Jazz
Bivak Records · 6 March 2026
The title is the joke and the programme: “Sorry, Miles!” gathers ten tracks split between pieces Miles Davis took credit for without having written them and originals by the guitarist Libor Šmoldas, written in the same vocabulary. There’s “Tune Up”, “Four” and the “Solar” that appears here as “Sonny (Solar)”, all three with authorship that has been disputed for decades, and there’s “Richard’s Regret”, a ballad built almost like a fugue and aimed at the Richard Carpenter who put his name on “Walkin’”. The quartet recorded in Svárov on 6 and 7 November 2025: Šmoldas on guitar, Mikuláš Pokorný on piano, Tomáš Bároš on double bass and Jesse Simpson on drums. The title track sets the pace with a vintage post-bop feel that looks to Davis’s second great quintet, and what holds the album together is the dialogue between guitar and piano, in “Dig” and “Four” above all, where Šmoldas and Pokorný share out the line instead of taking turns as soloists.
Šmoldas, born in 1982, has twelve albums as a leader and has played with George Mraz, Sam Yahel, Bobby Watson and Adam Nussbaum: competence isn’t where the doubt lies.
The doubt is that the premise reads better than it sounds. Forty-four minutes for ten tunes leaves the pieces short, and the originals — “Square Head”, “Prima Dancers” — move in the same register as the covers, so the question underneath, who wrote what, stays in the liner notes and never changes the playing. Where it does get through is “Richard’s Regret”: the tune sounds like an amends, slow and reluctant, and it’s the only place on the record where the music says what the title says.
Rating: 7.4/10
Text by Aina Torrents