Imagine settling down in front of your TV set on Christmas day 1957 and seeing the great Miles Davis appear on your screen. That’s what happened for many French jazz fans, via a short Parisian television performance that was considered lost until just a few years ago…
This footage shows Miles at 31 — two years before he recorded Kind of Blue. If you’ve not seen it before, stay tuned below for the full video..!
Jazz history is full of moments that live only in memory: bands assembled for a brief tour, film sessions improvised in real time, or performances that were broadcast once and then disappeared.
The deeper you go into the 1950s, the more it becomes a story of partial fragments — recordings preserved by chance and rumours about tapes that nobody can confirm ever existed.
For more than sixty years, one such mystery surrounded a televised performance by Miles Davis in Paris in December 1957. Photographs taken on a studio set suggested that Miles had filmed a short segment around the same time he recorded the soundtrack to Louis Malle’s Ascenseur pour l’échafaud. Yet no video survived, and the programme was widely believed to be lost. Writers only mentioned it in passing, always with the caveat: “no footage exists.”
In 2019, that assumption changed.
During an archival inventory at the Institut National de l’Audiovisuel (INA) conservation centre in Saint-Rémy-l’Honoré, researchers discovered the original 16 mm film of a French television broadcast featuring Miles Davis and a local quintet.
Digitised and made available online, it turned out to be the oldest known surviving footage of Miles Davis performing on a television set. The images had been unseen since the original Christmas Day broadcast on 25 December 1957 — almost 62 years earlier.
It is a short performance, but it opens a window onto a band that existed for only a few weeks, at a pivotal moment in Miles’ life.
Miles, Paris, winter 1957
By the time he arrived in Paris in late 1957, Miles Davis was already a major figure in modern jazz.
His recordings with Charlie Parker, the “Birth of the Cool” sessions and the beginnings of his first great quintet had given him a unique place in the music. Yet in France, Miles was not only admired — he was adored. He had first visited Paris in 1949, forming friendships with artists including Juliette Gréco, and returning gave him access to a cultural scene that valued jazz as both art and modernism.
During this trip he recorded the soundtrack to Ascenseur pour l’échafaud — improvised while watching the film projected on a screen in the studio. The session, recorded during the night of 4–5 December 1957, became a landmark in both jazz and cinema: sparse melodies, atmosphere over harmony, and long phrases shaped around the movement of the actors rather than a pre-written score.
The group Miles assembled in Paris was distinctive:
Miles Davis – trumpet
Barney Wilen – tenor saxophone
René Urtreger – piano
Pierre Michelot – double bass
Kenny Clarke – drums
Wilen, just twenty years old, was a rising saxophonist with a private, smoky tone and sharp phrasing. Urtreger and Michelot were central players in the Saint-Germain scene. And Clarke — an American drummer who had relocated to Paris — had already helped define bebop rhythm in New York. His presence gave the band a deep connection to the music’s roots.
This is the only filmed record of them performing together.
The Television Broadcast
The rediscovered footage was filmed on 7 December 1957 at the Buttes-Chaumont studio for French Radio and Television (RTF). The director was Jean-Christophe Averty, who would later become one of France’s most innovative television artists. INA describe the staging as a kind of “lunar” set — surreal, theatrical, and nothing like the club environments jazz is usually associated with.
The film was broadcast on 25 December 1957, as part of a Christmas programme that mixed jazz, vocal music and dance. Alongside Miles’ quintet appeared Juliette Gréco, the Guinean ballets of Keïta Fodeba, and singers Paul Braffort and Giani Esposito.
The mixture reflects a period when French television saw itself as an active participant in cultural life — placing jazz alongside poetry and theatre rather than isolating it.
Musically, the group performs a variation on “Dig”, a theme composed by Jackie McLean and recorded by Miles in 1951. Here, the tune becomes a framework rather than a conclusion: short melodic fragments, space between phrases, and interaction that borrows ideas from the Ascenseur session.
For decades, only photographic evidence of the broadcast existed. The programme was considered irretrievably lost. The fact that the film survived at all is almost accidental — preserved because a reel remained in INA’s vaults, unnoticed until 2019.
Looking from more jazz icons from the 1950s? Check out our list of the greatest jazz musicians of all time.