| Quiet Nights | |
| Type: | Studio |
| Artist: | Miles Davis |
| Cover: | MileDavis_QuietNights.jpg |
| Released: | December 16, 1963[1] |
| Recorded: | July 27–November 6, 1962 April 17, 1963 (Quintet) October 9–10, 1963 (1997 bonus track) |
| Genre: | Jazz, third stream, bossa nova |
| Length: | 26:57 |
| Label: | Columbia CL 2106 [mono] CS 8906 |
| Producer: | Teo Macero Irving Townsend (1963) |
| Prev Title: | Seven Steps to Heaven |
| Prev Year: | 1963 |
| Next Title: | Miles & Monk at Newport |
| Next Year: | 1964 |
Quiet Nights is a studio album by the American jazz trumpeter Miles Davis, and his fourth album collaboration with arranger and conductor Gil Evans, released in 1963 on Columbia Records, catalogue CL 2106 and CS 8906 in stereo. Recorded mostly at Columbia's 30th Street Studios in Manhattan, it is the final album by Davis and Evans.
Keeping to his standard procedure at Columbia to date of alternating small group records and big band studio projects with Gil Evans, Davis entered the studio with Evans to follow up the latest studio LP by the working quintet, Someday My Prince Will Come.[2] In 1961, Davis had also released his first live albums, two separate but related albums entitled Friday Night at the Blackhawk and Saturday Night at the Blackhawk—recorded back-to-back—in addition to the studio set. Another live set from 1961, Miles Davis at Carnegie Hall, also with both the quintet and a large ensemble conducted by Evans was issued in 1962.[3]
The genesis of this Davis/Evans album, however, encountered far greater difficulties than its three predecessors. Bossa nova had recently become a commercial success in 1962 with the single "Desafinado" from the album Jazz Samba by Stan Getz, and Columbia executives may have pressured Davis and Evans to attempt something similar with this album.[4] Sessions were also protracted over long stretches of time.
Two songs, "Corcovado" (see: Corcovado) and "Aos pés da cruz" (Portuguese: "At the Foot of the Cross"), were recorded at the first session in July, and released as Columbia singles 4-33059 and 4-4-42583; neither charted.[5] The pair returned to longer forms for the subsequent sessions, Evans perhaps not given enough time to finish the charts for the earlier session.[6] The attempt to mix potential hit singles and Evans' writing style for Davis, essentially concertos for jazz trumpeter, may have torpedoed the project.
After three sessions spread over four months, the yield was approximately 20 minutes of usable music, enough for an album side but not an entire album. Evans and Davis never made it back into the studio to complete more recordings, and the project was shelved.[7] Faced with the expenses from the large ensemble and the studio time, producer Teo Macero added a quartet track from an April 1963 session in Hollywood to complete the album and give the label something to show for its investment, Quiet Nights, released two years after the start of recording.[8] Davis was furious at the release of what he viewed as an unfinished project, and did not work with Macero again until the October 1966 sessions for Miles Smiles.[8] The added tune, "Summer Night", was an outtake by Davis' group as recorded for the album Seven Steps to Heaven.
"Time of the Barracudas"—recorded in Hollywood on October 9 and 10, 1963—was written as a commission from Peter Barnes to accompany a production of his play of the same name starring Laurence Harvey and Elaine Stritch. It is unknown whether the music was actually used for its intended purpose. The song was included as a bonus track when the album was reissued on CD by Columbia/Legacy on September 23, 1997.[9]
In a contemporary review for DownBeat, Leonard Feather called Quiet Nights a "curious and not entirely satisfying album". He felt "Song #2" ended prematurely while the long-meter arrangement of "Wait till You See Her" sounded unusual, but found "Once upon a Summertime" to be brilliantly recorded and "Summer Night" highlighted by Davis and Feldman's "consistent level of lyrical beauty".[10]
In the Saturday Review, Quiet Nights received praise for Davis' "wonderfully songful trumpet in a Latin-American vein", set against "piercingly lustrous curtains of tone and discreet Caribbean rhythms".[11]
The New York Times' Loren Schoenberg later called it "a slightly flawed but worthy companion" to other classic Davis–Evans recordings.[12]
J. D. Considine was less receptive in the Rolling Stone Album Guide (1992), dismissing the record as "halfhearted" bossa nova atypical from their otherwise exceptional work together.
All songs arranged and conducted by Gil Evans, except "Summer Night".