March 30, 2026
Miles Davis’ earliest masterpiece Birth Of The Cool gets the royal treatment with a new Tone Poet Vinyl Edition to be released on May 22 in celebration of the legendary trumpeter’s Centennial. Produced by Joe Harley, the album was mastered by Kevin Gray directly from the original analog phono reel master tapes, pressed on 180g vinyl at RTI, and packaged in a deluxe gatefold tip-on jacket featuring session photos by William “PoPsie” Randolph.
“This is an audacious gathering of sonic architects reshaping the language of jazz in real time,” says Harley. “Birth Of The Cool is a mood and a palette, where space and arrangement become as vital as the notes themselves. You can hear Miles standing at the threshold. And you’ll hear this as never before, from session masters gathered from the original phono reels.”
Following his trial-by-fire tenure in the Charlie Parker Quintet in the mid-1940s, Davis emerged with bolstered confidence and a creative hunger to explore new directions as a burgeoning band leader. A regular gathering of like-minded musicians at arranger Gil Evans’ Manhattan apartment provided the workshop at which the Miles Davis Nonet was born, and in 1949-50 Davis led three seminal sessions for Capitol Records that documented this exciting new music with a cast of collaborators including Gerry Mulligan, Lee Konitz, J.J. Johnson, Kai Winding, Gunther Schuller, John Lewis, Al Haig, Max Roach, Kenny Clarke, and others. The nonet featured a unique instrumentation with French horn and tuba to create new textures influenced by impressionist classical music that inspired lyrical improvisations by the band’s soloists on arrangements of pieces by Davis, Evans, Mulligan, Lewis, Denzil Best, Bud Powell, Johnny Mercer, and more. Originally released as select 10-inch 78-rpm singles, the 11 tracks were later compiled by Capitol on the 1957 12-inch release Birth Of The Cool.
