If I Were a Bell: How a Broadway Showtune Became a Miles Davis Standard

There’s a moment at the start of one of the most famous jazz records of the 1950s where you can hear a band that isn’t quite ready to be recorded.

A voice comes through the studio talkback. Miles Davis, sounding entirely unbothered, tells the producer he’ll play it and tell him what it is later. Then he clicks off the count with his fingers, Red Garland plays a little chiming figure on the piano, and a song from a Broadway musical about New York gamblers walks into the jazz repertoire and never leaves.

That song is “If I Were a Bell”. Today it turns up at jam sessions from Tokyo to Toulouse, in the key of F, usually with that same bell-like intro. But it started life in a very different room.

Frank Loesser wrote it for a drunk nun

“If I Were a Bell” comes from Guys and Dolls, Frank Loesser’s 1950 musical based on the Damon Runyon stories, which opened at the 46th Street Theatre in November of that year and became one of the great American book musicals.

In the show, the song belongs to Sister Sarah Brown, a Save-a-Soul Mission worker played on Broadway by Isabel Bigley. Gambler Sky Masterson has taken her to Havana on a bet, plied her with cocktails she doesn’t realise are alcoholic, and watched her defences come apart. “If I Were a Bell” is what falls out: a woman with, as the lyric puts it, a quiet upbringing, reaching for one comic image after another — a bell ringing, a lamp lighting, a banner waving, a gate swinging — because she has no vocabulary for what she’s actually feeling.

It’s a joke song. That matters, because the thing jazz musicians eventually did with it was take the joke seriously.

Loesser wrote both music and lyrics for Guys and Dolls, and the show is stacked with tunes that crossed over — “Luck Be a Lady” and “I’ve Never Been in Love Before” among them. Pop singers got to “If I Were a Bell” almost immediately: Bing Crosby and Patty Andrews recorded it in September 1950, before the show had even opened, and Doris Day cut her version for Columbia that same month.

None of those are the reason you know the tune.

Miles Davis and the session that made it a standard

On 26 October 1956, the Miles Davis Quintet went into Rudy Van Gelder’s studio in Hackensack, New Jersey for their final Prestige session. It was a marathon — the band ran tunes back to back, nightclub-set style, with almost no second takes, and the material from that day and one earlier session in May was later split across four albums: Cookin’, Relaxin’, Workin’ and Steamin’.

The reason for the marathon was contractual. Davis had signed to Columbia but still owed Prestige albums, so he cleared the debt in bulk. The band doing the clearing was the first great quintet: John Coltrane on tenor, Red Garland on piano, Paul Chambers on bass, Philly Joe Jones on drums.

The first thing they played that day was “If I Were a Bell”, and it opens Relaxin’ with the Miles Davis Quintet, released on Prestige in March 1958.

What you hear is a masterclass in doing less. Garland’s introduction is a simple bell figure over a pedal, more Big Ben than bebop. Davis comes in muted, tone light and dry, phrasing so far behind the beat it sounds like he’s just noticed the band has started. Underneath, Chambers walks a bassline that bass players have been transcribing for seventy years, and Philly Joe keeps the whole thing floating rather than driving. Coltrane, still a couple of years from Giant Steps, plays with a hunger that makes the contrast with Davis into the whole point of the record.

Two details worth knowing.

First, it wasn’t Davis who brought the tune in. Contemporary accounts credit Red Garland with introducing “If I Were a Bell” to the group — he also recorded it with his own trio around the same period. Davis took a pianist’s suggestion and made it his signature.

Second, the studio chatter was left in deliberately. Prestige kept the false starts and the talkback on the master reels, which is why the album opens with Davis addressing producer Bob Weinstock rather than with music. It’s a small thing that changed how the record feels: you’re not listening to a document, you’re standing in the room.

He kept playing it for a decade

“If I Were a Bell” became one of the few tunes Davis carried through almost every version of himself.

In April 1961, at the Blackhawk in San Francisco, he played it with Hank Mobley, Wynton Kelly, Paul Chambers and Jimmy Cobb — looser, longer, Kelly’s comping doing things Garland never tried, one version stretching past twelve minutes.

Then, in December 1965 at the Plugged Nickel in Chicago, the second great quintet — Wayne Shorter, Herbie Hancock, Ron Carter and a 19-year-old Tony Williams — opened the first set with it on both nights. Those performances are the tune’s furthest journey from Sister Sarah. The band had agreed among themselves to sabotage their own habits, playing “anti-music” against the expected shapes, and what they do to “If I Were a Bell” over sixteen minutes bears roughly the relationship to Loesser’s song that a Cubist portrait bears to a face. The changes are still there. Almost nothing else is.

Listen to the 1956 studio take and the 1965 Chicago take back to back. It’s one of the clearest illustrations in recorded jazz of what a decade of thinking does to a musician.

What to listen for

Go back to the 1956 recording with these three things in mind and it opens up.

• It starts leaning forward. The melody arrives before the tune has settled into its home key, which is why it already feels like it’s moving by the time Davis enters. (Technically: the head comes in over a II7–V7 before resolving to F.)
• There’s space built into it. The chords change slowly enough that a soloist can phrase across the bar rather than chase them. Listen to how far behind the beat Davis sits in that first chorus without ever sounding late.
• Everyone plays the same introduction. Garland’s bell figure has become the tune’s front door. Call “If I Were a Bell” at a jam session anywhere in the world and the pianist will play it — because the recording is the shared score here, not the sheet music.

If you’re learning it: it’s a 32-bar song in ABAC form, almost always played in F, and the intro is worth taking off the record rather than off the page. Above all, notice how little Davis plays in that opening chorus. The tune rewards restraint far more than it rewards notes.

Five recordings to hear

• Miles Davis Quintet — Relaxin’ with the Miles Davis Quintet (Prestige, 1958). The one that made it. Recorded October 1956.
• Miles Davis — In Person Friday and Saturday Nights at the Blackhawk (Columbia, 1961). The tune stretched out live, with Wynton Kelly at his most buoyant.
• Miles Davis — The Complete Live at the Plugged Nickel 1965 (Columbia/Legacy). The demolition-and-rebuild version. Not the place to start; absolutely the place to end up.
• Blossom Dearie — Once Upon a Summertime (Verve, 1959). A reminder that it’s a lyric first, delivered with the wit the words were written for.
• Dinah Washington — In the Land of Hi-Fi (Mercury, 1956). Recorded the same year as the Davis session, and coming from somewhere completely different.

The bell that kept ringing

Loesser died in 1969 having written some of the most durable songs in the American theatre. It’s unlikely he imagined that his comic number about a tipsy mission worker in Havana would end up as a proving ground for three generations of improvisers, or that its opening notes would be recognised worldwide as a piano figure rather than a punchline.

That’s the odd alchemy of the jazz repertoire. A tune doesn’t become a standard because it’s profound. It becomes a standard because someone finds a door in it — and then everybody else walks through.

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