After months’ worth of tapes from concert halls and festival stages, it’s a delight to hear the quintet back in a club setting. Because as much as Miles wanted to ratchet up the band’s volume and intensity throughout the year, the primitive amplification in these larger venues seems to have forced him beyond his comfort zone – often cutting through the mix at higher registers at the expense of that characteristically impeccable tone. Here at Ronnie Scott’s, he’s clearly in his element.
By the time the Newport Jazz Festival tour hit London, the quintet was on day 2 of a 7-day streak of gigs – each day featuring an afternoon and evening set. While at least one, and often both of the days’ sets of the tour were captured for radio broadcast, the only record of this show at the Hammersmith Odeon comes from a rough audience recording of the second set.
Following a monster of a gig in Rome on October 27th, the quintet had a few days to spare between shows. Who knows what sort of culture they immersed themselves in, but it made for a supremely weird set in Vienna. Fortunately, like most shows on this European leg, a broadcast team was there to capture it in prime fidelity.
The quintet’s second date on the Newport Jazz Festival European tour brought them to Teatro Sistina in Rome with a TV and radio broadcast crew at the ready. While the quality of the audio recording is superb, it’s worth noting that “The Theme” has been pruned from the end of the afternoon set, and “Directions” is absent from the start of the evening performance – giving the impression of an uninterrupted 89-minute gig. The available video is a bit of a mish mash of partial tunes from both sets, but essential viewing.
While the quintet set off for Chicago, Cincinnati and LA shortly after the August 19-21 Bitches Brew session, the next circulating tape is this murky audience gem from late October in Milan – the first of an incredible, and incredibly well documented run of gigs from the Newport Jazz Festival European tour.
Continue reading “10.26.1969 Milan”
Given the rapid evolution of the quintet across the first half of 1969, it’s no surprise that the band we hear on July 27th at Rutgers sounds remarkably different from the one featured on the next available tape, October 26th (upcoming). The change agent being, of course, the three-day sessions at Columbia Studio B on August 19, 20, and 21st that produced the Bitches Brew LP.
Though the focus of this series is on Miles Davis’ live performances from 69-75, the impact of that session on his live output was so immediate and long-lasting that providing context feels necessary. It’s also just incredible to hear this album being created before our ears.
Continue reading “8.19-21, 1969: Bitches Brew Sessions”
By the time the quintet took the stage in New Brunswick, they were on their third gig in three days with more than 3,000 miles of travel in between. As evidenced by this brief audience tape of an incomplete set, our heroes remained undaunted.
Perhaps his Fender Rhodes was in the shop after giving him trouble in Antibes, but Corea is on acoustic piano throughout the recording, giving “Miles Runs the Voodoo Down” a slightly more toned down reading than we’ve heard thus far. Without the wild ring modulation effect on the electric piano we’d hear from him in 1970, Corea’s able to make the switch quite gracefully here.
Continue reading “7.27.1969 Rutgers”
This pair of gigs from the Antibes Festival were two of the most heavily circulated recordings from the Miles Davis Lost Quintet before their official release in 2013 as Live in Europe 1969: The Bootleg Series Vol. 2 (the 7.25 set was issued decades earlier in Japan as 1969 Miles – Festiva De Juan Pins). Both were recorded for radio broadcast and filmed in luscious B&W for television (at present, only footage of the 7.26 set circulates), and for a while they were the only recorded evidence of the lost quintet out there in the wild.
The summer of ‘69 rolls on with a true scorcher in Central Park, just a couple of days after the Shorter-less blowout at the Newport Jazz Fest. Like that Newport gig, you can hear the band continuing to work out and refine a lot of the phrasing and touchpoints they’d use to great effect on the Bitches Brew sessions a month later.
This is also our first tape where Bitches Brew material makes up the majority of the set list, with the arrival of one of my personal favorites, “Spanish Key” – barely recognizable from its album counterpart. At this point, “Miles Runs the Voodoo Down” had been in the set for a couple of months, and it shows – the arrangement is starting to coalesce and the length is now hovering around a sturdy 10 minutes (gone are the 17-minute explorations we heard at the Blue Coronet just a couple weeks before).
Continue reading “7.7.1969 Central Park”
The earliest pro-recorded live set of 1969 comes from the Newport Jazz Fest – oddly, it’s also an incomplete set, with 3 songs clocking in at just 24 recorded minutes. Not surprisingly, it smokes, explaining why Columbia has released it on the Bitches Brew Live comp in 2011 and again on Miles Davis at Newport 1955–1975: The Bootleg Series Vol. 4 in 2015.
the Heat Warps 