Porgy and Bess (Miles Davis album)
| Porgy and Bess | ||||
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| Studio album by Miles Davis | ||||
| Released | March 9, 1959 | |||
| Recorded | July 22 & 29 and August 4 & 18 1958 | |||
| Studio | 30th Street Studio in New York | |||
| Genre | Third stream,orchestral jazz, cool jazz | |||
| Length | 50:53 | |||
| Label | Columbia | |||
| Producer | Teo Macero, Cal Lampley | |||
| Miles Davis chronology | ||||
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| Alternative cover | ||||
UK 45 rpm release
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| Professional ratings | |
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| Review scores | |
| Source | Rating |
| Allmusic |  |
| All About Jazz | (favorable) |
| Entertainment Weekly | (A) |
| Los Angeles Times | (favorable) |
| JazzTimes | (favorable) |
| New York Times | (favorable) |
| Penguin Guide to Jazz | |
| Rolling Stone | |
| Virgin Encyclopedia | |
| Yahoo! Music | (favorable) |
Porgy and Bess (CL 1274) is a studio album by jazz musician Miles Davis, released in March 1959 on Columbia Records. The album features arrangements by Davis and collaborator Gil Evans from George Gershwin's 1934 opera of the same name. The album was recorded in four sessions on July 22, July 29, August 4, and August 18, 1958 at Columbia's 30th Street Studio in New York City. It is the second collaboration between Davis and Evans and has garnered much critical acclaim since its release, being acknowledged by music critics as the best of their collaborations. Jazz critics have regarded the album as historic.
In 1958, Davis was one of many jazz musicians growing dissatisfied with bebop, seeing its increasingly complex chord changes as hindering creativity. Five years earlier, in 1953, pianist George Russell published his Lydian Chromatic Concept of Tonal Organization, which offered an alternative to the practice of improvisation based on chords. Abandoning the traditional major and minor key relationships of classical music, Russell developed a new formulation using scales or a series of scales for improvisations. His approach to improvisation came to be known as modal in jazz. Davis saw Russell's methods of composition as a means of getting away from the dense chord-laden compositions of his time, which Davis had labeled "thick". Modal composition, with its reliance on scales and modes, represented, as Davis put it, "a return to melody". In a 1958 interview with Nat Hentoff of The Jazz Review, Davis remarked on the modal approach:
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