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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
the Heat Warps 