Quiet Nights (Miles Davis and Gil Evans Album) - Music

Music

Two songs were recorded at the first session in July, "Corcovado" and "Aos Pes Da Cruz," and released as Columbia singles 4-33059 and 4-4-42583; neither made a dent in the chart. The pair returned to longer forms for the subsequent sessions, Evans perhaps not given enough time to finish the charts for the earlier session. 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. 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. 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. The added tune, "Summer Night," was an outtake by Davis' group as recorded for the album Seven Steps to Heaven.

On September 23, 1997, Legacy Records reissued the album for compact disc with the bonus track "Time of the Barracudas" recorded in Hollywood on October 9 and 10, 1963. 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.