Description

Historic Recording Captures Elegant Ballads Performed at February 1964 Concert
Reference-Standard Sound: Album Boasts Lifelike Tones, Balances, Images, and Ambience
Davis Taps Divine Inspiration: Compositions Marked by Deep Emotions, Spontaneous Brilliance, Sensitive Beauty, and Sublime Poignancy

Miles Davis My Funny Valentine marks several historic turning points. For Davis, the live album represents the final time on record hed perform standards rather than original compositions. It also stands as one of the last documents made by the same band that created Seven Steps of Heaven and, as such, the work teems with bebop melodicism yet steers clear of Davis oft-controversial avant-garde leanings. Most significantly, the 1965 set captures the ballads performed at a benefit concert from New Yorks Philharmonic Hall just months after President Kennedys assassination. Tapping into a seemingly divine inspiration, Davis never sounded so elegant or poetic. Having professed his admiration for Kennedy years prior, Davis appears to approach the compositions as homage to the fallen leadera collective soliloquy comprised of pieces shot through with emotional passages, spontaneous brilliance, sensitive beauty, and sublime poignancy.
Boasting gorgeous sound, Mobile Fidelitys collectable SACD features enhanced depth, presence, dynamics, clarity, and ambience. Presented in reference-standard fidelity, the record boasts balances, tonalities, and airiness that duplicate the experience of witnessing live jazz in an acoustically ideal hall. The images of each individual instrument, the decay of the notes, the inner reaches of the piano, the symmetry of the hornsall are rendered with palpable detail. This is the definition of reach-outand- touch-it realism.