Features Disc of the day
Miles Davis
Ascenseur pour L’Echafaud
(Fontana, 1958)
Jazz legend metamorphoses screen to sound. And with what style...
It's hard to imagine a cooler combination: Miles Davis and French new wave noir. Louis Malle's 1958 film Ascenseur Pour L'Echafaud (aka Lift To The Scaffold) tells the tale of two sets of lovers caught up in a crime. One couple's fate disintegrates into betrayed anguish, the other in flight from the pursuing police. Encouraged by his assistant Jean-Paul Rappeneau, Malle approached Davis at a performance at Club St-Germain in Paris in November 1957. With Barney Willen, René Urtreger, Pierre Michelot and Kenny Clarke in tow, Davis rolled up to the Le Poste Parisien studio on December 4. With minimal prep, barring a truncated preview for Davis and a short outline of the film's plotline for the band, the quintet improvised the entire soundtrack live as they watched the film unfold before them.
Over the next two years, Davis would issue an astonishing run of albums: Milestones; Porgy & Bess; Kind of Blue; Sketches Of Spain. Standing just as successfully alone as any of those better-known classics, Ascenseur Pour L'Echafaud is something beyond a movie accompaniment; it's a story told in sound. The somnambulist stroll of Nuit Sur Les Champs-Élysées conjures Jeanne Moreau, moodily skulking the dark streets of Paris, the cry of Davis's trumpet arousing the pain of her heartbreak every time it sounds. Then listen, rapt, to Sur L'Autoroute - and be forgiven for casting a glance over your shoulder for les flics. Just to check.
Mary Caulfield
Posted by Ross_Bennett at 5:53 PM GMT 11/03/2011
Further Listening
Sonny Rollins – Alfie (Impulse!, 1966)
Miles Davis – Kind Of Blue (Columbia, 1959)
Johnny Mandel – I Want To Live! (Rykodisc, 1999)
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Miles Davis - Ascenseur pour L’Echafaud
Jazz legend metamorphoses screen to sound. And with what style...
5:53 PM GMT 11/03/2011
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Great choice. I've only heard a small part of this on YouTube but it sounds utterly mesmerising. Must get a copy!
Posted by Alexander Meerkat at 8:24 PM GMT 11/03/2011 Report Abuse
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I only have Generique on a best of compilation but it is absolutely mesmerizing. I remember cruising the backroads of Southern Ontario with a buddy and the images it conjures up had us going for a late night drink in Paris in our minds!
Posted by Greg at 3:55 PM GMT 12/03/2011 Report Abuse
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what a way to welcome back DOTD. please keep it up, slackers.
Posted by Cardoman Railing High at 1:02 PM GMT 14/03/2011 Report Abuse
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Amazing review
Posted by Bubs at 8:02 AM GMT 15/03/2011 Report Abuse
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