Jazz By Miles Davis

Press, Volume CVI, Issue 31111, 14 July 1966, Page 8

Jazz By Miles Davis

My Funny Valentine, the new Miles Davis LP, is his best since the superb Kind Of Blue about six years ago —which to many people is as good as saying it is the best jazz LP since “Kind Of Blue.” It is a great record. It may lack the exalted quality of “Kind of Blue,” but it has more immediate strength. The strength is reflected in the urgency of Davis’s solos, which at times become almost mesmeric, and in the overwhelming virtuosity of his rhythms. “My Funny Valentine” and 'Stella By Starlight,’’ for example, with their kaleidoscopic changes of tempo and swirling phrases, swing with a fierceness that probably no other jazzman could match.

“All Blues” proves that you can create angles and images with a single note; “All Of You” and “I Thought About You,” less ambitious excursions, are content to be beautiful. But they have the same clarity, the same effect of rhythm-on-a-tight-rope—for which at least part of the praise must go to the brilliant teen-age drummer, Tony Williams. The solos of Herbie Hancock, the pianist, have muscle as well as imagination and the tenor saxophonist, George Coleman, often manages, as Nat Hentoff remarks in the sleeve note, “an oddly persuasive fusion of yearning and virility.” The LP is available in mono only, the catalogue number is

CBS 8P473237 and the playing time is a generous 62j minutes. The price is 39s 6d.