Billboard : 07/29/1957
Jazz Special Merit Album

One of the more interesting Davis LPs, offering the modern pace-setter in a more dynamic mood than usual, per the title. Great ensemble and adventurous solos by Davis, Coltrane, Garland, Chambers and Philly Joe Jones. To open a new market for the artist, concentrate on side two. Performances are all new to disks.

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Cash Box : 8/10/1957

Davis, one of the most oft-recorded jazzmen (Prestige or otherwise), is represented here as the head of the quintet recently disbanded. The trumpeter, along with the rest of the crew (Paul Chambers, bass; Red Garland, piano; Philly Joe Jones, drums; John Coltrane, tenor sax), whip up four crackling good sessions, plus a warm stint on My Funny Valentine. A delectable display of skilled jazz harmony. Excellent sales potential.

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Audio
Charles A. Robertson : November, 1957

During its nearly two years as a unit, the Miles Davis Quintet achieved a tensile strength and a command of its repertoire which gave it a spirit and sureness seldom surpassed in jazz. The unhappy circumstances of its disbanding last Spring makes this disc an imperative to any inclusive collection. For it is the most complete representation of that memorable organization at its pulsating best yet released. A free-flowing session with none of the stiffness of a studio performance, it has Miles calling the tunes just as he would at a club date and his men respond with the relaxed drive which comes when everyone is in top form. it is what you might hope to hear when the players are suitably warmed up at about the third set of an evening. But such live sessions are all too rare.

Though there are three or four LPs made by the group at about the same time still in the files, it will be difficult to select a program more fully indicative of its remarkable quality in all its aspects. Airegin and Tune Up are swift-moving pyrotechnical displays, firmly knit together by the consistent empathy of the musicians. When Lights Are Low, Benny Carter‘s marvelous tune which somehow is mislabeled as Just Squeeze Me, is given a glorious swing and a detailed examination it has never enjoyed before. My Funny Valentine begins with a calm trumpet statement by Davis in low register and gradually grows in intensity as the rhythm nudges it along. Blues By Five is a ruminative original by Davis which fades out on Garland‘s supple piano solo.

Long hours spent together on the stand enable them to give a deceptive ease to the session. Davis is master of his horn in every instance, making it speak with soulful conviction. And John Coltrane has progressed so rapidly on tenor sax in the past year that his recorded work is just beginning to approach the way he now sounds in person. Bassist Paul Chambers and drummer Philly Joe Jones always keep something going in the rhythm and Garland is an equal front line voice so skillfully does he move into his solos. All are suitably recorded by Van Gelder.

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Miami Herald
Fred Sherman : 08/25/1957

A fresh look at My Funny Valentine and four favorites of the trumpet leader. Notes tell us the quintet is breaking up. Hear tenor John Coltrane, bassist Paul Chambers, drummer Philly Joe Jones and piano man Red Garland working with the Davis horn and you’ll wonder why. A really cohesive session.

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Pittsburgh Courier : 08/10/1957
Harold L. Keith : 4 stars

The wonderful Miles Davis swings flamboyantly in the company of John Coltrane, Red Garland, Philly Joe Jones and Paul Chambers. This frothy album of Prestige has Miles on a swing kick that is calculated to make the feet of listeners tap a while. The mood is turned on by the powerhouse sticks of Philly Joe, one of the really top-flight jazz drummers extant.

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San Francisco Chronicle
Ralph J. Gleason : 08/15/1957
Miles Davis Quintet Close to the End

The first time you ran into the Miles Davis Quintet in person, your reaction was likely to be puzzlement. It was a remarkably erratic group, top notch one night and dispirited the next.

But what you hear from it was a sort of private language which required familiarity to understand and time to consider it before the implications sank in. This is why, I feel, the majority of critics in the recent Down Beat poll, myself among them, bypassed this group and voted the Modern Jazz Quartet as top group.

Not that the MJQ isn’t excellent, for it sure solid is. But the Miles Davis Quintet, which lasted a short two years, was by all odds the greatest achievement of the Eastern bop school of jazz, a highly complex organization operating on a variety of levels and containing, at its best, a remarkable wild, driving swing, controlled emotional tension, and a propulsive beat.

The main factors in this group’s artistic success were Davis’ growing stature as an interpreter of the blues, his increasing range of subtleties and his remarkable salt-tinged lyricism, plus the operations of his rhythm section.

In the Davis band the pianist, Red Garland, was a warm, melodic swinger; Paul Chambers, the bassist, an exciting improviser and a fine rhythm man. But it was on Philly Joe Jones, the drummer, that the burden fell. Jones, unlike the drummers in most small groups was a full rhythm section. He kept the time and the beat and directed the operations of the section until at times the rhythm team seemed to be playing duets with Miles. He led the pianist into an intricate language of organized figures to “feed” the soloists and then himself broke up the pattern of drumming until you stopped thinking of him in terms of bars or time but in terms of phrasing.

This group recorded several LPs, the latest of which is Cookin’ on Prestige. It is from a series of sessions made just before the demise of the group and it is the best album the Quintet ever made. The sound is more cohesive, the out-of-balance elements which marred in-person performances are corrected and the whole thing functions with a well-oiled delicacy that is amazing. It is exceptionally well-recorded, too, and thus you have the opportunity hear the inner workings of its mechanism. Among the great performances on it are My Funny Valentine and When Lights Are Low (miscalled Just Squeeze Me on the label). I suspect this album, and this group, too, will go down in jazz history as one of the best small bands ever assembled.

Drummer Jones considers this the best album the group has ever made. I go further: I think it is one of the two or three top albums of 1957. I have been playing it over and over for ten days now and it sounds better all the time.

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San Francisco Examiner
C.H. Garrigues : 09/22/1957

It would be difficult to find in these days a serious review of a Charlie Parker record which did not contain somewhere the phrase or the thought “…and after Bird, everything was different…”

It was not that Parker was the greatest of modern jazz musicians – any more than Monteverdi was the greatest of classical musicians. But before Monteverdi there was modal polyphony and Palestrina; after him there was tonality and tonal harmony: Bach and Hayden, Mozart and Beethoven and Schubert, Wagner and Brahms and Mahler.

So, before Parker there was traditional jazz: Armstrong and Goodman and Ellington. And after him is the whole school of modern jazzmen, bop and cool, hard swinging and soft singing: Davis, Manne, Roach, Hamilton, Rollins, Pettiford, Mingus, Vinnegar – East Coast, West Coast – who have made jazz a different (and an important) sort of music.

This fact, which is being constantly driven in upon the jazz reviewer, is now emphasized by a regular fall freshet of albums, some frankly Bird-inspired, some Bird-influenced, which illustrate every stage of development that grew out of the Parker inspiration.

The best of these (and indeed, on of the best albums of the entire post-Parker period) is Cookin’ With the Miles Davis Quintet. Davis was, of course, Parker’s closest musical associate: his protégé, almost his adopted son. So close was their association that it seemed, after Parker’s death, as though Davis could hardly pick up and go on with his work. But he has done it here: driving directly into his own style of warm, muted trumpet which still achieves the detachment (the air of there being something more unsaid, even in in the most frenetic passages) which distinguished Parker.

This is the Davis Quintet of last year (it has since disbanded) with Coltrane, Chambers, Garland, and Philly Joe Jones; it shows itself here to have been one of the really great groups of jazz history. Listen to the close work between Coltrane and Davis; listen to the close work of soloists and ensemble in front of Jones’ delicately hardswinging drums; catch the relationship between Jones and Chambers in the rhythm and between the Jones-Chambers rhythm and that of the front line (including, here, Garland’s piano) and you will come very close to having solved the unspoken mystery of how “swinging” is really achieved.

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Down Beat : 09/19/1957
Ralph J. Gleason : 5 stars

All the tremendous cohesion, the wild, driving swing, and the all-out excitement and controlled emotion that was present at the best moments of the Davis quintet has been captured on this record. Jones has said these sessions, made in 1956 and the last of Miles’ Prestige recordings, are the best Davis has made. I am inclined to agree.

Miles was in exquisite form; Coltrane sounds better here than on any except the group’s Columbia LP; Chambers is well recorded, and his solo on Blues by Five is particularly gratifying. Philly Joe and Garland work together in their intricate system of rhythmic feeding in a fashion that has been done seldom, if ever, before by any rhythm section.

There are many moments of pure music and emotional joy on this album. Note the traces of Davis in Coltrane’s solo on Airegin; note Miles and Philly Joe at the end of Davis’ first solo on Tune Up; note Jones and Garland behind Coltrane on the same tune; note how Jones doubles up against the pulse behind Coltrane on Lights Are Low.

Garland contributes a golden solo on Lights and on Five. In the same tune, note how the rhythm section continues the melodic outline behind the solos.

As to Miles, his peculiar blend of pure melody and acidulous accents never has sounded better. His “squees” and “whees” come at the moment you least expect them. On his own composition, Tune Up, he gets a remarkable show tune type of sound in his statement of the melody and then prefaces his improvisation by a series of two-note phrases with the accent on the second one. This is extremely effective. Valentine is a slow one, done thoughtfully and almost sedately at times, with Jones on brushes behind Davis.

However, it is When Lights Are Low, Benny Carter‘s great tune which is mislabeled Just Squeeze Me on my copy, that is the classic number. This is the second version of it Miles has recorded, and it is interesting to note that the tempo is almost exactly the same this time. This is one of the best arrangements this group had; an inventive melding of simplicity and thorough exploration of the harmonic and rhythmic possibilities.

Miles’ wispy statement of the melody is followed by Coltrane’s ruminative solo, Garland follows with his best work of the date, a long solo the second half of which is locked chords, and there is a short bit of Davis presaging the unison out chorus. This is one of the best LPs of the year and makes one wonder why the group rated so few votes in the Jazz Critics poll.

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Liner Notes by Ira Gitler

It is said that all good things come to an end. One did in the spring of 1957 when the Miles Davis Quintet was dissolved. I say the Miles Davis Quintet because in their nearly two years together, Miles, John Coltrane, Red Garland, Paul Chambers and Philly Joe Jones achieved a particular kind of unity. They were not just the Miles Davis Quintet; to me, and many others, they were the group – the best small combo active in modern jazz.

Not only did they improve as a unit while they were together but each member benefited individually from the association. Miles found an incentive to play gain and reached new heights because of the musical environment he had created in choosing his sidemen. The sidemen, in turn, flowered in the climate of the Davis latitude. By the beginning of 1957, Coltrane an broken the shackles of self-doubt and breathed freely into his singing horn, Garland had recorded successfully as a trio pianist (A Garland of Red, Prestige LP 7064) and the Chambers-Jones duo was fused into the most powerful of pulses.

The group attained a wonderful mood whether they were playing My Funny Valentine or a strenuous swinging like Airegin.

For sheer excitement on the up tempos, due more to a tensile undercurrent feeling rather than the mere speed, the Davis five was unsurpassed. I remember one night in the summer of 1956 at the Café Bohemia. I was in the throes of the hay fever miseries and nothing was helping very much. My nasal passages were completely sealed and I was gasping for breath. Along came Miles & Co. You may not know it but when you become stimulated and your adrenal glands go to work, it acts as a wonderful nasal decongestant. Well, after one set I was breathing freely. After two, I had forgotten that ever had hay fever. That is the kind of excitement this group generated.

In mentioning the Bohemia, I am reminded that it was during one of his stays at that Greenwich Village jazz center that these recordings were taped. In the two studio sessions that were made in that period, Miles called tunes just as he would for any number of typical sets at a club like Bohemia. There were no second takes. All in all, 24 extended performances were recorded. The rest will be heard in subsequent albums.

In essence, what you are hearing is a portion of the group’s repertoire. Some have been recoded before by Miles but with different personnel. (The only one duplicated from a previous quintet recording in Just Squeeze Me, first heard in The New Miles Davis Quintet, Prestige LP 7014). This is similar to the way bands used to record. I do not refer to the calling of tunes as in a set but the idea of recording numbers that have been in the book for awhile, ones with which the musicians are completely at home. I’m sure this had a lot to do with the great string of records that Count Basie made for Decca in the Thirties and although a small group has less difficulty in “shedding” an arrangement, the benefits they reap from experience of playing a piece on the job for several months prior to recording it, are unmistakable.

Besides Just Squeeze Me, there are two other numbers which Miles has recoded before. Tune Up can be heard in Blue Haze (prestige LP 7054) in the company of John Lewis, Percy Heath and Max Roach; Airegin in 10 inch LP 187 (soon to be re-issued on 12 inch) with Sonny Rollins (its composer), Horace Silver, Percy Heath and Kenny Clarke.

My Funny Valentine is a premiere recorded performance for Miles and his original Blues By Five is also new to discs.

This album is called Cookin’ at Miles’ request. He said, “After all, that’s what we did – came in and cooked.”

A good thing may have come to an end but we have the recorded proof that it was really that good.