Miles Davis - Porgy And Bess

Shipping to arrive no earlier than 1/31.

Mastered from the original master tapes

Strictly limited to 3,000 numbered copies!

If a more significant, influential, and lasting result of a creative musical partnership exists than that of Miles Davis and Gil Evans' Porgy and Bess, society hasn't seen it. It's impossible to overstate the importance of the pair's collaboration on the landmark 1959 update of George Gershwin's opera.

Miles' soulful playing — legendary performances by Davis' first great quintet — can now be heard in pristine detail courtesy of this definitive digital edition. Mastered from the original tapes and strictly limited to 3,000 numbered copies, Porgy and Bess attains previously unheard degrees of clarity, openness, immediacy, and depth on Mobile Fidelity's hybrid SACD. Here, the arrangements unfold amidst practically limitless soundstages and burst with multi-dimensional images. Separation between instruments allows you to locate individual band members and trace the decay of the notes. Davis' iconic solo passages take on borderline-surreal qualities of realism and shape. The magisterial scope of the Evans-conducted orchestra emerges with room-filling bloom, color, and dynamics.

While difficult to pinpoint its single-best strength, Mobile Fidelity's reissue gives reference-level credence to what may remain the album's most crucial aspect: tone. Based not on chords but on scales and feeling, Porgy and Bess teems with emotions and possibilities — characteristics conveyed by the nuances, timbre, and temper delivered by the array of horns, woodwinds, basses, and percussion involved. Whether the combination of Bill Barber's tuba in unison with Paul Chambers' bass during "Buzzard Song," Davis' improvisational flights on "It Ain't Necessarily So," or the doubling up on alto flutes on several compositions, never before have they been experienced with such richness, roundness, and palpability.

 

1. The Buzzard Song

2. Bess, You Is My Woman Now

3. Gone

4. Gone, Gone, Gone

5. Summertime

6. Oh Bess, Where's My Bess?

7. Prayer (Oh Doctor Jesus)

8. Fisherman, Strawberry and Devil Crab

9. My Man's Gone Now

10. It Ain't Necessarily So

11. Here Come de Honey Man

12. I Wants to Stay Here (a.k.a. I Loves You, Porgy)

13. There's a Boat That's Leaving Soon for New York

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