James Kaplan, "3 Shades of Blue: : Miles Davis, John Coltrane, Bill Evans, and the Lost Empire of Cool", 2024:
"....It’s unclear why Miles hadn’t brought his horn along. Had he pawned it for the umpteenth time? In any case, Weinstock, who’d already paid a substantial sum to set up the session, “turned white” at the news, Colomby recalled.
So I said to Miles, “I’ve got a trumpet in the trunk of my car. It’s an old Buescher I’ve had since I was 13.” Miles said, “Bring it in.” I walked to the car knowing the horn was full of leaks, and I thought, “How in the world is he going to play it?” Miles warmed up by just going over the valves with his fingers, to see if they were loose.
A note on Miles’s fingers: they were extraordinary. In 1986 Irving Penn took a series of black-and-white photographs of his hands, for Miles’s album Tutu.
Colomby’s account continues: Then he counted off the tempo to “Walkin’ ” without saying a word. It was just a blues, and everyone knew the tune. Miles played and I couldn’t believe how beautiful he could make that trumpet sound. Forget about take two, it was one of the best records he’d ever made. The band just went right into “Blue ’n’ Boogie,” an uptempo blues that Dizzy wrote...."
(I share my birth date with Miles!)
