Miles Davis Wrote “Donna Lee” Before “Tiny’s Con” Was Available! Guest Post by Leif Bo Petersen (+Bonus)

(Paying Subscribers, a rare version of Don Byas and Slam Stewart performing “Indiana” before the Town Hall concert is below as your latest gift.)

[Introduction by Lew: Jazz people love to compare records and say that “this artist must have gotten that idea from this recording” or “must be” quoting a certain song or recording. I always point out that one must check the release dates. It’s not enough to know that one thing was recorded before the other—was it released, that is, was it available, before the other? I usually check all release dates, and as noted before, I did check the release date of “Donna Lee.” But because “Tiny's Con” was recorded a year before  “Donna Lee,” and 78s usually were for sale one or two months after being recorded, I assumed, wrongly, that it must have been released by then.

You have previously enjoyed two essays by John Purcell about the musical relationships between Miles’s “Donna Lee,” Tiny Kahn’s “Tiny’s Con,” and Fats Navarro’s solo on “Ice Freezes Red.” (See the Index.) But Danish researcher and trumpeter Leif Bo Petersen has discovered that those last two pieces, although recorded earlier, were not released until well after “Donna Lee” was recorded! He was written the essay below to explain what this means about the audible connections between these pieces. Petersen’s extensive research on the Earl Hines “pre-bop” band was shared in this series. You may also be interested in the detailed book about Fats Navarro that he coauthored with the late Theo Rehak. Now, here is his new essay:]

By Leif Bo Petersen:

“Indiana" is a song composed by James F. Hanley, with lyrics by Ballard MacDonald, that was published in January 1917. [Lewis notes that the refrain begins “Back home again in Indiana,” and the song is sometimes listed by that name, but the title on the original sheet music is simply “Indiana.” Here is the original sheet music. As is typical, the first page after the cover drawing is the musical introduction or “verse”:]

Indiana,1917

1.08MB ∙ PDF file

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Petersen continues:

“Indiana” was a popular tune among jazz musicians ever since the recording of it by the Original Dixieland Jazz Band on May 31, 1917. [Lew adds that it had already been recorded by non-jazz artists, for example a vocal version in February 1917.] At first, jazz musicians mostly played it in F or Bb. But we find the tune played in Ab by Monk and others at Minton’s in 1941, and on the Bob Redcross recording of Parker and Gillespie jamming from 1943, so the tune may have become a jam session regular in the key of Ab by then.

In a recording of “Indiana” on November 2, 1944 made at the Manhattan home of Timme Rosenkrantz, by Don Byas and Slam Stewart, we surprisingly hear a gesture similar to the opening of “Donna Lee” in the last half of his second solo chorus:

(The full recording is below for Paying Subscribers.)

This signifies that this gesture, if not invented by Byas, may have been, as John Purcell noted, a common property when improvising on the  “Indiana” changes. Byas does not play this gesture in the well-known later version of this duo performance (Town Hall, June 9,1945). However, compared to the 1944 version, at Town Hall he plays the number in a furious tempo (about 288 on the metronome). The tradition of improvising on the “Indiana” changes in a fast tempo may be Byas’s main contribution to “Donna Lee.”

I look upon “Donna Lee” as Davis’s attempt to write down a solo on the chords of “Indiana,” a kind of “etude.” As Purcell noted, it is clear that Miles took some inspiration from “Tiny’s Con,” which was recorded June 8, 1946, and released on the 78-rpm disk Manor 1124. But I have not found a release date for this record before “Donna Lee” was recorded in May 1947, and it was not reviewed in DownBeat until July 28, 1948. [Lewis adds: DownBeat usually reviewed records when they were new. Also in July 1948, the Manor disk was listed among “New Releases” in an ad in Metronome magazine.]

So it appears certain that “Tiny’s Con” was released a full year after “Donna Lee” was recorded! What does this say about the audible similarities? As Purcell showed, only a few phrases are similar, but they are too close to be coincidental. Therefore, we must assume that Miles heard this tune, or saw the sheet music, by contact with its composer, Tiny Kahn, or other musicians. After all, Kahn, the drummer and composer, and vibraphonist Terry Gibbs were playing in New York during the first half of 1947. [Lew notes: In Gibbs’s autobiography he remembers meeting Miles in 1949, but this was written when he was about 79 years old and surely might be a few years off. Also, from 1949 onward, there are surviving recordings that document Miles performing with or on the same bill as Kahn and Gibbs as well as other musicians from “Tiny’s Con”: Gene DiNovi on piano, and Lombardi on bass. Miles surely could have met them in 1946-7.]

But there is yet another problem in discussing the origins of “Donna Lee: “Ice Freezes Red” was recorded January 29, 1947, but it was not released until early December of that year, in an album of four 78-rpm records entitled New Sounds in Modern Music (Savoy S-508). Therefore it cannot be on this record that Miles Davis heard Fats Navarro’s “Donna Lee” opening gesture. However, the two trumpeters were close in early 1947, so Davis may have heard Navarro play this phrase in person. Besides, as I have just shown, Byas used the gesture as early as 1944, and John Purcell gave an example of Bird playing it in January 1946.

In the music example below I have compared four versions of the “Donna Lee” opening gesture:

It is interesting to note that both Byas and "Donna Lee" start on the third beat, but although Byas sounds fine, "Donna Lee" sounds out of sync with the F7-Bb7 chords of the second and third measure. Parker at this time sometimes played purposely out of sync with the chords in his improvisations. (One of John Purcell’s essays gives examples of Bird turning the beat around, which is a related approach.) In his analysis of “Chasin’ the Bird,” recorded the same day, Lawrence Koch in his book Yardbird Suite states: “…it has always intrigued me that the second (trumpet) line, starting in bar 2, seems to echo the harmony, as if the second line is starting at the beginning, but a bar later” (p.112).

It seems we have here a phenomenon similar to the delayed opening of “Donna Lee.” The trumpet line of “Chasin’ the Bird” to me sounds like a creation of Davis. In his book Charlie Parker, Composer, Henry Martin suggests that that the lines were written out and that Parker then delayed the trumpet line in order to create the counterpoint (p.263). Furthermore, because this was a new quintet, there were rehearsals beforehand (Ken Vail, Bird’s Diary, p.27; no source given) where ideas like this could have been discussed and tested. With all this in mind, could the delayed entrance of “Donna Lee” be Parker’s contribution to the tune?

[Lew adds: After writing his essays, John Purcell also found an instance where Bird played the lick heard in measure 25 of “Donna Lee”—just that one measure, not the complete phrase—in 1945. So that might be another contribution by Parker—or perhaps it came from a source that both Bird and Miles knew.]

In any case, my conclusion is that we have a sure connection between “Tiny’s Con” and “Donna Lee,” even though “..Con” was not yet released. But the connection with Navarro’s opening gesture on “Ice Freezes Red” is more accidental, maybe rooted in routine gestures used by various artists when jamming on the chords of “Indiana.”

Leif Bo Petersen

[Thank you, Leif, for this fine research!

All the best,
Lewis