Miles Ahead brought together a variety of materials, but a year later, Gil Evans adapted Gershwin’s opera, Porgy and Bess into a really mesmerizing concert. The 1958 recordings exude inner tension, even though Evans treats the orchestra with great restraint, using only a fragment of a melody in Summertime, with a repetitive pattern of a total of seven notes in the accompaniment, played at a lively tempo. Meanwhile, the hero represented by the sound of the trumpet believes he can move freely, but the monotony of the accompaniment gives us a sense of foreboding – even as we still dare to revel in the beauty. In I Loves You Porgy, the tension is already enormous, even though there is hardly any movement in the accompaniment, it is almost static. The palpably vulnerable sound of Davis's trumpet demonically draws our attention, whether he is personifying the narrator or one of the title characters. Soloist and orchestra, innovation and tradition, classical and jazz; the complex goals of this legendary album are still exemplary for the Modern Art Orchestra today.

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.