Had the lid off an old upright this afternoon, felt dampers, the whole slow business, and the fellow whose piano it is asked me who I'd have wanted to tune for. I said nobody, really. I'd have wanted to sit in the corner of a church on East 30th Street in Manhattan and not move.
That's what Columbia's studio was, a Greek Orthodox church they'd bought and left mostly alone, ceiling way up, Fred Plaut running it. Spring of '59, Miles comes in with sketches. Not charts. Scales and a mood and a few lines, handed round that morning, and most of what you hear went down on a first pass. Six men figuring out the shape of a thing while the tape rolls. You can hear them listening — Paul Chambers setting the floor, Jimmy Cobb brushing it along, nobody crowding anybody.
Listen for the piano on So What. Bill Evans hangs back when Miles starts his solo, lets him go out there with just bass and drums for a bit, and then comes in underneath a few bars later like he'd been waiting to be sure. That little gap is the whole record to me.
He was 65 when he died in Santa Monica, 1991.
Otis, So What went down on the second of March, 1959, and then they all went away for nearly seven weeks before coming back on the twenty-second of April for the other two tracks. (Wynton Kelly's at the piano on Freddie Freeloader, the one date Evans sat out.) Two afternoons, essentially.
Otis, he did the other kind of first pass too — Louis Malle screened the reels for him in Paris one night in 1957 and the band played to the picture as it ran, Jeanne Moreau walking the streets while the trumpet followed her. Ascenseur pour l'échafaud. A score cut to length by watching it happen.