A swinging So What from _Playboy's_ first jazz festival

August 7, 1959
1st _Playboy_ Jazz Festival
Chicago Stadium,
1800 West Madison Street,
Chicago, Illinois

MILES DAVIS QUINTET
Miles Davis- trumpet
Cannonball Adderley- alto saxophone
Wynton Kelly- piano
Paul Chambers- bass
Jimmy Cobb- drums

introduction 00:00
So What (M. Davis) 01:10
closing titles 13:15

AFRS _This Is Jazz_ radio broadcast

In 1953 27-year-old Chicago born psychology graduate, advertising copyrighter and cartoonist Hugh Hefner published the first edition of a men's lifestyle magazine. After rejecting several possible titles, such as _Bachelor, Gentleman, Top Hat_ and _Stag Party,_ Hefner chose the name _Playboy._ The first edition was a success, thanks to a centrefold of a nude Marilyn Monroe, and the title became a monthly publication; by June 1956 it was selling a million copies and was growing into a huge empire. The magazine captured the mood of an aspirational and affluent post-war (male) America, defining a somewhat louche sophistication; articles on yachting, cocktails, and outdoor barbecuing sat alongside fiction by leading American writers, irreverent cartoons, jokes, men's fashion, sports, motoring, Hollywood, and of course, the indispensable disrobed Playmates.

Jazz was also part of the lifestyle- that first issue had included a feature on the Dorsey Brothers and articles on Louis Armstrong, Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, Benny Goodman, Lester Young, Stan Kenton, Dave Brubeck, and the Newport Jazz Festival followed- and in 1957 the magazine held the inaugural _Playboy_ Jazz Poll, an annual readers' vote for the music's leading figures (Miles placed 8th in the trumpet category that year); there were also tie-in LPs featuring the highest polling artists. In 1959 Hefner decided to hold a huge jazz festival in his home town, at the outdoor Soldier Field- a late change of venue to Chicago Stadium saw it become the first indoor American jazz festival- featuring an eye-popping line up including Duke Ellington, Ella Fitzgerald, Count Basie, Louis Armstrong, Dave Brubeck, Oscar Peterson, Dizzy Gillespie, Sonny Rollins, Coleman Hawkins, J.J. Johnson, Ahmad Jamal, Stan Kenton, and Bobby Darin.

The Miles Davis Sextet were booked to play the opening Friday evening of the festival. However, John Coltrane, who had just recorded his career-boosting album _Giant Steps,_ had quit the group to form his own quartet. On May 21 Miles' old associate Jimmy Heath was released after serving four years of a six year prison sentence for narcotics and Davis hired him for the tenor saxophone chair. This soon presented a problem; the conditions of Heath's probation prevented him from travelling outside the Philadelphia area and so Davis was forced to go to Chicago with a quintet. This is the only known live recording with Cannonball Adderley as the sole saxophonist (incidentally, Jack Chambers' book _Milestones: The Music and Times of Miles Davis_ erroneously dates these events as 1960; the mistake is repeated in Miles' own autobiography).

This performance of So What, from the _Kind of Blue_ LP which would be released ten days later, is all that was broadcast of the Davis quintet's appearance. It kicks off at a much speedier tempo and Miles, perhaps to compensate for the absence of Trane, pushes himself a little too hard, a couple of phrases not quite coming off, to his audible irritation. But it's mostly a buoyant, driving solo, matched by swinging spots for Adderley and pianist Wynton Kelly. Despite the personnel problems Miles seemed in good spirits, perhaps soaking up the atmosphere of an audience of over 19,000; Gene Lees reported in _Down Beat_ "even Miles seemed in good mood. He came close to acknowledging that the audience existed; once he even smiled. No amount of incredulity from the profession will deny the truth: Miles smiled... and played beautifully."

This recording comes from an AFRS broadcast of highlights from the festival, in typically cloudy sound for the period. I had two sources for the music, one was in very poor audio, the other was in better sound but apparently dubbed from a LP pressing with a lot of surface noise. I re-EQed the audio, ran it through a declicker (some noise persists) and adjusted the speed as it ran almost a semitone sharp.

Coltrane's absence from the sextet was short; Davis was forced to let Heath go and by the time the band opened at Birdland on August 13 Trane was back in the fold. Despite the success of _Playboy's_ first jazz festival- there were over 70,000 attendees at five concerts across the three days- it would be another twenty years before Hefner organised another. But the magazine continued to feature jazz in its pages; in September 1962 it launched The _Playboy_ Interview, which would become a prestigious and popular feature, as young writer Alex Haley (later of _Roots_ fame) sat down with its first subject... Miles Davis.

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