miles davis's second quintet

free jazz and fusion may not have been nearly as significant causes to the death of jazz as inside jazz being PERFECTED by the 50s and 60s greats was. I understand this is uncharacteristic of me to say. discuss.

josh, which of these albums should i buy first? tower had them all for 7.99 at one point!

GO!

'stuff' on miles in the sky does this weird thing where the rock rhythm keeps coming in waves because they mess with it.

The aforementioned Filles de Kilimanjaro is technically not completely the second quintet--but that aside, is my favorite and one I most listen to all the way through (somewhat surprising, since it is stylistically closest to Miles in the Sky). "Frelon Brun" is just terrific.

Tower has a fantastic sale going on right now. The 'contemporary classical' section, for instance has albums at 25% off (and since i'm a student, there's 10% extra off). I think its finishing so go there.

"We were actually tampering with something called DNA in music in a song. Each song has its DNA. So you just do the DNA and not the whole song. You do the characteristics. You say, 'Okay, I will do the ear of the face, I will do the left side of the face. You do the right side of the face.'"

Herbie Hancock:

"I learned how to keep a structure in mind and play changes so loosely that you can play for some time without people knowing whether the structure is played or not, but then hit on certain points to indicate that you have been playing the structure all the time. When you hear those points being played, you just say, 'Wow, It's like the Invisible Man. You see him here and then you don't. Then all of a sudden you see him over there and then you see him over here.' And it indicates that it's been happening all the time."

John Szwed:

"During this time, Miles was talking about what he no longer wanted to do--no more 'songs' or chords, no fixed bar lengths or phrases. Yet he was not ready to go as far as some free jazz musicians had in attempting to abandon harmonic structure totally, and he was certainly not ready to give up on rhythmic pulse. He talked instead of 'controlled freedom.' It was left to Herbie Hancock to elaborate:

'What I was trying to do and what I feel we were trying to do was to combine--take these influences that were happening to all of us at that time and amalgamate them, personalize them in such a way that when people were hearing us, they were hearing the avant-garde on one hand, and they were hearing the history of jazz that led up to it on the other hand--because Miles was that history. He was that link. We were sort of walking a tightrope with the kind of experimenting we were doing in music, not total experimentation, but we used to call it 'controlled freedom.'"

That pretty much sums up why this is possibly my favorite Miles era. I've become particularly partial to the Plugged Nickel set. Although they're playing standards, they're improvising more than on any of the studio albums. I don't really know most of the original tunes they're doing very well, but basically it seems like they just play the theme at the beginning ultra-quick, and then they take off... they do the tunes fast and noisy; they do them slow and thoughtful too. They'll do "I Fall in Love Too Easily," and it sounds like Frank Sinatra and Ornette Coleman. You have to really listen to this music. It sounds nice in the background, of course, but you don't really hear what they're doing unless you're playing close attention to each twist and turn, because it changes all the time. It makes me wish I actually knew something about music, technically speaking, cos like, these guys are obviously operating at some level way beyond my comprehension...

(okay, not really.)

my copy of filles would seem to be 2800 miles away, so no dice.

julio, that'd be great if i had any money. at all. like, a dime.

I had almost the exact same reaction to that record. It seems only to have been a stepping stone for Miles and his band to get to IASW and BB. Which gives me a thread idea.

it's the only miles record my dad seems to like (i haven't tried them all but if he showed a liking dark magus i would buy everyone on ilx a car)

I have the Quintet box (fantastic) so I never hear them as discrete albums. But I know I like all the tracks on Miles in the Sky. Come on, Black Comedy? That's them at the extreme of the pre-electric style.

The "second quartet" produced much more satisfying music but I prefer them in the studio. Of course when you listen to the Plugged Nickel stuff you go wow, these are among the most amazing performances given by any band in jazz history, and you ARE staggered by the empathy and the invention. But at the same time it's kind of a self-conscious act of connoisseurship or something, a somewhat abstract or cerebral pleasure (which it wouldn't have been if you'd actually been THERE of course). The studio stuff seems to offer a better balance between the more cerebral side and just glorying in the sound of the band.

I don't get either half of this.

'dreariness', dom! !!

I'd agree that most of these can be seen as stepping stones to something else, so it doesn't seem like any could be discounted as being MERELY stepping stones. since I think bitches brew is a pinnacle of all music then you might try convincing me that silent way is a stepping stone, but I think those two are just too different. it's as if there's a discontinuity there.

Favorite electric studio: Get Up With It (although Jack Johnson is a "better," more well-rounded record, the peaks on this one--He Loved Him Madly, Rated X, Calypso Frelimo--are just too good)

Favorite electric live: Harder cos there are so many; I think the live electric albums are more important than studio too (I just read John Szwed's new Miles bio and he has all this great stuff on the way Miles led the band at this time), but torn between Live/Evil and Pangaea.

Bitches Brew: Flawed masterpiece

(You should check "It's About That Time: Live at the Filmore East" from 1970, which came out a year or two ago--it has smoking versions of quite a few Bitches tracks, I think I prefer them live)

currently wiggling my hips to "frelon brun"

7 Years pass :(

got his autobiography for my birthday yesterday.
really looking forward to getting into that.
no doubt it will induce a need to get albums from this era (Smiles, and Sky are already high on the agenda) as i'm currently obsessing over IASW through to Get Up With It.

'Circle in the Round'- the track - has been living on the turntable: at the moment I can't think of anyhting else I know that is even a bit like it. As if music - generally - went somewhere other than where it did and this was a memory of that counter-earth.

holy shit how had i never even heard of circle in the round

7 Years pass :(

― Emily's Cheese, Tuesday, February 2, 2010 9:57 AM (6 days ago) Bookmark

in the intervening time there was also

What the hell is going on with Miles' Second Great Quintet?

free jazz and fusion may not have been nearly as significant causes to the death of jazz as inside jazz being PERFECTED by the 50s and 60s greats was. ... discuss.

― Josh (Josh), Wednesday, August 28, 2002 7:01 PM (7 years ago) Bookmark

This is the sort of subjective music historiography I always buy into - it sounds intuitively right, even necessary, that jazz had nowhere left to go but out. (It's like Terry Eagleton's take on Middlemarch - that the perfection of modernism, briefly encapsulating while exposing the tensions of the time, spelled its own demise and compelled postmodernism.) I think I fall for this style of thought because it forms an attractive model of innovation that in my mind resembles a song structure: first the head is played through (Perfection) followed by the solo (Freedom/Innovation building on and deforming and reforming Perfection), so when the head comes back your perception of it's been altered by what you heard in between. Is it historically accurate though? I mean, one long view would be that the perfection of big band necessitated the revolution brought on by bebop, in which case the subsequent perfection/free jazz destruction merely repeated the same ebb and flow. Which if so, that would make such experimentation/cultural radicalism seem less a disruption, more a natural pattern; evolution instead of revolution. But I didn't think that, at the time, these new forms were seen as holistic treatments for the perfection that ailed jazz. In over my head here, hoping jazzheads will chime.

On this note seems to me that one thing that makes Miles such an incredible historic figure (in not just jazz but in any avant-garde cultural development anywhere) is that he could easily be Example #1 of both Perfection and Deviation; the ultimate icon who became the ultimate iconoclast. It's like his attainment and development and personal experience of so much Perfection left him chafing with the "nowhere to go but out" drive. Which I guess made this quintet as well situated as anyone to go on to perfect a template for how to deviate from the norm, crafting its own new subgenere as a means to dismantling received jazz form (described as well as possible in those great pull quotes Williams pulled upthread).

The quotes from Shorter and Hancock above and your piece, dad a, made me think of Adorno's essay on Beethoven's 'late style':

'The maturity of the late works of significant artists does not resemble the kind one finds in fruit. They are for the most part, not round, but furrowed, even ravaged. Devoid of sweetness, bitter and spiny, they do not surrender themselves to mere delectation. They lack all the harmony that the classicist aesthetic is in the habit of demanding from art, and they show more traces of history than growth.......

And later:

'The power of subjectivity in the late works of art is the irascible gesture which takes leave of the works themselves. It breaks their bonds, not in order to express itself, but in order, expressionless, to cast off the appearance of art. Of the works themselves, it leaves only fragments behind, and communicates itself, like a cipher, only through the blank spaces from which it has disengaged itself....'

it's a stretch to call Davis's second quintet 'late' - he was in his forties - but there are few enough popular artist with any distinct periods, never mind an eary and a late. The communicating through 'blank spaces' fits well enough with Hancock's talk of playing the changes so loosely that poeple didn't know if the structure was there or not. I like the notion of, not an excess of subjectivity, but an absence, a consciousness of the opposition and eventual triumph (but then decay) of the object...

http://bigozine2.com/roio/?p=405

xpost OK, I think in your first Adorno quote the idea is that late style equals (or should equal) formidable, difficult music. Music as a totality that can only be understood on its own terms, challenging you listeners to appreciate it on its own terms & part of that challenge is figuring out how to understand it in the first place. This Davis quintet doesn't give you anywhere near jazz's by-then-standard points of access and form. It's like you're used to walking on concrete sidewalks, then the next day they're all pulsing membranes. But the challenge isn't just to the audience, it's to the musicans themselves -- how do you go about building a membrane sidewalk? I'm impressed whenever artists continue to challenge themselves (and then as a result, the audience) late in life, instead of resting on convention and settled expectations. I feel like that quote could be Scott Walker's credo lately, for instance. Creative maturity doesn't need to go that route though. An equally valid line is that what maturity gives artists is the skill to strip away any vestige of BS and just express what matters. Nice rumination on late works here: http://www.believermag.com/issues/201002/?read=article_cohen. To which I'd add Raymond Carver's description of his own starkest stylistic stage: "cutting everything down to the marrow, not just the bone." On these records Davis does that too. Everything's being stripped away until the stripping away is all that's left. That's where your second Adorno quote comes in, and definitely rings true to my sense of these records. He empties the landscape of self-expression (jazz's animating force) and leaves you looking for hints, glimpses, any sort of purchase. But another way of saying it would be that he expresses nothing but self: that the alien, skeletal version of song form he created here is his own self-portrait as alien skeleton.

Yeah... the Adorno essay is formidably dense, and it doesn't help that i don't really know the music he's talking about. There's another interesting bit where he talks about how, in the late works, Beethoven isn't afraid to be obvious, even crude: 'often convention appears in a form that is bald, undisguised, untransfromed' - instead of dressing it up, the cliche is just there, almost daring you to dismiss it.

'Circle in the Round' as i said above, has be a source of obsession for a few days now, and the baldness of the guitar part has no counterpart in any jazz I can think of: Jazz guitar is meant to be pianistic, or else to play lightening fast horn lines - here its like crudely tuned percussion and it never goes away.....

http://images.amazon.com/images/G/01/richmedia/images/cover.gif

lol, i guess that did not work:
In the 1960s Miles Davis toured Europe several times with some of the greatest bands he ever led. As the first title in a projected series of boxed sets Sony/Legacy introduces MILES DAVIS QUINTET - Live In Europe 1967 - The Bootleg Series Vol.1 featuring Miles Davis Second Great Quintet featuring WAYNE SHORTER, HERBIE HANCOCK, RON CARTER and TONY WILLIAMS -- arguably the single greatest small group ensemble in jazz history.

The recordings from their 1967 European tour are some of the only existing documentation of the band performing compositions from the extraordinary series of studio albums they made between 1965-1967 -- E.S.P., Miles Smiles, Sorcerer and Nefertiti. Now fans can hear live versions of Agitation (from E.S.P.), Footprints" and "Gingerbread Boy ( from Miles Smiles), Masquelero" (from Sorcerer ) and Riot" (from Nefertiti); PLUS, Miles revisits some of the earlier classics he had been performing for years -- Round Midnight , On Green Dolphin Street , I Fall In Love Too Easily and No Blues -- all in strikingly different interpretations from the original studio versions. Seeing this band in action only further emphasizes their near supernatural rapport!

DVD Track listing:1. Agitation, 2. Footprints, 3. I Fall In Love Too Easily, 4. Walkin , 5. Gingerbread Boy, 6. The Theme, 7. Agitation, 8. Footprints
9. Round Midnight, 10. Gingerbread Boy, 11. The Theme

http://www.amazon.com/LIVE-Europe-1967-Bootleg-Vol/dp/B005ARYEY6/ref=pd_sim_m_21

oooh

yeah, i thought it was some sketch import (there are a ton of them) at first, but this is a sony release.

here's the stream of this new box set http://www.npr.org/2011/09/11/140229346/first-listen-miles-davis-live-in-europe-1967-the-bootleg-series-vol-1
excited, this is some of my fave second quintet stuff -- prefer it to the plugged nickel I think.

It's definitely more consistently frantic than the Plugged Nickel stuff, and Miles' chops are in better shape. I think at the time of the Plugged Nickel dates he was coming off a period of not having played in a while, as he was recuperating from an ailment or three.

yeah i think that's exactly it -- miles sounds better on these recordings. everyone else sounds great on the plugged nickel shows, but here he's really going for broke. things are a little more concise on the european recordings, too.

Cool, listening now. Kinda terrible sound, at least for Ron Carter fans.

Pre-ordered this a while back; can't wait to hear it.

dunno, maybe i'm used to the actual bootlegs, but the sound quality is great to my ears. radio bcasts have floated around forever, but it's nice to have them cleaned up.
budget price too.

wonder if they are actually planning on putting out more of these bootleg series'?

A Sony press release said they'll be releasing "at least" one of these sets per year.

I have a boot DVD of one of these shows, and it's unbelievable. Some of my favorite playing by Hancock and Williams.

ok, I'll amend that -- the sound is ok, but Carter is not well served by the mix. "Round Midnight" just started and he's suddenly there after being almost inaudible in the first two tracks.

oh nice, wonder what else will be in the series? seems like they'd do one from coltrane's final 1960 tour w/ miles. probably some of the electric era...

There have been rumors about a (large) 1973-75 live box. Hopefully that's in the works.

was kinda hoping that Tokyo 1975 would be the last metal box for Miles, but it looks like that's not to be ...

agreed that if this new series goes for a while, they'll eventually do a 73-75 box, which would be awesome

yeah, i would be into that for sure. i was listening to some of the (few) post-Japan 1975 shows recently, and they're great, kind of a different vibe than the Japanese shows. Not great recordings, would be nice if there were soundboards in Columbia's vaults.

to bring this back to the 2nd quintet - thanks all for the heads-up on the upcoming 1967 box, i hadn't known about it. pretty sure i have all those shows as bootlegs, but having decent sound will be great. late sixties live Miles is something i never really get tired of.

agreed w/r/t ron carter being lost - but some of that may be due to the internet stream. at least i'm hoping.

yeah, might be the stream -- though bassists being lost in the live setting in this era is pretty standard, i think.

unfortunately true!

ok, I'll amend that -- the sound is ok, but Carter is not well served by the mix. "Round Midnight" just started and he's suddenly there after being almost inaudible in the first two tracks.

― Antonio Carlos Broheem (WmC), Monday, September 12, 2011 12:23 PM (1 hour ago) Bookmark

I think this is due to the fact that these shows were mixed live to 2-track. Carter's sudden appearance on "'Round Midnight" was probably the engineer saying, "OK, what does this fader do...ah, there's the bass!"

As that stream went on, it became clear that that was the case. The playing on that Antwerp show is blistering, btw, esp Hancock.

yeah this really sounds wonderful --"late sixties live Miles is something i never really get tired of" otm. such an exciting band.

Great writeup of 1967 in the NYT

Thought I'd pass these along in thanks for the Rhode Island show linked upthread - both of these are fantastic shows

Antwerpen Oct 28 1967

Berlin November 4 1967

looks like disc 1 of the Sony 1967 is the Antwerp show

From Sony:

"To continue with the year of Miles Davis we have another installment of the successful Bootleg Series set for release on October 14th. Miles Davis Quintet: Freedom Jazz Dance: The Bootleg Series, Vol 5 focuses on the music recorded by the 2nd Great Quintet of Miles Davis from 1965 to 1968. The 3CD set features studio sessions of key tracks from the albums recorded in that time frame and includes dialogue between Miles and the rest of the quintet. Fans will get to experience the evolution of these songs and then hear the master take as well. This year is also the 50th Anniversary of Miles Smiles which makes up a big portion of this release."
2nd Great Quintet of Miles Davis:
Miles Davis - Trumpet
Ron Carter - Bass
Herbie Hancock - Piano
Wayne Shorter - Saxophone
Tony Williams - Drums
TRACK LIST
Disc 1:
1. Freedom Jazz Dance (session reel) 23:15
2. Freedom Jazz Dance (master take) 7:14
3. Circle (session reel) 11:45
4. Circle (take 5 – closing theme used on master take) 5:23
5. Circle (take 6 – released master take excluding closing theme) 5:48
6. Dolores (session reel) 5:17
7. Dolores (master take) 6:23
Disc 2:
1. Orbits (session reel) 14:44
2. Orbits (master take) 4:41
3. Footprints (session reel) 5:48
4. Footprints (master take) 9:52
5. Gingerbread Boy (session reel) 3:44
6. Gingerbread Boy (master take) 7:45
7. Nefertiti (session reel) 11:05
8. Nefertiti (master take) 8:04
Disc 3:
1. Fall (session reel) 19:44
2. Fall (master take) 6:40
3. Water Babies (session reel) 8:33
4. Water Babies (master take) 5:09
5. Masqualero (alternate take/take 3) 7:59
6. Country Son (rhythm section rehearsal) 7:43
7. Blues In F (My Ding) 7:29
8. Your Eight (Miles Speaks) 0:06
** All session tracks are previously unreleased**

huh! that's unexpected. but i love this period, so i will definitely be interested to hear it.

Yeah, really curious about the "Nefertiti" session reel in particular. Still don't know why Sony is (apparently) balking at releasing a '70s live Japan box, but yeah, this'll be great anyway.

I love this period, and the bootleg series has been great so far -- but this kind of seems like the tracks that would ordinarily just be bonuses on the albums.

Enh, this is the first one in the Bootleg series for him that I'm not really interested in at all.

Yeah wait, this doesn't contain the lost version of 'Nefertiti' with solos, does it? I thought that was...lost.

I'm having trouble digging up confirmation, but I clearly remember hearing about how this great first take was lost because of a recording issue, and rather than try to recapture it, they just decided to play the theme over and over again. Maybe it was in the autobio or the liner notes?

iirc, Hancock talked about the "lost" first take in the liner notes of The Complete [sic] Studio Recordings of The Miles Davis Quintet 1965–1968.

I like those quintet albums a lot (well, except for Miles in the Sky), but I agree with Dominique that this just seems like stuff that should have been used on deluxe editions of the original albums.

I didn't like the last volume in the Bootleg Series much, either. Some of the material (particularly the live stuff from 1966 and 1967) was killer, but the way it jumped from decade to decade seemed to go against what the series had been to that point. I really want multi-disc live sets from the 1971 (Bartz/Jarrett/Henderson/Chancler), 1972 (Liebman/Lucas/Henderson/Foster/Badal Roy), and 1973-75 bands way more than I need more vault scrapings from the quintet.

Bought this because I am a whore, and yeah, nice while it's playing, but pretty unremarkable overall.