Miles Davis Recorded Four Classic Albums in Two Days — To Get Out of His Contract

In 1956, Miles Davis had a problem most musicians would recognize: he owed his record label albums he no longer wanted to make for them. His solution produced four of the most revered records in jazz — in two days of studio time.

Davis had spent the early 1950s in the commercial wilderness, and clawed his way back with a celebrated appearance at the 1955 Newport Jazz Festival. Columbia Records came calling with the kind of money and promotion Prestige could never match. There was just one obstacle: his Prestige contract still had albums left on it.

Most artists in that position drag it out, phone it in, or lawyer up. Davis did something different. He booked Rudy Van Gelder’s studio in Hackensack, New Jersey, brought in his working band, and cleared the debt at speed: one session on 11 May 1956, another on 26 October. Twenty-five songs. Four albums. Done.

A club set with the tape rolling

The band Davis brought to Hackensack was the group now known as the First Great Quintet: John Coltrane on tenor saxophone, Red Garland on piano, Paul Chambers on bass and Philly Joe Jones on drums.

There was no new material and next to no studio craft in the modern sense. Davis ran the dates like a gig — calling out titles, counting the band in, moving from one tune to the next without retakes. The repertoire was the quintet’s nightly set list: standards and originals they had been playing in clubs across America, worn smooth by the road.

You can hear how informal it was. Relaxin’ opens with Davis telling the room, “I’ll play it and tell you what it is later.”

Instead of sounding rushed, the music feels alive. Coltrane is audibly developing the rapid-fire approach that would soon be dubbed “sheets of sound”.

Davis — harmon-muted, influenced by the space and silence he admired in pianist Ahmad Jamal — is in razor-sharp form. And the rhythm section moves like a single unit, because by October 1956 it effectively was one.

Four albums, five years

What emerged from those two days was sequenced by Prestige boss Bob Weinstock into four separate LPs, released gradually over the following five years — a slow drip of Davis albums that kept the label in business long after its star had left:

Cookin’ with the Miles Davis Quintet arrived first, in July 1957, followed by Relaxin’, Workin’ and Steamin’. The now-famous gerund titles were a marketing idea rather than an artistic statement — and Davis, for once, approved of the framing. “After all,” he said of the first title, “that’s what we did — came in and cooked.”

The sessions produced one more landmark that escaped the four albums entirely: the definitive quintet reading of “‘Round Midnight” from those dates was issued separately on Miles Davis and the Modern Jazz Giants.

The contract that captured a peak

There’s an irony at the centre of this story that Davis himself seemed to appreciate. The contract he was trying to escape ended up documenting his working band exactly as it sounded at its height — no studio gloss, no elaborate arrangements, just five musicians who knew each other inside out, playing the music they played every night.

“That was some great music we made at both those sessions, and I’m really proud of it today,” he wrote in his 1989 autobiography. “But this ended my contract with Prestige. I was ready to move on.”

Move on he did — to Columbia, to Miles Ahead, Milestones and Kind of Blue, and to a run of reinvention that lasted the rest of his life. But the two days in Hackensack have never been treated as mere contract-filler.

Seventy years on, in Davis’s centennial year, Craft Recordings has just gathered the material again as Miles ’56: The Prestige Recordings — the latest confirmation that what was recorded as an obligation is now regarded as a high-water mark of small-group jazz.

Not bad for two days’ work.

Looking for more? Explore our guide to the most famous Miles Davis albums, or dive into more stories from jazz history.