The 1969 “lost quintet” (Shorter, Corea, Holland, and DeJohnette) was the pivot point on which Miles’ career would turn. Sure, the ‘70-‘72 groups were funkier and the gigantic ‘73-’75 ensembles took abstraction to its limits, but the ’69 quintet was the first and only to delicately balance the frantic bop of Miles’ pre-electric period with the heady psychedelia of Bitches Brew. 

1969 was the year Miles broke free from his previous self – setting off on one of the most thrilling career stretches in modern music. Diving headfirst into the unknown, birthing entirely new genres and sending music off on side quests that are chased to this day. 

The Miles Davis sextet began 1971 much in the same way it closed out the previous year: with a steady, albeit scarcely documented run of live performances. And though 1971 saw the release of the Tribute to Jack Johnson LP in February and Live/Evil in November, Miles made no studio recordings for the first time since 1964, and there’s just one official live release documenting this pivotal year. 

Despite the paltry “official” record, there remains plenty of evidence of the exceptional music Miles’ live band produced in 1971.

While dicey health kept Miles from the road throughout much of 1972, his studio activity during the spring and summer was a revelation, producing the still-futuristic On the Corner album, providing much of the meat for his Big Fun and Get Up with ItLPs, and collected in part on the Complete On the Corner Sessions box. 

Much like his 1970 sessions documented on the Complete Jack Johnson Sessions set, Miles’ 1972 studio ensemble featured a rotating cast of familiar faces (Herbie Hancock, Chick Corea, Jack DeJohnette, Michael Henderson, Keith Jarrett, Mtume and others) and fresh blood (guitarist Reggie Lucas, Khalil Balakrishna on electric sitar, organist Cedric Lawson, drummer Al Foster, and tabla player Badal Roy). This time though, Miles took every member of his final 1972 studio session on the road – beginning the mercurial practice of smearing the line between his studio and live output.

Even with Henderson and Mtume the lone holdovers from his 1971 working group, the music Miles’ band produced when it returned to the road in September 1972 is astonishingly different from what poured from the stage just a year prior. The impetus has been dissected by the more qualified, and frankly, genre signposts serve no use – this music is the equivalent of magma erupting from a crack in the earth. Borne seemingly out of nowhere, it simply exists. The first fissure occurred on the final night of the 1972 Ann Arbor Blues & Jazz festival.

Miles Davis reached both a personal and critical nadir in the fall of 1972. Returning to New York following a brief but thrilling tour with a revamped nine-piece ensemble, he totaled his Lamborghini Muira and broke both legs in a gruesome, cocaine-strewn accident on the West Side Highway. The same week, his On the Corner LP was released to near revulsion from the music press. Yet, in the throes of his most fertile creative period since the spring of 1970, Miles refused to end the year a broken man – his studio sessions continued unabated from November into the following spring, often with the bandleader hobbled on crutches.

Miles would also make several changes to his live ensemble across the first half of 1973, including swapping out saxophonists, adding guitarists, ditching the tabla and sitar, and burning through keyboardists before taking over organ duties himself. 

It’s hard to overstate how rapidly Miles Davis fell off the cultural radar beginning in 1974. In comparison to the wealth of images and live footage covering his activity from 1969-73, the stretch between January of ’74 and his retirement in mid ’75 is documented in a smattering of photos and a brief B&W video clip. And though the year saw the release of the excellent compilation LPs, Big Fun and Get Up with It, Miles’ extraordinary live albums recorded during this period – Dark Magus in March of ’74, and Agharta and Pangaea in February of ’75 – would languish unreleased in the US until the latter half of the decade.

The late-1974 departure of guitarist Dominique Gaumont may have returned the band to the septet configuration it had honed to perfection throughout much of 1973, but the band that emerged here at the start of 1975 was an altogether different beast. The smaller lineup certainly allowed saxophonist/flautist Sonny Fortune more room to stretch out and carry the music into different turf than his predecessor, Dave Liebman, but the biggest benefactor was likely guitarist Pete Cosey, whose approach to his instrument shifted dramatically, almost as if he simply absorbed Gaumont’s voodoo, merged it with his own singular style and was born anew. 

With Miles’ rapidly deteriorating physical health and a working band likely aware it was living on borrowed time, the ensemble often performs as if guided by an invisible hand – both possessed by and in service of the master, the 1975 septet produced some of the most fascinating, gripping music of the electric period.