The French Connection: Jazz in Paris, 1957

In November 1957, Miles Davis returned to Paris to play the Club Saint-Germain.

Since visiting seven years earlier, Davis had barely finished recording eight songs on tape, accredited to the ‘Miles Davis Nonet’; The nine-piece outfit proved unusual yet effectual in foreshadowing modern sounds in Jazz. With the exhilarating but untenable indulgences of Bebop wavering, artists found themselves seeking different sounds that still fell within an artistically viable vicinity.

While visiting, Davis experienced a profound sense of liberation.

“I had never felt that way in my life. It was the freedom of being in France and being treated like a human being, like someone important. Even the band and the music sounded better over there… I even found myself announcing the songs in French.”

– Miles Davis and Quincy Troupe, Miles: The Autobiography (Simon and Shuster, 1989)

However, upon his return from la Ville des Lumières, Davis’ initial depression spiraled into heroin abuse, costing him valuable time and career progress. After kicking the habit and revitalizing his career at the 1955 Newport Jazz Festival, Davis sped through the rest of his Prestige contract to jump ship and record with Columbia Records.

Columbia represented, in many ways, a rebirth. Davis improved his salary and utilized the label’s sheer production volume, teaming with key individuals Teo Macero and Gil Evans along the way. These elements would coalesce to define Davis’ next decade with the label, arguably the best creative hot streak of his career. Additionally, George Avakian’s forward-thinking leadership heated up their roster – competitive even in the face of the consistently phenomenal Blue Note. Brubeck brought Cool jazz to the college campus. Now with firm footing, Davis innovated with Bop, and after twenty-seven choruses, Duke Ellington’s career woke up. All three signed papers with Columbia. With a quality contract and great players surrounding him, all the pieces seemed to fall into place for Davis. Musically, however, the inverse occurred. As the fifties unfolded, Davis felt increasingly restrained playing chord progressions recalling his arrival on the music scene. Searching for new melodic pathways in improvisation, Davis aimed to change the musical structure he saw as monotonous and cumbersome. His trademark willpower gave him the primary means to do just that.

While in France, Jean-Paul Rappeneau introduced Davis to young, progressive filmmaker Louis Malle. Malle, later named as one of the progenitors of the forthcoming French New Wave, a period where a modernist generation of artists redefined the role of cinema in society worldwide, needed music for his new crime noir film, Ascenseur pour l’échafaud (US: Elevator to the Gallows, UK: Lift to the Scaffold). After Davis attended a screening, he agreed to compose its score, wisely using the opportunity as a broader vehicle to experiment with modal jazz.

Methodizing short handwritten harmonic sequences – developed hastily and entirely in his hotel room – Davis drew out the structures from which songs several minutes in length could derive from. On 4th and 5th December, Davis, alongside tenor saxophonist Barney Wilen, pianist René Urtreger, bassist Pierre Michelot, and American drummer and cohort Kenny Clarke, converged at Le Poste Parisien studio, where Malle rolled film and tape alike. Davis and Company improvised, using the basic framework provided by the sketches with influence from the actions they saw on film. The band required just a few takes to nail down the feel for each section. Malle’s engineers applied reverb, and the session concluded.

Ascenseur pour l’échafaud earned excellent reviews, the debut launching Malle as a first-class director, and stating boldly that visual and aural art could be synonymous.

By synthesizing sound and image, the film shaped both elements as complimentary as inseparable and earned praise for its striking interplay. Acquiring its nocturnal inclination from the scenes of Ascenseur pour l’échafaud, beautifully photographed by Henri Decaë, the soundtrack captured the film’s darker tonal palettes and provided coloring for their connotations. Moreau’s lovesick, detached Florence Carala wanders through Paris, emotive as the desolate streets, in vast contrast to the object of her entrancement – differentiated in both feeling and circumstance. While she roams, Ronet’s Julien Tavernier cannot – his domain hampered by an elevator between floors, in the same building where he killed his boss, Mr. Simon Carala hours earlier, so he and Florence could be together. Carala’s abstraction comprises her character, while Tavernier’s cognizance surges to fearfulness. On another plane, two lovers transform into felons in a matter of hours. All endure throughout the night, their plight and consequences illustrated by Davis’ score.

A fundamental and developmental congruency exists between the soundtrack and Miles Davis’ recordings made soon after. These songs, without a doubt, share the inherent properties that would come to craft the ethereal and eternal Kind of Blue less than sixteen months later. The same frameworks (“sketches”) gave little form to a highly skilled band – producing music owing its characteristics purely to the musicians behind the instruments. Miles’ third significant movement influenced his contemporaries to broaden Jazz’s scope. Others such as Coleman and Brubeck created revolutionary records of their own (The Shape of Jazz to Come, Time Out) around this time.

The soundtrack’s influence extends further than the music field. The concept of cohesive sound and image did not begin and end in 1957. Almost all modern films feature soundtracks; They present music as an augment. Only the most daring ones place music on par with the images they capture. This even-handed idea – in the sixty years since – has routinely been revisited, with the most modern results being 2017 flick Baby Driver, which operates on similar principles as Gallows.

In describing Moreau’s portrayal of Carala, critic great Ebert once wrote: “An improvised Jazz score by Miles Davis seems to belong to the night as much as she does.”

What came after that night was revolutionary.