The first official music video for Miles Davis’ “Moon Dreams” has been released today by Blue Note/UMe, in association with Ingenuity Studios. The track it accompanies was written by Chummy MacGregor and Johnny Mercer, arranged by Gil Evans, and recorded by the Miles Davis Nonet on March 9, 1950 for the project that would eventually become known as Birth of the Cool. Directed by Nicolas Donatelli with visual effects produced by Philip McGuire, the new video is influenced by Davis’ own sketches and imagines a night in New York City through every era of jazz.
Earlier this year, to celebrate the 70th anniversary of the Miles Davis Nonet’s formation, all of the tracks recorded at the 1949-50 Birth of the Cool sessions (including “Moon Dreams”), as well as the ensemble’s only extant live recordings (cut at the Royal Roost in New York), were released in a 2LP vinyl, CD, and digital package called The Complete Birth of the Cool.
The new Miles video is the second video to be released from Universal Music Group’s “Never Made” project, a series that creates videos for songs that never originally had them. The first, for Marvin Gaye’s “What’s Going On,” was released on September 13.
