Saturday 24th June, 7:00 PM – The Palace of Melancholy.
Pianist Oscar Peterson was sometimes, very occasionally, active as a vocalist. On the LP With Respect to Nat he pays tribute to Nat King Cole.
Miles Davis improvised in Paris, with a small combo, music for the film Ascenseur pour l’échafaud. A film noir by the filmmaker Louis Malle, starring Jeanne Moreau.
Also in this ever-expanding Palace: Anita O’Day, guitarist Tal Farlow, the Rumba Band of Edmundo Ros, and more.
Nat King Cole was a successful singer and pianist. (And the first African-American host of an American television programme!) He formed a trio consisting of piano, bass and guitar – a lineup that was followed in the jazz world. This is also the case with pianist Oscar Peterson. After Cole’s sudden death in 1965, Peterson was one of many musicians to record his songs as a tribute. With Respect to Nat was released in 1965. Six of the twelve pieces sound in the well-known trio line-up, with guitarist Herb Ellis and bassist Ray Brown. The other six are accompanied by a Big Band led by Manny Albam, including the cheerful and light-hearted Orange Colored Sky. Cole recorded the song in 1950 with Stan Kenton’s orchestra.
The similarity in singing style and voice colour between Cole and Peterson is striking.
I was walking alone minding my business/When love came and hit me in the eye/ Out of an orange colored sky…
At the end of 1957 Miles Davis travels to Paris. In addition to a concert in the Olympia Theater, three weeks of Club Germain are booked in the agenda. Some European cities are also planned, including Amsterdam. His French accompanists are twenty-year-old tenorist Barney Wilen, pianist René Urtreger and bassist Pierre Michelot. Kenny Clarke, who has been living in Paris for a while, is the drummer. Filmmaker Louis Malle, an admirer of Davis, gets wind of this plan and asks Miles to record the music for his recent film Ascenseur pour l’échafaud (Elevator to the scaffold), a film noir. French filmmakers experimented with jazz in the 1950s. Earlier that year, the Modern Jazz Quartet had provided the score for a Roger Vadim film – a year later it was the Jazz Messengers who provided a soundtrack for Des femmes disparaissent.
Davis likes this experiment. “I agreed to do it and it was a great learning experience (…)” He watches film clips and starts sketching using a piano in his hotel room. One evening he takes his group, who knows nothing, to a dark radio studio, for the right atmosphere. Jeanne Moreau is also there. In one set, looking at repeated film scenes, the music is improvised. There are agreements about tempo, key and chord progression. And strikingly: no themes, and many scenes end abruptly. Four hours later everything is on tape. Never before in film history has a score been created in this way.
Like the film, the music is noir – night, loneliness, tension, menace. In the scene in which Jeanne Moreau wanders the Champs-Élysées at night in search of her husband, Davis’s trumpet paints the mood within seconds.
The soundtrack writes film music history, and soon surpasses Louis Malle’s film.
Programme details in the Guide.
The Palace of Melancholy – Sjaak Roodenburg
