It takes a Milwaukeean, sometimes, to get the job done. When ex-Brew City gal Cheryl Pawelski, who has worked in L.A. in the music biz for well over a decade took a job at Concord Records, which had just purchased the huge Fantasy Records jazz, blues, soul, folk and rock catalog, she promised this writer that good things were coming soon.
She didn't lie. The first fruit of her tenure in A&R at Concord has led to "The Miles Davis Quartet: The Legendary Prestige Sessions," which she assembled along with Stuart Kremsky and Nick Phillips.
Casting aside the cumbersome boxes of Fantasy's past, the trio has put every tune that Davis recorded with his group that included John Coltrane -- who was just beginning to formulate and master his sheets of sound technique-- pianist Red Garland, bassist Paul Chambers and drummer Philly Joe Jones -- onto three discs in an attractive, slim box with a thick booklet.
There's also a fourth disc of unreleased materialm including seven tunes recorded on "The Tonight Show" in 1955 and a multi-media feature with five transcriptions of Davis solos.
The booklet is packed with photos and essays and recording information, but its the music that is the star here. Davis is the kind of musician that people either love or love to hate, but there's no question that, like Art Blakey, his bands served as jazz universities for decades.
With this group, he really introduced Coltrane to a wider audience via these recordings ("Relaxin'," "Steamin'," "Workin'" and "The New Miles Davis Quintet") and the ones recorded concurrently for Columbia. Often, that audience wasn't savvy enough to understand what the tenor man was up to, but as that changed, the world began to realize that the Davis quintet was one of the seminal bands in jazz.
In a recent e-mail, Pawelski -- who tapped a number of local bands for her Bruce Springsteen tribute project when she worked at EMI -- promised more goodies, but declined to get specific. We'll just have to wait and see.
Born in Brooklyn, N.Y., where he lived until he was 17, Bobby received his BA-Mass Communications from UWM in 1989 and has lived in Walker's Point, Bay View, Enderis Park, South Milwaukee and on the East Side.
He has published three non-fiction books in Italy – including one about an event in Milwaukee history, which was published in the U.S. in autumn 2010. Four more books, all about Milwaukee, have been published by The History Press.
With his most recent band, The Yell Leaders, Bobby released four LPs and had a songs featured in episodes of TV's "Party of Five" and "Dawson's Creek," and films in Japan, South America and the U.S. The Yell Leaders were named the best unsigned band in their region by VH-1 as part of its Rock Across America 1998 Tour. Most recently, the band contributed tracks to a UK vinyl/CD tribute to the Redskins and collaborated on a track with Italian novelist Enrico Remmert.
He's produced three installments of the "OMCD" series of local music compilations for OnMilwaukee.com and in 2007 produced a CD of Italian music and poetry.
In 2005, he was awarded the City of Asti's (Italy) Journalism Prize for his work focusing on that area. He has also won awards from the Milwaukee Press Club.
He has be heard on 88Nine Radio Milwaukee talking about his "Urban Spelunking" series of stories, in that station's most popular podcast.
