Miles Davis - Ascenseur Pour L'Echafaud (1974 US Mercury Mono Vinyl LP)

Miles Davis - Ascenseur Pour L'Echafaud | Vinyl LP - 1974 US Mercury Mono Reissue (660 213, Masterdisk cut)

In late 1957 Miles Davis was touring Europe, guesting most nights with a French quartet, when the twenty-four-year-old director Louis Malle asked him to score his first film. Miles watched a screening, and then, on the night of 4 December, walked into Le Poste Parisien studio in Paris with the band and almost nothing written down. He had sketched a few harmonic sequences in his hotel room, and that was it. Malle projected looped scenes from the film onto a screen, explained the plot, and the group improvised straight to the images: Miles on trumpet, Barney Wilen on tenor, René Urtreger on piano, Pierre Michelot on bass and the expatriate American Kenny Clarke on drums. What they caught in that one overnight session is some of the most atmospheric music Miles ever made, muted trumpet drifting over a slow modal hush, with faster cues like "Sur L'Autoroute" pushed along by Clarke's brushes.

The film, a noir about a love affair and a murder starring Jeanne Moreau, launched Malle and the French New Wave, and the score launched something in Miles too. Reaching for scales instead of dense chords, he found the modal language he would open right up two years later on Kind of Blue. It stands as one of the first jazz film scores that works completely as an album in its own right. In the United States the music first appeared as half of Jazz Track in 1959; this is the later standalone Mercury edition.

1974 US pressing on Mercury, mono, catalogue 660 213, cut at Masterdisk and carrying the ten French cue titles on its red labels.