At the conclusion of the Jazz for Moderns tour in 1957 on 23 November 1957, Miles Davis travelled alone to Paris, primarily to resume his affair with the actress Juliet Gréco, who met him at the airport with film director Louis Mallé. A keen Davis fan, Mallé asks the trumpeter to provide the soundtrack for a film he had in production called Ascenseur pour l'êchafaud. Davis, who was also booked to play a concert at the Olympia, Paris on 30 November (see Miles Davis: The Unissued Paris Broadcasts 1956-7 on RLR Records) and fulfil a three-week engagement at the Club St Germain with the above personnel, agreed. The soundtrack session took place on the nights of 4 and 5 December and was released in France on a Fontana 10-inch LP in 1958 and in the United States a year later as side one of Jazz Track (Columbia), with what has become known as his ‘Green Dolphin’ session, recorded in May the following year (with the Kind of Blue band) on side two. Subsequently, the Ascenseur soundtrack has turned up on all manner of re-releases down the years, but since it was never enough to fill either an LP or CD it was usually paired with some inappropriate session or other (Mercury once released it with an Art Blakey date, for example). Thus this State of Art limited edition CD is without a doubt the best reissue of all, since it preserves the original cover art with a photo of actress Jean Moreau, the film's star, original liner notes by European jazz writer Boris Vian and the whole session has been 24 bit re-mastered. So what exactly does 24-bit mastering mean? Well, the standard red book CD has a sampling rate of 1411 kbps, but leaps to 9216 kbps for 24-bit CD. Simply put, the more samples per second you get, the more complete a picture of the music you get, plus you get an accurate reproduction of sound across the entire audible frequency range (20 to 20,000 kHz). Thus, this is a pretty near perfect reproduction of the analogue source material, which in this case is good. The rest of the CD – the ‘bonus tracks’ – comprise the Jazz Track ‘Green Dolphin’ session, plus three tracks from 1956 with Sonny Rollins (whom Davis wanted to join his quintet, but declined, so Davis turned to Coltrane). The music itself, of which much has been written, is subservient to visual logic and keyed to the scenes of the film, rather than using the complete masters from which these soundtrack excerpts were taken. Thus, there are some abrupt endings, for example Barney Wilen is cut off in his prime on ‘Florence sur le Champs-Élysées’, while Davis' trumpet suffers from an excess of reverb on ‘Générique’ and ‘Chez le photographe du Motel’ – a sound that was, ironically, widely imitated on countless moody, noir-ish film soundtracks. What we have is a blueprint for Kind of Blue – Davis experimenting with static and pared down harmonies – and rising to the creative challenge of improvising to the film sequences as they unfolded before them in the studio (in much the same way pianists and organists in film theatres used to provide live accompaniment to silent films some 40 years earlier).