Miles Davis - Ascenseur pour l’échafaud / 2CD set

To mark the centenary of Miles Davis, Decca Records France will release a deluxe CD edition of the legendary soundtrack to Louis Malle’s 1958 film Ascenseur pour l’échafaud. Recorded in Paris in December 1957, the music remains one of the most influential jazz soundtracks ever created, and one of the only film scores in which the music was entirely improvised while the musicians watched the film.

The 2-CD set brings together the original album and all surviving takes from the sessions of December 4 and 5, 1957, accompanied by a 60-page hardcover book featuring notes by Ashley Kahn and Franck Bergerot.

First released in 1958 by Fontana in Europe and Columbia in the United States, the recording quickly took on legendary status. Few film scores have contributed so decisively to the atmosphere and reputation of a film. Nearly seventy years later, beyond the mythology surrounding its creation, the recording still stands as one of Davis’s most striking works: a tense, nocturnal score charged with dramatic intensity and spare, haunting lyricism.

The circumstances of its creation have become part of jazz folklore. While Davis was performing at the Club Saint-Germain in Paris in late 1957, Louis Malle, dissatisfied with the music originally planned for his debut feature, was persuaded to approach the trumpeter. After attending a private screening, Davis agreed to record a soundtrack. On December 4 he arrived at the studio with four musicians then based in Paris: Barney Wilen on tenor saxophone, René Urtreger on piano, Pierre Michelot on bass and Kenny Clarke on drums.

Little preparation had been done. Davis had sketched only a few simple harmonic sequences in his hotel room and shared them with the band shortly before recording began. With the plot explained, loops of key scenes from the film were projected in the studio while the musicians improvised directly to the images, without any pre-composed themes. Bassist Pierre Michelot later recalled that “Miles just asked us to play two chords – D minor and C7, four bars of each, ad lib.” It was typical of Davis: minimal instruction paired with an unerring sense of atmosphere.

François Leterrier, the film’s second assistant director, remembered the session beginning around ten in the evening and continuing until dawn while the musicians watched black-and-white sequences shot by cinematographer Henri Decaë, including Jeanne Moreau’s celebrated walk through the Champs-Élysées at night. “All of us there in the dark auditorium were aware that something extraordinary was taking place,” he later recalled. “Something that had definitely never happened before.”