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The Sound of Miles Davis

Jan Lohmann's The Sound of Miles Davis: The Discography 1945-1991 (Copenhagen: JazzMedia ApS, 1992) is the most important published resource I have drawn on over the years while maintaining Miles Ahead. Jan has been unfailingly generous and helpful for more than thirty years, and I owe him a lot.

Jan's "disco," as he calls it, was published in March 1992, six months after Miles Davis died. The first edition sold out very quickly. For years afterward Jan maintained a website, also called The Sound of Miles Davis, which tantalized us with the prospect of a second edition of the discography. It was not to be.

Work on the disco went on: acquiring new recordings (much easier to do in the era of Dropbox and WeTransfer than by mailing cassettes around the world!); poring over materials from the Columbia and Warner Brothers vaults; cataloging new releases (whether "official" or the various species of the genus Bootleg); gathering information from collectors worldwide; and filling gaps where information was missing from the first edition.

Jan abandoned the idea of a second print edition of The Sound of Miles Davis some years ago. But we have added his data from 1980-1991 to Miles Ahead, to fill the gaps in what George Cole calls "the last Miles." We hope that the result is a resource that provides accurate information about Miles Davis' recording sessions, from the earliest ones in 1945 until the latest ones just before his death in 1991.

I am grateful to Jan for sharing his data and for his help in adding it to Miles Ahead. Of course if anyone finds errors or omissions or inconsistencies in the sessions listed here, please send us a message.