical melody. Coltrane keeps himself close at hand, launching into a countermelody that starts quiet but emboldens as it goes. Soon trumpet and sax sing to each other. Savor the way their voices ricochet off the closing chords. A little softshoe from the brass while our woodwind man glides gracefully offstage. And the silence lingers, because the song knew a little more. That these two dudes would, each in their own way, define the genre’s next decade or thereabouts. And that the good folks on the other side of the speakers would need a little time to take it all in.