Tune Up
composition written by Eddie Vinson and popularized by Miles Davis
"Tune Up" or "Tune-Up" is a composition by Eddie Vinson, but is traditionally credited to Miles Davis, who first recorded and popularized it. It has become a jazz standard.
Background and history
"Tune Up" was first recorded on May 19, 1953, with John Lewis on piano, and first appeared on the Miles Davis album Blue Haze, released in 1956, for the Prestige label. John Coltrane was a member of both Vinson's band in the late 1940s and the Miles Davis Quintet and performed the tune on numerous occasions while with Davis.
According to Jack Chamber in his book Milestones: The Music in Times of Miles Davis, both "Four" and "Tune Up" were always credited to Davis for decades, and nobody objected to the false crediting until decades later. Vinson was a blues singer at the time and had no use for the tune. Davis is documented to have also recorded the tune on November 12, 1956, and November 30, 1957, both while in Paris. Wes Montgomery recorded it in October 1960 for his album Movin' Along, and three takes of the tune appeared on his 1963 album Fusion! Wes Montgomery with Strings.
Composition
The tune is typically played in the key of D major, though also modulates through the tonal centres of C major and Bb major.
This brief starts where responsible research should: with the source description of “Tune Up” as composition written by Eddie Vinson and popularized by Miles Davis. Everything that follows is an evidence route, not borrowed authority.
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The subject matters to the general reference register because the source frames it as composition written by Eddie Vinson and popularized by Miles Davis. Its deeper value depends on whether names, dates, institutions and citations support that framing.
The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jun 28, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q112788281. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1953, 1956, 1957 and 1960.
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This entry incorporates text from “Tune Up” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.