Legends of Music - Miles! Live in Concert

© -  Steven A. Cerra, copyright protected; all rights reserved.

On January 10th 2015 a group of Dutch Jazz Musicians who referred to themselves as the LEGENDS OF MUSIC performed and recorded a concert at the Philharmonie in Haarlem, The Netherlands which has been released on CD as Miles! Live in Concert.

The group consists of Michael Varekamp on trumpet, Ben Van Den Dungen, tenor and soprano saxophone, Wilboud Burkens, keyboards, Manuel Hugas, bass, Eric Hoeke, drums, Job Geheniau, VJ, and Jimmy Rage, spoken word.

The seven tracks on the CD are a retrospective of Miles Davis’ career beginning with Ascenseur pour L’Echafaud [Ascent to the Scaffold] from the louis Malle 1950s film of the same name to Cyndi Lauper’s Time After Time, a song that Miles often performed later in his career.

The following excerpts are from the project commentary located on the Legends of Music website:

“Legends Of Music is a new production team whose objective is to create special music programs based on an equal mix of film and music.  Live improvisation based on composed music is combined with a collage of video and moving pictures. Musicians respond film and VJ reacts to the music and each performance is different and unique!

With a mixture of many styles, each production attempts to be as colorful as possible.

The new CD MILES! Live in Concert is out and will be available for download soon on CDBaby, iTunes and Amazon.

Miles Davis was a musical genius when you take into consideration that he was standing by his musical boundaries at the forefront of a number of new trends in jazz music. The flamboyant trumpeter combined jazz with various elements of the turbulent times in which he lived and jazz gave thereby a host of new possibilities.

Many famous jazz musician began his career in the band of Miles Davis as John Coltrane, Herbie Hancock, Wayne Shorter and John Scofield. In essence, you can think of Miles as the best "coach" that jazz has ever produced.

In addition to his contribution to the timeless jazz repertoire including pieces like All Blues, Footprints and So What made ​​legendary albums like Kind of Blue, Milestones and Tutu. These now are still among the best-selling jazz records ever.”

You can locate order information and other details about this events by going to www.legendsofmusic.nl. The following video offers a sampling of the project.