Category: Official Release

7.1.1975 Avery Fisher Hall

On By Jeremy ErwinIn 1975, Band / On-Stage Recording, Official Release

The wealth of documentation chronicling Miles Davis’ electric period begins with an 85-minute audience reel captured at a small club in Rochester, NY on February 25, 1969. It concludes here at Lincoln Center on July 1, 1975 with a tape recorded on stage by guitarist Pete Cosey. While Miles would perform his final concert of the 1970s in Central Park on September 5 – a tape of which is yet to surface – at least one subsequent gig in Miami had been booked. When Miles canceled the date last-minute due to ill health, the concert promoter impounded the band’s gear, cauterizing the electric era and kick-starting the trumpeter’s period of seclusion that would last through the end of the decade.

“I was spritually tired of all the bullshit I had been going through for all those long years. I felt artistically drained, tired. I didn’t have anything else to say musically. I knew that I needed a rest and so I took one.

I was beginning to see pity in people’s eyes when they looked at me and I hadn’t seen that since I was a junkie. I didn’t want that. I put down the thing I loved most in life – my music – until I could pull it all back together again.”

from Miles: The Autobiography

Lincoln Center was a venue Miles knew well, having recorded a trio of live albums there, including My Funny Valentine and Four & More during a February 12, 1964 date, as well as the 1972 In Concert LP documenting the barely controlled chaos of his 9-piece ensemble. Given that context, there’s undeniable poetry in Miles returning to the venue for the final recorded performance of his most creatively adventurous era.

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2.1.1975 Osaka

On By Jeremy ErwinIn 1975, Official Release

Miles Davis’ electric period is largely defined by the quartet of albums bookending his seven-year creative run – In a Silent Way and Bitches Brew, studio LPs laid to tape six months apart in 1969, and Agharta and Pangaea, live albums recorded during matinee and evening performances in Osaka, Japan on February 1, 1975. Whereas the 1969 LPs marked a pivot point in Miles’ career and created a template for an entire genre of music, Agharta and Pangaea remain firmly entrenched in the future. Music that’s defiantly unclassifiable and delightfully impenetrable.

Like the most rewarding live Miles tapes, such as his first gigs at the Fillmore West, the late ’71 show from Switzerland, or the septet’s gripping ’73 set in Pescara, the tapes from Osaka reflect a band possessed by forces unknown – creating music that travels far beyond any familiar terrain but executed with remarkable confidence and ease. While the septet hinted at some of its darker, headier, more sinister tendencies earlier in the Japanese tour, those elements don’t simply come into bloom here on the first of February, they propel the music itself.

The afternoon performance captured on Agharta is more upbeat, immediate, and frequently stunning, but the languid, unspooling sets documented on Pangaea reveal an equally compelling cache of riches. These are universes unto themselves. Whatever your preference, the best approach is to simply get lost in them.

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3.30.1974 Carnegie Hall

On By Jeremy ErwinIn 1974, Official Release

By all accounts, Miles’ hometown gigs were often beset by weird vibes, strange guests, and high drama, all of which coalesced here at Carnegie Hall for the live recording of the Dark Magus double LP. Much of the night’s theatrics were courtesy of Miles himself, who, after arriving over an hour late despite living just blocks from the venue, informed his septet that they’d be joined by a pair of guests during the second set – 22-year-old saxophonist Azar Lawrence, and French-Bahaian guitarist Dominique Gaumont.

While Lawrence had gained notoriety for his then-recent work with McCoy Tyner and Elvin Jones, members of the septet became familiar with the relatively-unknown Gaumont when the band performed in Paris in late ’73.

Dominique took me all over Paris on the Metro and we were having a ball. I brought him to the hotel and introduced him to Miles, who was in a kinda semi-conscious state because he had been ill. He had nurses around the clock with him in the suite. So I introduced Dominique to Al Foster and we hung out and had dinner in the restaurant. We dined for hours and went to a club. I don’t know if Miles remembered meeting Dominique and the next time we met was in New York. When Dominique came to New York he hooked up with Al and Al brought him by to Miles’s place and that’s how he got in the band.

Pete Cosey interview via The Last Miles

Though much is made of Gaumont’s contribution to the night’s second set, the beauty here is the way in which the septet so easily reshapes itself to accommodate the new musicians. Having honed its act to a fine polish, the surprise addition of Lawrence and Gaumont unmoors the band from its familiar patterns and allows Columbia’s tape engineers to document the exploration of some entirely new turf. In contrast to the expertly crafted psychedelia of the opening set, the sprawling, indulgent, often disorienting second set doesn’t simply make for a thrilling live LP, but one that captures a pivot point in real-time.

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11.1.1973 Berlin

On By Jeremy ErwinIn 1973, Broadcast Recording, Official Release

The site of stunning electric gigs in 1969 and 1971, Miles returned to the Berlin Philharmonie for a pair of shows on the first of November, 1973. Recorded for radio and television by West Berlin public broadcaster, Sender Freies Berlin, the evening’s first show was released in full on the 2015 set, Miles Davis at Newport 1955–1975: The Bootleg Series Vol. 4 and captured in an expansive photo set by Jan Persson (excerpts below). Video of the set surfaces occasionally and I’ve included the currently available clips further down. It’s unknown if the later 10pm set was recorded, but there’s no tape in circulation.

Having built momentum across the first week of its Euro tour with standout shows in Stockholm and Copenhagen, the Miles Davis septet unleashes hell on what was surely an unsuspecting crowd of Berliners. Following an introduction by London club owner, Ronnie Scott, the band explodes into “Turnaroundphrase” with literal tape-saturating intensity as Miles stabs through the tapestry with remarkable ferocity, folded over and nearly disappearing into a comically long scarf as he channels spirits unknown through the wah pedal. Don’t bother adjusting your receiver, the entirety of this official tape remains firmly in the red thanks to either the band’s overwhelming stage volume or a little too much gain on the soundboard – any route, Sony’s choice to release such a blown-out tape is definitely a bold move.

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9.29.1972 Lincoln Center

On By Jeremy ErwinIn 1972, Official Release

After little more than two weeks on the road with his re-tooled live ensemble, Miles returned to Lincoln Center to record the double LP titled simply, In Concert. Though it lacks the captivatingly in-the-red moments that made the group’s Ann Arbor set such a thriller, the pristine sound and evenly balanced mix of this official release make it easily the best live document of Miles’ 1972 working group. Recorded days prior to the October 11th release of the On the Corner LP, In Concert is a companion piece if there ever was one, from the albums’ impenetrable textures and unrelenting momentum on down to their complementary cover illustrations.

Much like Miles Davis at Fillmore, Black Beauty, and well… all of his live albums from the electric period, In Concert included no info on personnel or recording dates, labeling the LPs “Foot Fooler” (the evening’s first set) and “Slickaphonics” (second set) in lieu of proper song titles. According to Mtume, it was all part of Miles’ grand plan.

“He had pictures of all these black characters — the pimp, the Panther, the prostitute. There’s a white band in there and if you look at the drummer’s foot, it says “Foot Foolers.” That was Miles saying, “I really got the funk.” He put the critics to work; he didn’t want to put anyone’s name on the LP, so the critics wouldn’t even know whose music it was.”

Mtume – The Fader, June 2005

Whatever Miles’ intent behind the album’s packaging, the music from both sets at Lincoln Center absolutely rips.

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10.22.1971 Dietikon

On By Jeremy ErwinIn 1971, Broadcast Recording, Official Release

While traversing the continent on the five-week Newport Jazz Festival in Europe package tour, the Miles Davis septet presumably made a few detours to perform one-off headlining shows. An October 18 performance in Frankfurt appears to have been one (no circulating tape from that show, unfortunately), and this October 22 gig at the Neue Stadthalle in Dietikon Switzerland was likely another.

Miles and tour manager Bobby Leiser en route to Dietikon, 10.22.71. Video footage of the band’s airport arrival.

Both of the evening’s sets were broadcast on Swiss radio with superb engineering by Klaus Koenig, whose work resulted in one of the best aural documents of the 21-date Euro tour – even more impressive considering the organizers hired a Steinway grand piano in preparation for an acoustic show and the band performed no soundcheck.

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12.16 – 12.19.1970 The Cellar Door

On By Jeremy ErwinIn 1970, Official Release

The Miles Davis sextet maintained a steady touring schedule throughout the final three months of 1970, morphing from a relatively loose, borderline feral funk experiment into a taught road-tested ensemble with each successive gig. The scant amount of circulating tapes from this period enforce just how rapid the band’s evolution was. And though there were some truly incredible gigs along the way, the sextet’s four-night stand at the Cellar Door in Washington DC feels very much like a culmination of the journey.

Despite appearing in heavily edited form on the 1971 Live/Evil LP, and in a more comprehensive six-disc Cellar Door Sessions box in 2006, the released material is far from a complete document of the Cellar Door residency. By most accounts, the band performed a total of 12 sets (three per night), 10 of which Columbia recorded, and just six of those sets were released on the Cellar Door box. 352 minutes of material is a feast by any measure, but you can’t help but salivate over the remaining four unreleased/uncirculated sets of music.

The Cellar Door today – now a Starbucks
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8.29.1070 Isle of Wight

On By Jeremy ErwinIn 1970, Official Release

When Dave Holland and Chick Corea joined the Miles Davis live band in August of 1968, the bassist was shocked that the crowd numbered just a few dozen for their opening night in San Francisco. “My expectation of Miles was that him being a great artist, everyplace he played would be absolutely packed. That was not the case.”

By contrast, Holland and Corea’s final gig alongside Miles at the Isle of Wight Music Festival on August 29, 1970 drew an estimated 600,000 – 700,000 people – the largest audience for a jazz performance in history.

Thanks to the resulting compilation album, documentary film, live DVD set, and 2011 Bitches Brew Live album, the band’s 35-minute Isle of Wight gig is perhaps the most well-known and frequently examined live performance of Miles’ career. And in spite of the heightened emotion of this being Holland and Corea’s final gig, compounded with the head trip of playing in front of such a mass of humanity, the band delivers on a level that is nothing short of astonishing.

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6.17 – 6.20.1970 Fillmore East

On By Jeremy ErwinIn 1970, Official Release

Following a late April swing through the Bay Area and five hyper-productive sessions at Columbia B (Miles’ last studio dates until March ’72), the Miles Davis Septet returned to the Fillmore East for a four-night stand opening for Laura Nyro – the band’s first performances with Keith Jarrett in tow. While Miles’ previous pairing at the Fillmore East opening for Neil Young and Crazy Horse was undoubtedly more explosive, this lineup was a bit more strategic. Miles had dropped in on Nyro’s session for the New York Tindaberry LP in June of ’69, so there was a clear mutual appreciation, plus Nyro’s audience gave Miles the broad exposure he sought from these Fillmore shows.

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4.9 – 4.12.1970 Fillmore West

On By Jeremy ErwinIn 1970, Official Release, Soundboard Recording

Having sized up Bill Graham’s Fillmore audience with two nights at Fillmore East the month prior, the Miles Davis sextet arrived at Fillmore West well-prepared for a four-night run opening for the Grateful Dead. They were also riding high on the release Bitches Brew, unleashed just days prior on March 30th, and by all accounts were fully intent on upstaging, outplaying, and straight-up out-psychedelicizing the Dead with nightly mind-melting sets.

Bassist Phil Lesh recalls his reaction to the April Fillmore West shows in his memoir, Searching for Sound: My Life with the Grateful Dead

As I listened, leaning over the amps with my jaw hanging agape, trying to comprehend the forces that Miles was unleashing onstage, I was thinking, “What’s the use? How can we possibly play after this? We should just go home and try to digest this unbelievable shit.“

Like most of Miles’ Fillmore gigs, all four nights were recorded, with the evening of April 11th memorialized on the Columbia double LP, Black Beauty.

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