Gil Evans' collaboration with Miles Davis as bandleader and arranger on the 1957 studio album Miles Ahead covered a lot of ground, but there was still room to develop further. Their three albums together – and the earlier Birth of the Cool recordings – are absolute reference points in the history of jazz. Miles Ahead is centered on Davis playing the flugelhorn, with him as the only soloist. Evans took the big band out of its traditional role and, by incorporating symphonic instruments and pieces into the repertoire, created a new, symphonic ideal of beauty in modern jazz, which was immediately embraced by audiences and critics alike. This is also the ideal the Modern Art Orchestra follows: to open up to classical music while standing on the ground of jazz. Although the album cover was later changed at Davis's request, giving it a new title (Miles Davis+19), it had already become legendary, so the title remained the same.

The Modern Art Orchestra’s three-part concert series pays tribute to this year’s centenary of a jazz icon through the legendary collaboration of Miles Davis and Gil Evans. The evenings built around three inescapable milestones of jazz history – Miles Ahead, Porgy and Bess, and Sketches of Spain – are not straightforward reinterpretations of the iconic albums, but rather trace the arc of a shared musical vision: the expansion of the boundaries between jazz and classical music, the redefinition of the big-band sound, and the revolutionary rethinking of the relationship between soloist and orchestra. The series is at once a homage to the 100th anniversary of Miles Davis’s birth and a statement of the Modern Art Orchestra’s artistic credo: starting from the tradition of jazz while remaining open in the search for new sonic ideals. Three concerts, a single musical idea revealed through different faces.