Date: Feb 6, 1970 – Dec 19, 1970 (recording)
Release: Columbia/Legacy #65135
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There’s something about the way this music hits me. It’s not as if I haven’t been exposed to lots of hard, loud music – in fact, compared to some of the stuff that now gets called “fusion,” Miles Davis’ version can often seem quaint on the surface. At the time of the shows documented on this 1970 set, he was playing with a new band (something he was doing more often than in any period of his life theretofore), and playing music that, while broached in the previous couple of years by himself and very few others, was rather unheard of to most music listeners of the time, and certainly the canonical jazz guard.

Davis’ ability to pluck players from all over has been fairly well absorbed into the arcane annals of jazz history, and something which I think rock listeners usually take some pride in, especially given that so many of the ones he plucked at that time were at least as much on a rocky road than a jazz one. Maybe that’s why the music they made was so unusual. Whereas the literal fusing of jazz and rock made journalists, critics and DJs have very little problem pigeonholing the sound of a hundred bands with virtually nothing in common except the way they were misunderstood or dismissed by various music experts and traditionalists.

Blood Sweat & Tears wins a Grammy in 1969 for “Spinning Wheel” and the rock press cheers their eccentricity and radical introduction of jazz into the pop vocabulary – Davis responds by making fun of the song’s hook on Bitches Brew. It turns out mixing rock and jazz wasn’t always revolutionary. Of course, the rock press redeemed themselves by sheer fickleness in the coming years by writing off bands like BS&T as lightweight clowns.

In the hands of a curious, inspired artist, the exact same convoluted fusion could work. Davis made the initial, relatively clumsy stabs on albums like Miles in the Sky and Filles de Kilimanjaro, and really got down to his genius business on In A Silent Way and Bitches Brew. The way he progressed, mastering one element at a time, from picking his players, experimenting with editing and tape loops in the studio, to jumping headfirst into the rock circus, playing in front of crowds more accustomed to “Suite Judy Blue Eyes” as an encore rather than “Miles Runs the Voodoo Down.” This modular advancement was at once subversive and marvelously efficient. In fact, the only other act in rock at the time to ever make such a successful leap in so short a time was The Beatles (in the mid 60s), and it shouldn’t come as a surprise that Davis was highly influenced by Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band.

And there really is something about the way this stuff hits me. Live-Evil was released in 1971, and details two sets at The Cellar Door, Washington, DC, in December of 1970, and two recording sessions completed earlier in the year. The session stuff generally finds Davis in full mystical mode, as if starting from “Nefertiti” and working his way through Messiaen and who knows what rootless, exploratory concept of what makes a jazz ballad. The live stuff is a different animal entirely, and is arguably as close as Davis ever got to actual integration of rock and funk into his music. The beats are there, and the bass is right up front, but there is something else.

On paper, you can see how the players would probably sound good: Davis, the ringleader, on his horn, often with the wah-wah and other assorted aggressive filtration; Keith Jarrett, a holdover from the Bitches Brew touring band, on electric piano; Jack DeJohnette and Airto Moreira as the rhythm makers, also from the Bitches Brew band; Gary Bartz on soprano and alto sax, and Michael Henderson, fresh from Aretha Franklin’s band, on bass. A pretty nice lineup, and then there was the last minute addition of one John McLaughlin on guitar – these performances were probably fated to be special, as this kind of apparently offhanded, yet rather essential, arrival (Bartz later said that the group had never played with McLaughlin before this date) generally signals good things to come.

The first music recorded for Live-Evil actually came from sessions just after Bitches Brew, in February 1970. “Gemini/Double Image” is a slow burning, blues-mourn featuring most of the people who appeared on the legendary studio album, and was actually written by Davis’ former keyboardist Joe Zawinul. McLaughlin begins the wail with some very Hendrix-inspired figures, and in fact some of this tune is reminiscent of the more bluesy offerings from Jimi Hendrix’s Band of Gypsys release. Miles plays something like a head, accompanied by various exotic percussion instruments, and a rock-steady, albeit intermittent drum pulse.

In the summer of 1970, Davis entered the studio with a different band (featuring Steve Grossman, Ron Carter and Brazilian transplant Hermeto Pascoal, in addition to most of Davis’ regular partners from the time), and commenced laying down more peaceful tracks than the earlier session. “Selim”, at just over two minutes, is the shortest piece of music on the album, but is also one of the most singularly beautiful. Davis plays the tune, pensive and vulnerable, and is joined by Pascoal’s disembodied vocal. It is reminiscent of the otherworldly, hymnal music from In A Silent Way. “Nem Um Talvez” is in the same vain, though slightly longer, and featuring some subtle, reverb-laden auxiliary percussion. Furthermore, the band recorded “Little Church” the following day, which uses what sounds like a church organ and Pascoal’s (who wrote the tune) whistling alongside Davis’s muted trumpet to enhance the mood a tad. After so many years, it’s still odd to hear the breadth of expression of which these guys were capable. Warm, more than a little spacey and perfectly realized. And this stuff never even made it to the road.

As engaging as the studio material was, it is the live music that gives this release its teeth. “Sivad” begins without any hint of hesitancy over playing fairly unprecedented music, and in fact jumps headfirst into the groove like no music had ever come before. DeJohnette and Henderson are major reasons why Davis’ music from the period retains its power and cutting edge: these men play like hawks, circling around the band, pouncing at all the appropriate (and many other) moments, and just playing LOUD. One aspect of this band, and most of Davis’ bands in the 70s is that they tended towards the rock dynamic even if they played with jazz instrumentation.

“Sivad” begins as hard funk, but soon transforms into a blues lament (again recalling Hendrix), stretching out the hazy vamp for Davis, McLaughlin and Jarrett to take a chorus or six. Conversely, “What I Say” just stays with hard funk. The groove is faster than the former tune, and is superficially less “evil”, though I would add that any tune featuring Davis’ screech hits can never really be all that nice. Henderson lays down an assured ostinato, and DeJohnette plays the rock beats like he invented the stuff. Jarrett wastes no time in launching a solo. The tune also features one of two drum solos by DeJohnette on the record, both of which are great examples of a mixture of abstract jazz exploration and sheer rock pummeling.

“Funky Tonk” is mostly famous for Jarrett’s amazing, unaccompanied solo in the middle of the tune, for which the audience – doubtlessly less familiar with the piano player than they were Davis – emphatically gives its approval. “Inamorata and Narration by Conrad Roberts”, despite featuring the rather stream of consciousness prose from Roberts referenced in the title, is still more prime hard fusion. It would be hard to imagine a band more on top of their game than this one was at the Cellar Door date, and given that Davis would go on to tinker with his lineups increasingly before his early retirement in 1976, that this group of people were playing this closely and passionately is practically a miracle.

And even beyond all the grooves and tunes and solos and mystical cul-de-sacs, there is still something about Live-Evil that hits me strangely. Most of Davis’ other live albums from the period are a lot spottier than this one, especially as he got closer to retirement. It could be that he hadn’t gotten so heavily into drugs and the “rock star” lifestyle by the time of this album that he couldn’t still have some semblance of control of his sound. Or, it could be that this band of players simply couldn’t go wrong, and were actually on the verge of becoming so powerful, they had to split off, one-by-one, to start their own journeys. But what I really think it is, what I really believe makes Live-Evil so great is its sheer aggressive spirit. Miles Davis didn’t claim to be the best bandleader or the best trumpet player, but he did lead by example, and his bands played harder than anyone else I can think of. Live-Evil is a testament to what can happen when a real leader and artist sets his group free to tear down barriers, and on these dates, they did like no others.

Date: July 1969
Release: Jazz Door #1294
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Recommending a Miles record is a lot like making a public service announcement: it’s a strong statement of the obvious that surprisingly large numbers of people still need to hear, like smoking kills or friends don’t let friends drive drunk.

Without question, this hard to find European CD is one of the most important historical documents in modern music. It represents nothing less than a missing link in the well documented musical evolution of Miles Davis. This flawlessly recorded live set captures Miles at a pivotal moment: July, 1969. It was a time when massive changes were rocking his world. Miles was in the process of leaving large parts of himself behind–the standards, the mute, the sheet music. Something deep was happening to him and his music, something monstrous was brewing, and the world would soon be shaken by Miles’ voodoo. To put it in historical terms, July 1969 found Miles and band playing at the Montreux Jazz Festival just a few weeks prior to embarking on the epic Bitches Brew sessions. These were the final days before the bomb.

At Montreux you could hear the metamorphosis taking place. In a seven-song continuous set lasting over an hour, Miles and band played profoundly under the influence of one another. Powerful new ideas can be heard filtering through the live stage en route to the studio. Miles’ live and studio directions had been fast diverging since he recorded In A Silent Way five months earlier. Fans of the old Miles still expected his concerts to cover familiar ground, and for years he obliged them, playing sets of mostly old standards while neglecting his newer material. This is not to say that his live gigs were conventional in the least. Anyone familiar with his masterful mid-60s performances at the Plugged Nickel Club knows that Miles never played the same song the same way twice, turning even the most tired standard into a vehicle for radical exploration. Nonetheless, Miles’ choice to limit his live set lists caused friction among his young band-mates, who resented the fact that the new sounds they were passionately creating in the studio were being kept off center stage. By the time July 1969 rolled around, Miles’ live and studio performances had stopped diverging and were suddenly coming together.

It’s About That Time features Miles playing the last live versions ever released of his two most classic standards, “Round About Midnight” and “Milestones”–both of which he turns completely on their heads. It also includes the earliest known performances of future Bitches Brew tracks, “Miles Runs The Voodoo Down” and “Sanctuary.” This combination of swan song standards and unveiled classics are what make the Montreux set so historically significant. This was the inspired moment of transition signalling a watershed in jazz. Even as he plays “Milestones” for the thousandth time, the music surges with excitement as it points the way into the future like a blazing neon sign. Wayne Shorter and expand the canvas, while drummer Jack DeJohnette and bassist Dave Holland round out the bottom end with heavy circular grooves.

By incorporating elements of rock, funk, and African modal textures, Miles was launching new directions in music. Although the end of the set is greeted by the kind of stormy applause you expect Miles always received, the unconventional style of his new music probably put off quite a few traditional jazz fans in the audience that day. Fortunately his electrifying sound attracted a new young crowd, who bought Bitches Brew in droves upon its release in March 1970, giving Miles his first gold record to reach the pop Top 40. While the Ken Burns “Jazz” documentary series completely dismissed this phase of Miles’ career as creatively barren, the fact is that Miles evolved with phenomenal momentum between 1969 to 1975, recording nearly a dozen exceptional records and innumerable bootlegs.

Like Bitches Brew itself, It’s About That Time cannot be broken down into individual songs. It exists as a living composition, with each part feeding off the other to build a surging, otherworldly musical organism of almost terrifying proportions. With the driving electric keyboards of Corea, the propulsive rhythms of DeJohnette-Holland, and the stratospheric runs of Shorter, Miles was being pushed hard by a group of powerful mother fuckers, almost all of whom were half his age. Miles sampled the cosmic funk and rock in the ether around him, processed it, and poured it back on the world through his soulful trumpet. Miles triumphs as the sorcerer, hanging over the music, conjuring mood and fire from a wildly swirling pot of sounds. He proved that man too can give birth.

Date: 1968
Release: Columbia/Legacy #65362
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I never waited as impatiently for a boxed set to be released as I did for this one. I assumed that the only thing that could possibly be better than In A Silent Way was The Complete In A Silent Way Sessions, because there would be so much more of it. Now that I have it all to enjoy (!), I’m finally able to appreciate the full magnitude of the original release of In A Silent Way. After withstanding three decades of overplay, In A Silent Way remains a mysterious, urgently necessary, life-affirming masterpiece that stands outside anything Miles or anybody else has ever recorded. When I first got the box, I had the insane expectation that I was about to hear some unreleased music on par with the original album. Looking back, I don’t know how I could even think such a thing was possible. Maybe it’s because I vividly imagine a bunch of record label executives huddled together late at night in smoke filled rooms listening to the best music ever while secretly conspiring to keep it eternally locked in the vaults for their own sinister pleasure. But whether or not such theories hold their water, I have come to accept the old single-disc version of In A Silent Way for what it has always been: COMPLETE.

The full and unedited In A Silent Way session—40 minutes of music recorded on February 18, 1969—attests to the producing genius of Teo Macero. As the raw session tapes remained unreleased for years, their contents were the subject of intense speculation and conjecture. Some claimed that Miles had only taped 27-minutes of music that day, forcing Macero to heavily edit the session in order to fill the space of an album. Others insisted that Macero had overproduced the album, wheedling down a double-album’s worth of material to make a single one, denying listeners the complete and unexpurgated brilliance of Miles’ music.

With the release of The Complete In A Silent Way Sessions, featuring “all that was committed to tape on that day,” these assertions have given way to the truth. Just as Michael Jackson had his Quincy Jones and the Beatles had their George Martin, Miles too had his perfect creative foil in producer Teo Macero. This is made clear when one hears the previously unissued and uncut performances from the February 18 In A Silent Way session. While it is fascinating to hear the music in its organic form, it lacks the focus and power of the edited material found on the album. It took a force like Teo to splice together a cohesive album out of so many inspired pieces. Not only did Teo have the balls to stand up to Miles on creative decisions, he had the right. And Miles knew it.

For Miles was much more than a great musician, he was a great leader, and one of the hallmarks of great leadership is the ability to share power with those who deserve it. Miles had an almost supernatural ability to sense talent in others. Throughout his life, he surrounded himself with extraordinary people who challenged him creatively, expanding and extending his musical powers, pushing him in new directions. A mentor to so many talented musicians, Miles remained fresh because he never stopped growing, always absorbing what those around him had to offer.

He profoundly understood that no man is wise enough by himself. And while his ego rebelled against any producer messing with his music, Miles knew that incredibly great records were borne out of the conflict and compromise of his relationship with Teo. So with a watchful eye and wary ear, Miles kept Teo around, letting him do his thing, tightening the leash when necessary. With Miles’ direction, Teo chopped the hell out of the In A Silent Way tapes, substantially rearranging what was actually played in the studio on that February day. A new musical collage emerged from Miles’ rough draft of genius. The finished whole was greater than the raw sum its parts.

Miles was going through exciting musical changes in 1968, hearing and playing things which were leading him into the future and into In A Silent Way. His playing and lifestyle were being influenced by a wave of new sounds and ideas, and he was responding deeply to the music of James Brown, Sly Stone, and Jimi Hendrix. Having already pushed acoustic jazz to the limits with his mid-Sixties quintet, Miles metamorphosed the new music around and within him, creating a work of enduring magnificence. On the title track, Miles threw away Joe Zawinul’s chord sheets, transforming the keyboardist’s original melody of “In A Silent Way” into a sublime electric mantra that was overwhelmingly beautiful and fresh. On “Shhh/Peaceful,” Dave Holland’s simple bass line and John McLaughlin’s drone-like guitar intertwine with Tony Williams driving hi-hat rhythms to create a circularly repeating groove. The three pianos of Hancock, Corea, and Zawinul play as extensions of one another, perfectly washing across the spaces left open in the rhythm. Miles trumpet crosses the language barrier, articulating emotions that can’t be put into words.

Egos gave way to unity in these miraculous sessions that spaned a six-month period from 1968-69. Without exception, the sense one gets from hearing the unfiltered music on The Complete In A Silent Way Sessions is that Miles and his partners had exceeded themselves, pushing beyond what they’d previously known as possible, discovering something something alive and electric, something spiritual—making it physical, making it stick.

In A Silent Way represents one of the most important self-declarations of artistic independence to ever go down in jazz history. This was not “jazz” aimed at its traditional audience, but rather a monstrous new thing that, once unleashed, would bring about some unexpected changes to music in general. While The Complete In A Silent Way Sessions offers a lot of incredibly great new music to enjoy, the original In A Silent Way has the singular power to transport the listener to heavenly places.

Date: Jun 1, 1972 – Jun 6, 1972 (recording)
Release: Columbia/Legacy #63980
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An electrified and multidimensional burst of ass-shaking funk straight from the master himself. If Sly Stone and Jimi Hendrix took a space ship to India together, they very well might have come up with something approximating On The Corner.

This utterly unique and unprecedented recording was savaged by a lot of the critics of its day. They blasted Miles for creating a new “anti-jazz” that fundamentally violated the genre’s integrity. Reviled as the jazz anti-Christ, his playing on this recording was indeed demonic. His trumpet spits out wah-wah distorted licks of fire and nastiness, and he grinds on the organ like it was a cheap date. He masterfully tangles and intertwines the varied sounds of the sitar, conga, electric guitar, tabla, organ, and electric bass to create thickly-layered rhythms of dazzling complexity. He throws in some heavy licks on top of it all, hitting hard with quick and punchy bursts from his horn that make the groove throb.

This explosive session is anything but harmless, as it still remains the album that the purists most love to hate. Brimming with the risky inventiveness of untested ideas, Miles pushed the envelope a little too far for many of the less visionary critics with On The Corner. If Bitches Brew was the first bombshell Miles dropped on the jazz world, this surely was the second. Still, with both recordings, Miles showed why its better to burn as a devil in the fire than rot as an angel in the wings.

Date: August 19, 1969 – February 6, 1970
Release: COLUMBIA #65570
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No other musician in the 20th Century explored the possibilities of music as fiercely as trumpeter and bandleader Miles Davis. He frustrated critics and fans alike as he opened himself up to unexpected directions in musical thinking while continuously shaping and refining his remarkable skills on trumpet. Critics tried and tried to squeeze his musical journeys into a box called “jazz,” but Miles would have none of it. And then, in August of 1969, Miles decided he’d put all of us in an impenetrable box and dare us to break out.

Suddenly she was aware of her heart beating rapidly within the cage of her ribs. Had it stopped before? What had made it start again? The tingling in her arms and legs grew stronger, and suddenly she felt movement. This movement, she felt, must be the turning of the earth, rotating on its axis, traveling its elliptic course around the sun. And this feeling of moving with the earth was somewhat like the feeling of being in the ocean, out in the ocean beyond this rising and falling of the breakers, lying on the moving water, pulsing gently with the swells, and feeling the gentle, inexorable tug of the moon. I am asleep; I am dreaming, she thought. I’m having a nightmare. I want to wake up. Let me wake up. ‘Well!’ Charles Wallace’s voice said. ‘That was quite a trip! I do think you might have warned us.’

Madeleine L’Engle, A Wrinkle in Time

While Miles did warn us with the electronic dabblings of his mid-sixties quintet and In A Silent Way, there is really no way to be prepared for the complete realignment of one’s musical schematic that is Bitches Brew. To even begin to understand what was created in these sessions, we need to get a little perspective on what led up to them: a phenomenally talented composer and trumpet player; a true musical seeker who squeezed every last morsel of musical information out of Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, Bud Powell, Gil Evans, Charles Mingus, John Coltrane; a jazz cat for hire who barely clawed his way out of heroin’s grip; a man who influenced the evolution of an art form with his astonishing collaborations on recordings like ‘Round Midnight, Milestones, Miles Ahead, Sketches of Spain, Kind of Blue and In A Silent Way among many others arrives at the vortex of Jimi Hendrix and James Brown surrounded, as he’d always been, by the visionary musicians of the times: Herbie Hancock, Joe Zawinul, Chick Corea, Bennie Maupin, Wayne Shorter, Dave Holland, John McLaughlin – just a few of who would participate in Bitches Brew.

Clearly, Miles Davis was at the precipice of something massive, something almost unsettling in its hugeness. Sure enough, this sprawling team of talent would create with Miles the most impenetrable, incendiary, and finally revelatory musical experiment of his lifetime.

Meg gasped. It wasn’t that Calvin wasn’t there and then that he was. It wasn’t that part of him came first and then the rest of him followed, like a hand and then an arm, an eye and then a nose. It was a sort of shimmering, a looking at Calvin through water, through smoke, through fire, and then there he was, solid and reassuring.

When listening to the music of Bitches Brew and The Complete Bitches Brew Sessions, space and time tremble, quiver, and become elastic. One moment, you’re traveling rapidly, furiously backward toward the Big Bang- the next, you’ve stopped and hang suspended, a million light years from nowhere, curling dangerously across some cosmic bump. Then, all at once, you’re surging forth, speed increasing, any ability to gauge time lost in the burn, spinning and tumbling upward, downward, outward. Images – the elapsed time of an orchid in bloom, pixilated fast-motion fragments of urban decay – careen, stop, rewind at another speed, only to flicker forth cautiously. There is a feeling of expanding, contracting, implosion, stillness. The rules of physics have become open to interpretation. The grid upon which the universe is mapped ripples slightly – patterns shift. Towering creatures of color and light groan and sway. The thread between the first cell and the end of time coils and uncoils wildly like a snapped powerline in a hurricane, twisting and spewing energy. . .

What was created in this music – in its probing, tentative tempo, its evolving rhythms, its blasts and blurts and belches of melody – was something strangely familiar yet entirely original, entirely its own thing. What coalesced as these ten to twenty musicians fed frenzy-like off the brash impulses of one another was a music that literally lifted itself away from their conscious control and began making its own decisions. At times fearsome, others breathtaking, Bitches Brew is music as liberated organism, surging and soaring, gorgeous and terrifying, taking you dark and fantastical places to which only it holds the map.

“If you’ve hurt Meg, any of you-” Calvin started, but suddenly Meg felt a violent push and a shattering as though she had been thrust through a wall of glass.

Much like the music contained within it, this box set feels mythical, a lot like some otherworldly text unearthed halfway across the cosmos. The construction of the 148-page book along with the art and the graphic design throughout is intensely aesthetic. The photographs of Miles and the essay by Carlos Santana are the jewels of the package. One complaint is that the track information is buried amidst the many pages and clumsily found – I recommend photocopying those pages, drawing or painting on the copies while listening to the music, and then posting them someplace accessible. And while Miles biographer Quincy Troupe’s expansive 70-page essay is flush with compelling insights, ranging from the influence of Jimi Hendrix priestess Betty Mabry on Miles’ flow to the significant use of overdubbing and other new postproduction techniques, his lengthy track-by-track analysis feels belabored and seems to miss the point.

Suffice it to say that much of the previously unreleased material travels along similar time wrinkles, some of it leaving unanswered questions for the listener to forever puzzle over. That’s both the punishment and the reward. The haunting riddles of Bitches Brew rip at us and taunt us – however, the willingness to engage those riddles and ghosts, fully and with heart, produces thevisceral joy that can shatter the box Miles put us in. That joy, while exhausting and unnerving, is his legacy and his gift to us.