Someday, My Prince Will Come
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Someday My Prince Will Come is one of those early Miles Davis albums (recorded for Columbia in 1960-61, released in 1961) that seems like you've heard it before, except you probably haven't. The title cut is a cover of - of all things - a song most widely associated even in 2017 with a Disney film from eighty years before, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937). I don't think the 1960 version of the movie's hit song is riding as hard on the coattails of the film as some did at the time.
Howard Mandel (not that Howard Mandel) said in a Down Beat review that it was a commercial record and, of course, that was true. Davis was never an artist who ignored his own bottom line and he found ways of making the experimental saleable from Kind of Blue to On the Corner and beyond, which is why Columbia signed him and whoever he chose to play with from 1956 to 1985. But on this track, on this album (as on so many others) there is something in the in-between that is simply magical. For one thing, this is one of the very few tracks John Coltrane would play on with Davis after their 1960 European tour and one of the first after a police brutality incident involving Davis and the New York Police Department was legally settled in 1960, but it is also a preview of the quiet, angry energy that remained closely associated with Davis throughout his career.
The opening bars tell you everything you need to know. The bass and the cymbals are marking the passage of time, the stirring of the snare with the brushes the quietest possible emphasis on the movement forward from the original version of the 30s standard. The absence of vocals on what was originally a first and last hit for Adriana Caselotti, who Disney kept under a restrictive contract after her star turn in the 1937 film, is one marker of time's passage, but there's another: the group of black men playing the tune. Snow White is, after all, really really white (the fairest of them all, in fact) and as Red Barber said about Jackie Robinson, Miles Davis is "very definitely brunette," as are all the other band members on this track.
The meaning of this code-switch is embedded in the re-purposing of the tune. The waltz-time signature remains, the quiet, rhythmic intro pointing backwards to the film version, but Davis' choice to cover a white female performer's big song marks a drastic departure from the sugary point of the first version: where Snow White hopes for the return of the creepy prince who surprises her in the film's opening minutes by sneaking up on her to insert himself in her choral tribute to her animal friends, Davis and his band hope for no such thing and, in fact, can only be read as treating the tune to an ironic rereading that questions the value of the Prince who came too soon and then too late, as well as of the social imaginary the film re-creates: old-European, rural, white, conservative, and ultimately imaginary.
The shift in emphasis is also clear from the album's cover, which features Francis Davis (married at the time to Miles Davis) looking dubiously at the camera, one eyebrow upraised as if to question the very concept of a saviour-prince (as well she might do) to the hard swinging rhythm of the title track, which sits so far back on the beat it is almost on the next; nothing about this tune is obvious, even though it is simultaneously almost unmistakably a cover of an innocent Princess' iconic cartoon lyric. From Davis' mashup of confident brightness with forlorn tone-bending licks he never repeats again, and the contrast between the crisp rhythm section recording and the fuzzier, more distant horns, to the distant piano that gives the listener a clipped, gnomic solo before laying down the atmosphere again after a single run through the song's melodic structure, this song is quietly rebellious, and entirely stylish about it. Even the smoothness of the surface is a shrouded critique of the obviousness of the initial, 'fair' presentation.
As the song rolls on the propulsive tempo never falters, encouraging a slightly rushed, clipped feel; the subdued, percussive piano chords and the delayed entry of the other horns, the muted sound of Davis' trumpet and the continued stirring of the snare keep the feeling moving forward even as the song invites the listener to look backward in time, and the dissonance Davis uses in his own solo emphasizes the undercurrent of discord that characterizes the tune from the meter to the execution. Coltrane's concise, close-toned solo and the piano's more expressive and melodic 12 bars mitigate the message of Davis' solo but only enough to maintain the forward momentum of the whole until a final return, when Davis finally gives the listener a (more or less) straightforward rendition of the original melody. When Coltrane returns the song is nearly over and, beside a chord-based piano and another rendition of the base melody, the track is heading to its end in another oddly off-putting final run-through, this time without Davis' muted trumpet lead. Even here the Prince of Darkness remains aloof; one almost feels, deservedly so.