Modern Art Orchestra: Miles Davis 100 | Miles Ahead

Bandleader and arranger Gil Evans’ collaboration with Miles Davis reached new heights with the 1957 studio album *Miles Ahead*, but there was still more to come. Their three joint albums—and, as a precursor, the *Birth of the Cool* recordings—stand as absolute landmarks in the history of jazz. Miles Ahead centers on Davis playing the flugelhorn; he is the only one to take solos. Evans liberated the big band from its traditional role, creating a new, symphonic-like ideal of beauty in modern jazz by incorporating symphonic instruments and pieces into the repertoire—an ideal that audiences and critics immediately embraced. This is also the ideal of the Modern Art Orchestra: to open up to the classical while standing on the ground of jazz. Although the album cover was later changed at Davis’s request, by the time it was given a new title (Miles Davis+19), it had already become a legend, so the title remained the same.

The Modern Art Orchestra’s three-part concert series pays tribute to the jazz icon, who would have turned 100 this year, through the legendary collaboration of Miles Davis and Gil Evans. The evenings dedicated to three indispensable albums in jazz history—Miles Ahead, Porgy and Bess, and Sketches of Spain—are not merely reinterpretations of iconic records, but trace the arc of a shared musical vision: the expansion of the boundaries between jazz and classical music, the redefinition of the orchestral sound, and a revolutionary rethinking of the relationship between soloist and orchestra. The series is both a tribute to the centenary of Miles Davis’s birth and an articulation of the Modern Art Orchestra’s artistic creed: to openly seek new sonic ideals while drawing from the tradition of jazz. Three concerts, different facets of a single musical concept.