Nardis is an instrumental jazz composition credited to Miles Davis and written in 1958 during his modal period. It was first performed by the Julian "Cannonball" Adderley Quintet on the Riverside album Portrait of Cannonball, recorded in July 1958, with Bill Evans as sideman. Davis was not fully satisfied with the overall performance, though he said Evans was the only one who played it the way he wanted.
The piece is in a 32-bar AABA form in E minor. Its melody draws on the Phrygian dominant and minor Gypsy (double harmonic) scales, as Davis had done in Sketches of Spain. Its title and authorship are debated: some musicians, including Richie Beirach, argue that Bill Evans wrote it, but that claim rests on weak evidence. Evans made the piece closely his own from the 1960s onward, recording it on many albums, and it became a widely recorded jazz standard.
