Sandy Brown Jazz

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Jazz As Art

Miles Davis

Someday My Prince Will Come

When you listen to music, you sometimes conjure images in your mind. Our Jazz As Art series invites you to listen to a piece of jazz and as it plays, scroll down the page and see which of the pieces of art I have chosen comes closest to the pictures in your mind. Hopefully, this will introduce you to recordings and art works you might not have spent time with before.

Miles Davis Someday My Prince Will Come

Someday My Prince Will Come, written by Frank Churchill and Larry Morey for the 1937 Disney film Snow White And The Seven Dwarfs, is the title track for Miles Davis' seventh studio album for Columbia Records. It was released in 1961 and it was the only Miles Davis Quintet studio recording session to feature saxophonist Hank Mobley. It was a time of personnel changes for Miles' band and the album reflects some of these. The personnel for the album as a whole is: Miles Davis (trumpet); John Coltrane (tenor saxophone on Someday My Prince Will Come and Teo); Hank Mobley (tenor saxophone on all tracks except Teo); Wynton Kelly (piano); Paul Chambers (bass); Jimmy Cobb (drums on all tracks except Blues No. 2); Philly Jo Jones (drums on Blues No. 2).

In Wikipedia we read: 'In a contemporary review for Down Beat, Ira Gitler praised Coltrane's solo on the title track while finding Kelly equally exceptional as both a soloist and comping musician. "His single-lines are simultaneously hard and soft. Cobb and Chambers groove perfectly together and with Kelly", Gitler wrote. "The rhythm section, individually and as a whole, is very well-recorded." The magazine's Howard Mandel later viewed Someday My Prince Will Come as "a commercial realization rather than an artistic exploration" but nonetheless "lovely", highlighted by each musician's careful attention to notes and dynamics, and among Davis' most "romantic, bluesy and intentionally seductive programs".

Play the tune and scroll slowly down through the pictures I have chosen to go with the music (I think this only works if you spend time with each painting). The track is quite short so you might need to play it twice. See what you think.