This audience tape from the Blue Coronet in NYC is one of the better sounding recordings from the first half of 1969 and the second to feature the monster “Miles Runs the Voodoo Down” – 17+ minutes here! This is the fourth circulating reel from 1969, and the Lost Quintet’s evolution across just a few months is astonishing. You can hear them stretching the limits of hard bop and moving into purely uncharted turf.
This audience tape sounds as though it were recorded from inside a coffee tin backstage, but let your ears adjust and be rewarded; the band was positively ON at this Plugged Nickel gig. As if trying to one-up the Miles Davis “Second” Great Quintet’s notoriously 1965 recordings at the same venue, the band summits early with an impressively intense “Gingerbread Boy”. The solos on this tune are jaw droppers, both in their pacing and precision – Corea sneaks in some particularly bizarre chords amidst his flurry, and Holland’s turn is simply superhuman.
This brief audience tape offers a mere snapshot from one the Miles Davis Quintet’s stopovers at the Village Gate in 1969. My god, what a show. Jack DeJohnette is absolutely ferocious behind the kit* and goes full-bore from the start – not necessarily overplaying but clearly pushing the rest of the band (even Miles) into supporting roles. The precise date of this set is unknown, but the essential Miles Ahead database narrows it to December 12-13:
The Davis Quintet performed at the Village Gate many times in 1969: April 25-26; May 23-24; July 29-August 10; December 12-13 and 19-20. Although this session is sometimes dated from May-June, the presence of “This” among the tunes suggests a later date. The tune was recorded by Corea, Holland, and De Johnette in May for release on Corea’s Is (Solid State SS 18055). But the only other live performances of the tune by Davis-led groups besides this one and an uncertainly-dated recording from the Blue Coronet Club are from late 1969 and early 1970. So it seems likely that this recording is from a mid-December engagement at the Village Gate.
Continue reading “December 1969 Village Gate”
This February tape from Rochester, NY is the first recording with the Miles Davis Lost Quintet fully intact. Despite the fresh lineup, the performance sounds remarkably similar to what Davis’ “second great quintet” (Shorter, Hancock, Carter, Williams) was up to just a year before – it’s amazing to hear Corea and DeJohnette sound so restrained. Maybe it was the material (this is the last Miles recording I know of to include “So What”) or perhaps they were just trying to find their footing, but this is the closest this quintet ever came to playing it straight. Still, the second half of the tape (starting at 43:35) gets pretty wild, finishing up with a long stretch of freeform abstraction that was new turf even for Miles at this point.
Though the exact date of this recording is undetermined, (the band played a run of shows from February 25-March 2) the rear photo from In a Silent Way was shot in Rochester on February 26th during the quintet’s time at Duffy’s.
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the Heat Warps 