Listen Up! Miles Davis and Elevator to the Gallows
BY
SASHA FRERE-JONES
Metrograph’s Listen Up! column, in which we revisit movie scores and soundtracks of note, continues with a look at Miles Davis’s quick and vital contribution to Louis Malle’s Elevator to the Gallows (1958).
Elevator to the Gallows plays 7 Ludlow beginning on Friday, April 19 as part of On the Run in Paris.
The first disintegration happened in September of 1957, when the Miles Davis Quintet dissolved. This was inconvenient, to understate the case. In late 1956, Davis had recorded three albums with another version of this band, known today as the “first great quintet.” A blowsy, stylish album with the Gil Evans Orchestra was also going to be released in October (and widely embraced, it turned out). But Davis was a working musician first, and the quintet he had been using for New York club dates was suddenly gone. As John Szwed reports, Davis “fired Red Garland for missing gigs, Art Taylor quit in anger over Miles’ criticism of his playing, and Sonny Rollins left to form his own group.”
To understand what Miles was about to sound like and to track an important sequence of events, revisit one of those “great quintet” albums released in spring of 1957 on Columbia (his first for the label): ’Round About Midnight. That session was recorded with John Coltrane on saxophone, Garland on piano, Paul Chambers on bass, and Philly Joe Jones on drums, some of whom came back to work with Davis in 1958. On the title track, a Thelonious Monk tune, the band is beginning to drag the ballad into a form more reduced, more restrained, quieter and slower and weirder than ballads usually admitted. This was the beginning of a chain of events that led to 1959’s Kind of Blue, one of the most famous albums in jazz.
Kind of Blue embodied the variables that many now expect from jazz as a matter of course: languid, careful, impeccable, perceptibly articulated. These variables are emerging on ’Round About Midnight, but the album that captures that state of mind most fully is the score that Davis recorded in Paris on December 4, 1957, in a session that began at 9pm and ended early the next day. The cool jazz that nobody ever minds hearing comes into focus here; Ascenseur pour l’échafaud (the French title would be retained for the album’s US release) is my favorite version of the idea, idiosyncrasies and all.
In September of 1957, before Davis had to think about rebuilding his band in New York, a French promoter named Marcel Romano offered him a brief European tour. Davis would be playing with musicians then living in Paris: American Kenny Clarke on drums, Pierre Michelot on bass, Barney Wilen on saxophone, and René Urtreger on piano. Davis had played with Urtreger’s trio the year before and had dated Urtreger’s sister.
Elevator to the Gallows (1958)
The second disintegration happened in Paris, before Davis even landed. Though Romano had promised “a three-week tour” and “had plans to produce a short film on jazz with Miles himself as the star,” neither eventuated. Romano’s idea is worth noting: film a session with musicians who had just met. “I wanted to show some of the atmosphere of a session to a wide audience, and also promote Miles, who was then far from being as famous as he is today,” Romano said in a 1988 interview. The immediacy of interactions between people who “had just met” is a central quality of the music Davis recorded for Louis Malle.
Romano had teamed up with a director named Jean-Claude Rappeneau, who was also working with a new director in his early twenties, Malle. Malle wanted to have a jazz soundtrack, perhaps entirely improvised, for his first feature, Elevator to the Gallows (1958). That film, unlike Romano’s, did happen. “[Malle] told me he had always loved my music and that he wanted me to write the musical score,” Davis said in his memoir. “I agreed to do it and it was a great learning experience, because I had never written a music score for a film before.”
What the quintet recorded in December of 1957 is famous in part because it was improvised quickly while watching rushes from the film, but it’s also a point of negotiation between Europe and America, recorded music and cinema, composition and time. Ascenseur pour l’échafaud is what jazz sounded like in 1957. Davis may have been one of the people shaping that sound but it’s fascinating to hear this music and understand that it doesn’t stand outside history—this is a great jazz band, no more and no less, recording one of the first improvised soundtracks in twentieth-century cinema.
Since the early ’50s, American composers like Alex North and Elmer Bernstein had been channeling jazz for movies like, respectively, A Streetcar Named Desire (1951) and Sweet Smell of Success (1957), reimagining what a film score could be. The French New Wave directors, to cut their teeth and kill their fathers, had then been reimagining these noir movies, minus the American anger and guilt. You could say the homages of Jean-Pierre Melville, François Truffaut, Jean-Luc Godard, and Malle were inept, but that would miss the point of their transformations into a gentler varietal. The gunplay in Godard rarely looks realistic enough to provoke tension (is anything more comical than the ending of Breathless?) and the trains in Melville are sometimes revealed as the toy dioramas they are.
Elevator to the Gallows (1958)
Part of that came from a class divide that barely makes sense in 2024; cops were hardly on the side of justice, but, in terms of their position in the social world of the films, they are not so far removed from the criminals. Both wear trench coats and hats, smoking is absolutely required, and the guns are janky lil’ pistols that are usually fired once if at all. The manner native to both sides is Generally Cinematic, and in Elevator to the Gallows, there is not really a lot of sense or intensity to the crime at its center, which involves some grappling hooks (retrieved by a child?) and a long and baffling stretch of a character trapped inside an elevator. What is more important is looking cool, and in the middle of the 20th century, cops and criminals had only one job in movies: look cooler than civilians.
When Davis told his brother Vernon, infamously, “Fuck jazz! Alex North is the man,” it doesn’t now seem to mean that Miles simply wanted to, like North, record more often with string sections or score Hollywood movies. My take is that Davis was moving towards something he would chase for the next 20 years, until the end of the ’70s: a way of working with time differently, of playing less and having more happen. I have chosen to believe that the part of his quote about North is not all that specific, and that when Davis says “fuck jazz,” he means only what has come before, not all of jazz to come.
For Ascenseur, Davis composed a few themes in his hotel after seeing some scenes of the movie and then recorded the entire album in three hours and some change with the band, stopping and starting as Malle (also in the studio) added his own minor instructions. In the autobiography, Davis barely mentions the project: “While I was in Paris writing the music for Malle’s film, I was playing at the Club St. Germain … I remember this gig because a lot of French critics got mad when I wouldn’t talk from the bandstand and introduce tunes like everyone else did, because I thought the music spoke for itself.” (There is talk in the book of his relationship with the singer Juliette Gréco, though Davis spent more time with Urtreger’s sister Jeannette, who goes unmentioned.)
Bassist Pierre Michelot gave an interview in 1988 that opens up the story. The five musicians had been playing dates together, so they were in sync. “We arrived at the Poste Parisien around 10pm, Jeanne Moreau was there, and we all had a drink together,” Michelot said. Her presence that night in the lead up to the recording feels necessary, as it is Moreau who is at the center of what makes Elevator still valuable as both film and music. Scenes of her walking around Paris, almost getting hit by cars, and staring dolefully at boys playing pinball is where the second half of the 20th century begins. These scenes are the seed of Bernard Herrmann’s jazz soundtrack for Taxi Driver (1976), and of all of Scorsese’s shots of watery and luscious red stoplights paired with sliding horns, the city as psychic fishbowl and inherently melancholic space. For Malle, it is Davis and a big blinking Kronenbourg sign. Who the fuck knows what else this film is about!
Elevator to the Gallows (1958)
These filmed urban spaces are peaceful—no matter how violent these 20th-century cop films eventually became, the city is presented in Elevator as a valley between pressures, not the pressure itself. That changes with Michael Mann’s Heat in 1995, the moment when cop movies became militarized and gallons of bullet casings began to roll through the streets. A metabolization of the Rodney King riots three years earlier, Heat tells us that the specter of policing can no longer be cloaked in the soft fabrics of trench coats and floppy hats. For Malle and Davis, back in the middle of the American century, we are still flâneurs, not yet targets.
Moreau is one of the figures in the film who brings out the music, literally: the music tends to arrive when she does, Michelot’s bass loping into the audible field as Moreau walks mopily down the street, all of us unsure what we’re doing. Elevator did not use all of Davis’s music, even though the final commercial album last over an hour. The 18 minutes Malle chose were used for what is often described as “mood,” which, as a musical idea, is a way of describing the capturing of time, not necessarily events and information. This is an essentially cinematic state, but when Davis goes back to New York, makes up with John Coltrane, and ushers in a massive sea change with Kind of Blue, the roots of which can be found in Ascenseur’s vague themes, that revolution is described with musical terms like “modal.” That is not inaccurate, but what Davis is channeling comes first from cinema, and second from music, the Barthesian sense of jouissance: bliss and boredom conjoined on the boulevard. Moreau was vibing, in other words.
Returning to Michelot: “Miles was very relaxed, as if the music he was playing wasn’t that important. It was only later that I learned he’d already been to a screening, and that he’d known about the project for several weeks.” Davis gave the musicians minimal guidelines—like “play two chords - D minor and C 7 - with four bars each, ad lib”—and sometimes the director did, in different terms. “Malle gave certain indications that he couldn’t express in the way a musical technician would, but he knew how to make himself understood clearly enough to get what he wanted.”
This approach eventually became part of what we know now as New Age or ambient: “the absence of a specific theme,” as Michelot put it. “This was new for the period, especially with the soundtrack for a film,” he said. “We only had the most succinct guidance from Miles.” Davis was interested in “structures of some kind,” while Malle apparently said that the “music ought to be in counterpoint to the image.” The key here is to understand that everything initially dismissed in genres like New Age is the result of an insane academic obsession with written music and traditional virtuosity. Audiences? They didn’t care, but advances like Davis’s had to be described through harmonic terms like “modal” because people hadn’t yet caught up with movies like Elevator.
Watching Moreau wander through Paris at night precisely without the burden of plot was a major development, an echo of Tarkovsky’s men forever wading through water, and of Ozu’s seated, suffering spouses waiting for the next rhombus of interstitial black to relieve the tension. The sheer act of being filmed in an urban space, subject to a cinematic eye that treated criminals and cops (also workers) equally, gives an illusory class solidarity to all participants. This is part of our third disintegration, that of jazz itself. A schism occurs, one that still maddens the purists who want Real Players and Real Compositions, involving mood and tone and form and the recording process itself. The cinematic eye creates paintings, frame by frame, but so does a recording device in a studio. Davis allowed jazz to find its electric ground water, a bubbling pace that matches the pace of life in the city and time under the clock of bosses. No themes, no masters, no plots. If there is no plot, we have come to the meditative state, which is far from anodyne. Here we confront ourselves, the most terrifying experience of all, worse than even the cops.
Sasha Frere-Jones is a writer and musician from New York. He lives with his wife, Heidi, in the East Village. His memoir, Earlier, has just been published by Semiotext(e).
Elevator to the Gallows (1958)
