October 21st
album anniversaries

Gil Evans arranged and conducted a large ensemble of brass and woodwinds for Miles Ahead, his first collaboration with Miles Davis since the Birth of the Cool sessions of 1949 and 1950. The ten pieces were recorded at Columbia’s 30th Street Studio in New York in May 1957 and are linked into suites, with Davis the only soloist, playing flugelhorn throughout.

“Springsville” opens the sequence, and Evans’s own “Blues for Pablo” sits on the second side. The repertoire also takes in Kurt Weill’s “My Ship” and Dave Brubeck’s “The Duke”. George Avakian produced the album, which was later retitled Miles Davis + 19 after Davis objected to its original cover.

“Alive and Kicking” reached the shops as a single in September 1985, a few weeks before the album arrived. Once Upon a Time was recorded at the Townhouse in London with producers Jimmy Iovine and Bob Clearmountain, then mixed that summer at Bearsville Studios and Right Track in New York.

The eight songs run from the title track through “Ghost Dancing” to the closing “Come a Long Way”. “Sanctify Yourself” and “All the Things She Said” followed as singles in 1986. The album went to number one in Britain and reached number ten on the Billboard 200.

James Mercer recorded much of Chutes Too Narrow in his basement in Portland, Oregon, in June and July 2003. The band produced it with Phil Ek, and the mixing was done at Avast! Studios in Seattle before Sub Pop issued the follow-up to Oh, Inverted World.

“Kissing the Lipless” opens the ten songs, all written by Mercer, and “So Says I” went out as a single a month ahead of the album. “Fighting in a Sack” and “Pink Bullets” were released as singles over the next two years. “Those to Come” closes the record, which reached number 86 on the Billboard 200.

Mark Ronson worked with Lady Gaga on Joanne over many months and took an executive producer credit, with BloodPop also brought in. The album stepped back from the high drama of Artpop, and it was shaped by a family loss: the early death of an aunt in the 1970s.

Josh Homme co-wrote the opener, “Diamond Heart”, and Florence Welch joins Gaga on “Hey Girl”. “A-Yo” mixes country and funk, while the ballad “Million Reasons” returned to the US top ten after her Super Bowl half-time performance. Joanne entered the Billboard 200 at number one.

Butley Priory in Suffolk, RAK Studios in London and La Frette in Paris all hosted sessions for The Car during the summer of 2021. James Ford produced the ten songs, every one of them written by Alex Turner, for the band’s seventh album.

“There’d Better Be a Mirrorball” opens the record and was the first single, followed by “Body Paint” and “I Ain’t Quite Where I Think I Am”. “Perfect Sense” brings the sequence to an end. In Britain the album entered at number two, held off the top by Taylor Swift’s Midnights, which came out the same day.

Written during lockdown, Hugo is largely autobiographical and deals with Loyle Carner’s estranged father, with whom he had recently reconnected; recordings of his father’s voice are sampled on several tracks. Carner’s son was born in late 2020, and he wanted the album to stand as a true record of his life.

Madlib produced “Georgetown”, which samples the Guyanese poet John Agard performing “Half-Caste”, a poem Carner said gave him permission to write explicitly about being mixed. JNR Williams and Olivia Dean join him on “Homerton”. “Hate” opens the record and was its first single, and the album entered the UK chart at number three.