Lift To The Scaffold/Jazz Track

Only twice have I stumbled upon Miles Davis LPs in charity shop record bins: on one occasion I found an '80s re-press of Sketches of Spain, and on another, during a trip to Newport, I found this 1960 UK mono pressing of Miles Davis' Lift to the Scaffold/Jazz Track. This album had been released the year before in the US, where it had been simply, if generically, titled Jazz Track. Before that, the music on side A, recorded in Paris in late 1957 as a soundtrack to Louis Malle's film Ascenseur pour l'échafaud, had been issued in Europe on a 10" album. The three pieces on side B were recorded in New York in '58, and first saw the light of day on Jazz Track.

On the ten short soundtrack cues, Davis was joined by Barney Wilen (tenor sax), René Urtreger (piano), Pierre Michelot (bass) and Kenny Clarke (drums). The personnel on side B are the same sextet as famously can be heard on (most of) Kind of Blue, that is, with Bill Evans rather than Wynton Kelly on piano. I prefer the latter to the former: while the soundtrack cues are moodily atmospheric, their brevity makes for a slightly unsatisfying listening experience. The other three tracks are all exquisite ballads, with the first of them 'On Green Dolphin Street' my favourite on the disc.

Albert McCarthy spends a sizeable portion of his sleeve-notes outlining the plot of Ascenseur pour l'échafaud and explaining where in the storyline the various pieces on side A can be heard. Among other things, McCarthy stresses the idiosyncratic nature of Davis' playing, and how it "is the antithesis of the work of earlier greats of the calibre of Louis Armstrong, Buck Clayton and Emmett Berry, having none of the extrovert qualities associated with them".

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