Guildhall Jazz Orchestra: Aura — A Miles Davis Centenary Celebration

Guildhall Jazz Orchestra returns to Aura, Miles Davis’s Grammy Award-winning final album with a jazz orchestra, for a powerful Friday festival finale.

Following the orchestra’s momentous 2023 performance, the first complete performance of the work anywhere in the world since its 1984 premiere, they reprise it under the direction of Scott Stroman, with special guest trumpeter Robbie Robson.

Made in collaboration with Danish trumpeter Palle Mikkelborg, Aura is a suite of ten movements that range from blues to funk to reggae, capturing, in the words of writer Herb Wong, Miles’s “charismatic and nutritious aura”.

The evening brings the original orchestral score to life through a mix of classic big band arrangements and fresh new interpretations.

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A hugely ambitious piece, its main theme consists of ten notes generated from the letters ‘M-I-L-E-S-D-A-V-I-S’, with each movement representing a different colour of Davis’ aura as seen by Mikkelborg. Fred Kaplan of New York magazine described it as a “jolting synthesis of jazz, rock, and Messiaen-influenced classical music that lit up a future path lamentably unfollowed”.

Why Aura? Scott Stroman says: “I know of no other piece quite like Aura. Of course, on first hearing, it is the unmistakable voice of Miles that catches the ear, but there is something about the setting, the larger piece, that sets it apart from any other Davis recording since the 1960s. It is the voice of another musician, one who seems to know how to draw out the best in Miles in a large palette; one who somehow, from a distance, shares his world. I know of only one other who could do that: Gil Evans. Palle Mikkelborg walks in his footsteps.”