The Miles Davis 2xLP collection The Complete Birth of the Cool (Blue Note/UMe) came out this past June celebrating the 70th anniversary of the initial Birth of the Cool sessions. Today, Universal Music Group’s “Never Made” project, in collaboration with Blue Note/UMe and Ingenuity Studios, has released a music video for one of the album’s standouts, the Chummy MacGregor/Johnny Mercer song “Moon Dreams.” Influenced by Miles Davis’ own sketches, the animated visuals for the track imagine a night out in New York City thru every era of Jazz history.
The Complete Birth of the Cool chronicles the brief but influential Miles Davis nonet started in 1948 in conjunction with pianist and arranger Gil Evans and baritone saxophonist Gerry Mulligan. Evans’ basement apartment in Manhattan had become a meeting place for young musicians looking to move beyond the dominant style of bebop. Expanding bebop’s quintet into a nine-piece, Evans and Mulligan added baritone saxophone, trombone, French horn, and tuba in paired groupings attempting to achieve Davis’ desire for the instruments to sound like “human voices singing.”
In September of 1948, the nonet would begin a two-week engagement opening for Count Bassie at the Royal Roost in New York. The following year, Capitol Records signed the group leading to the recording of twelve tracks over three sessions between 1949 and 1950. While Capitol would go on to release some of the recordings as 78rpm singles in 1949/50, as well as a 10″ LP entitled Classics in Jazz: Miles Davis in 1954, Birth of the Cool was not released until 1957. While Davis had already moved on to hard-bop by that time, the album would go on to influence the West Coast Cool Jazz sound.
“Moon Dreams” was arranged by Evans and recorded during the nonets’ third session in 1950. Influenced by his time in Claude Thornhill‘s orchestra with Gerry Mulligan, the song features rich harmonic arrangements and the unison sound of paired instruments. The Miles Davis inspired visuals echo the song’s vibrant tonalities and innovative approach using animated line drawings. Design-forward, this is a stylish imagining of New York Cities historic night-life and the music which drove it.
