Miles Davis’s centenary is marked by renewed attention to his musical legacy, including the repackaged 1957 soundtrack Ascenseur pour l’Echafaud. During the film’s production in December 1957, Davis composed from a small set of chords and largely improvised while the screen showed Louis Malle’s crime thriller. A local quartet featuring drummer Kenny Clarke helped shape a harmonic openness that produced a spacey, ethereal soundworld. The music accompanies a story of two lovers who believe they have committed the perfect murder, followed by mishaps and emotional reversals through a long Paris night. Sensual dreaminess, fast-bop urgency, bluesy wandering, and bar-room counterpoint all emerge, yet the soundtrack remains effective without the images.
"When Miles Davis was dying in September 1991, an invisible, neighbouring trumpet player, who this writer would frequently hear practising graceful classical phrases, began playing homages to Miles' voice-like, blues-inflected melodies instead. It was a poignant personal tribute to a unique instrumental sound, and a unique imagination, that had profoundly enriched 20th-century music."
"A standout this month is his 1957 movie soundtrack Ascenseur pour l'Echafaud now repackaged on vinyl and CD with restored audio, beautiful photographs and revealing essays. Composed by Davis from little more than a handful of chords, this music was mostly improvised straight to a screen showing budding New Wave director Louis Malle's crime thriller Ascenseur pour l'Echafaud (Lift to the Scaffold), over one long night in a Paris studio in December 1957."
"His fine local quartet included expat New York bebop drummer Kenny Clarke, and their harmonic openness created a spacey, ethereal soundworld (a method that within little more than a year would also colour the landscape of Miles's classic Kind of Blue) for a story following two lovers who think they've committed the perfect murder of an inconvenient husband, and the mishaps, farces, ecstasies and fears that populate the long night of their undoing."
"Dreamily sensual sounds mirror misplaced hopes; there are car-chase scurries (Miles's fast-bop horn virtuosity was formidable in this period), desolately bluesy accompaniments to actor Jeanne Moreau's confused wandering in search of her partner, bar-room clamour in the trumpet/tenor-sax counterpoint between Miles and saxist Barney Wilen but all the music stands alone, without images. A quiet slow-burn, but simmering with all of Miles Davis's"
Read at www.theguardian.com
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