Tag: columbiarecords

Herbie Hancock, Mega-Mix/TFS

Album of the Week, November 16, 2024

I’ve hinted at it, I’ve teased it, I’ve done all but say it outright. Finally today we take a left turn out of jazz and into early hip-hop, following the steps of Herbie Hancock.

When not cutting traditional jazz albums like Herbie Hancock Quartet, Herbie had been making fusion records since at least 1972’s Head Hunters (a giant album that will melt your head if you aren’t prepared). But his taste radar seemed to go astray as he went further afield from funk into commercial R&B. Some of the late 1970s albums in between the VSOP dates are … well, calling them an acquired taste is probably accurate. They didn’t perform especially well commercially and were savaged by critics.

In the early 1980s he began to make changes, leaving longtime producer David Rubinson to cut Lite Me Up with Quincy Jones (RIP), which had a strong disco influence but didn’t move buyers (or critics). But other winds were blowing, and the duo of bassist Bill Laswell and keyboardist/producer Michael Beinhorn, collectively known as the band Material, approached Herbie to collaborate on material that left more traditional fusion behind for a postmodern, hip-hop sound. The result was the album Future Shock, which both went platinum and earned critical acclaim.

The standout track on the album, the one I remember being played on my school bus, at the bus stop, in the streets, really everywhere I went, was “Rockit.” As part of the work on the album the track was remixed by Grand Mixer DXT, together with other songs from the album (“Autodrive,” “Future Shock,” “TFS,” and “Rough”) and an updated version of the lead song from Head Hunters, “Chameleon.”

The resulting track, “Mega-mix,” was one of the first such remixes, a genre that built a medley out of whole sections of songs, often played over a single beat and joined together with scratching or other DJ techniques. As such, Grand Mixer DXT was a natural artist to innovate in this style, as he is credited as the first turntablist. The mix was issued as both a 7 inch single and a 12 inch extended play; I’m reviewing the single today.

“Mega-Mix” opens with an echoing clatter of percussion over which the beat from “Rockit” plays, interspersed with a man”s voice saying “Herbie… Herbie… Herbie” and the bass line to “Chameleon.” As the track carries on DXT intersperses samples of spoken word and synthesized percussion across the different segments of the track. It’s disorienting and danceable. It sounds like the future. But it also sounds like riding the bus in fifth grade and listening to this tune, and other pieces of electro-funk, coming in over slightly static-y airwaves. There’s very little direct performance by Herbie on it, save for the prominent synth line that is the main melody of “Rockit”—as well as the bass line from “Chameleon,” which he played on the ARP Odyssey.

“TFS” is less influenced by DXT, but that’s not to say it resembles a traditional Herbie Hancock track. The dominant voice here is producer and bassist Bill Laswell. Laswell got his start playing in funk bands in Michigan before moving to New York City in the early 1970s, where he started the long-running project Material with Beinhorn and drummer Fred Maher. The track he wrote for “TFS” is nervous and twitchy, with a squelchy bass line and gated percussion underlying Herbie’s melody piano and synth lines.

Herbie did three albums with the “Rockit” crew, but remained artistically restless, also recording collaborations with kora player Foday Musa Suso (who appeared on the second album, Sound System). In the early 1990s he made a definitive return to acoustic jazz on A Tribute to Miles, a sort of reunion of the V.S.O.P. band with Wallace Roney filling in for Freddie Hubbard, who had injured his lip. Aside from concert performances and one last Bill Laswell collaboration, he’s stayed in the acoustic vein since. A frequent collaborator on those records, especially 1+1 and River: The Joni Letters, was his fellow Miles Davis band mate Wayne Shorter. We’ll hear from Wayne next time.

You can listen to today’s music here:

Bonus: Here’s the song “Rockit” in full, with its slightly insane music video:

Herbie Hancock, Herbie Hancock Quartet

Album of the Week, November 9, 2024

In 1981, Herbie Hancock was still touring with the V.S.O.P. band—well, most of them. For a tour of Japan in July 1981, neither Freddie Hubbard nor Wayne Shorter were available. So for this record Herbie, Ron Carter and Tony Williams were joined by Herbie’s labelmate, a rising star of a trumpeter named Wynton Marsalis.

Wynton was born in New Orleans into a musical family. His father, Ellis Marsalis, was a pianist and music teacher who named Wynton after Miles’ former pianist Wynton Kelly. There was something in the water at the Marsalis household; Wynton’s older brother Branford became a jazz saxophonist (from whom we’ll hear more later), and his younger brothers Delfeayo and Jason played trombone and drums respectively. Supposedly, a six-year-old Wynton was at a table together with Clark Terry, Al Hirt and Miles Davis, when his father joked that the boy should have a trumpet too. Wynton went to school in New Orleans, became one of the youngest musicians admitted to the Tanglewood Music Center at age 17, and attended Juilliard.

From the beginning, Wynton’s technique was pristine; he could execute the crisp runs required for Baroque trumpet music as well as the post-bop jazz concepts that were part of his heritage from his father. This led to an interesting beginning to his career, where Sony marketed him as both a jazz and a classical artist. (We had a record featuring his performance of a Haydn trumpet concert in my house when I was growing up.)

Wynton’s technique is on full display on the opening track, a cover of Thelonious Monk’s “Well, You Needn’t.” (The blend of standards and Hancock compositions on the record leads me to imagine the musicians in the studio, trying to work out what Wynton could play from Herbie’s repertoire.) The arrangement is the one Miles’ first quintet played; the tempo is accelerated beyond even the faster tempos that he favored with the second quintet; and Wynton is on fire throughout, tossing off pristine runs and playing a series of sixth and seventh jumps precisely and almost casually. It sounds as though the band takes Wynton’s prowess as a challenge, with Williams especially laying down some fiery fills. Herbie responds to Wynton’s improvisations, but by the end the two musicians seem almost to be contending as Herbie goes into something of a Latin riff and Wynton throws off high descending glissandi. At the end Wynton stops time for a moment with a cadenza that, surprisingly, resolves into a blues ending.

“Round Midnight” is also given in the Miles arrangement (which leverages Dizzy Gillespie’s introduction to the tune), and Wynton channels the elder trumpeter, playing with a Harmon mute and generally playing it cool, except for a few tossed off glissandi. Herbie plays some abstract runs, and seems to try to move things along, but Wynton returns for a second run at the intro. His high trumpet part soars above Williams’ thunderous drums, though it lacks some of the urgency of Miles’ version. Herbie takes the solo, keeping it firmly in the second quartet’s idiom, with chromatic sweeps of chords driving through.

Tony Williams’ “Clear Ways” opens with a duet between Wynton and Carter, with the rest of the quartet joining soon thereafter. It’s a brisk number that wouldn’t have been out of place on E.S.P., with the opening Herbie solo featuring some Keith Jarrett-esque vocalizing in the background. Wynton’s solo is quick, crisp and pointed, and displays one of his limitations at this early stage of his career: while he is precise and fast in his improvised runs, he is innovating melodically but not improvising rhythmically. Carter’s solo, opening and closing with bold glissandos from the lowest string, similarly moves along with a sense of rhythmic inevitability without being at all predicable melodically.

“A Quick Sketch” is one of two Ron Carter compositions on the album, and is a completely different mood and color. More of a blues-flavored tune until Herbie and Wynton enter with descending chromatic scales, the tune is the longest one on the album and begins with an extended melodic introduction, followed by Wynton’s solo. Here he stretches out more, displaying greater rhythmic fluidity as Carter improvises on the repeated ground of the tune. Carter takes a solo on his own tune, and Wynton wraps up with a series of suspended notes that circle the tonic without ever landing there, at one point breaking into a quotation from Ted Grouya’s “Flamingo.”

“The Eye of the Hurricane” is the one Herbie Hancock work to repeat between the V.S.O.P. albums and Quartet. Wynton leads with another accelerated series of runs, but this time interrupts the string of sixteenth notes with other rhythmic patterns. The solo is oddly static, in that, while it is very busy, it ultimately seems to do nothing so much as circle around the central chord. Herbie’s solo builds in menace as it accelerates up until the “eye,” Tony Williams’ drum break, is upon the band.

“Parade” is the other Carter composition, and is restrained by contrast, opening with Herbie playing the tune as a free ballad. At about 2:30, the group enters, swinging into a gentle samba. Wynton plays a fiery solo atop the groove, urging the group forward, only to have it return to a reverie until the very end, where Williams and Carter pick up the double-time melody that Wynton began.

Herbie’s “The Sorcerer,” from the Miles album of the same name, is given a reading of similar intensity to “The Eye of the Hurricane.” At the end of his solo, Wynton plays a chromatic descending scale which Herbie picks up and makes the foundation for the opening of his solo; Ron Carter picks up on the same pattern, performing it in portamento.

“Pee Wee,” a Tony Williams composition also found on Sorcerer, here gets a sleepy reading courtesy of Wynton’s muted playing, contrasting Herbie’s surging piano. Wynton plays the tune an octave up from its original performance by Wayne Shorter, and the result loses some of the quiet urgency of the original performance. The contrast with Jule Styne and Sammy Cahn’s “I Fall in Love Too Easily,” the only tune on the album from the Great American Songbook, is strong; together Herbie and Wynton play an emotionally rich rendition of the ballad to close out the set, in a reading reminiscent of Miles’ approach to “My Funny Valentine.” Herbie’s coda, in a different tonality entirely, underscores the somber brevity of Cahn’s lyric, bringing the album to a close in a very different place from where it started.

After this album, Herbie and Wynton’s paths diverged. The same sessions that produced Quartet also produced Wynton’s debut album, where he and Herbie’s trio were joined by Wynton’s brother Branford on saxophone, as well as other musicians. Herbie spent most of the 1980s following a very different direction; we’ll get a peek of that next time.

You can listen to this week’s album here:

Herbie Hancock and Chick Corea, An Evening with Herbie Hancock and Chick Corea In Concert

Album of the Week, November 2, 2024

In the year following the V.S.O.P. tour, Herbie Hancock recorded a jazz-funk album, Sunlight, with the post-Headhunters band that appeared on his V.S.O.P. live album, plus Jaco Pastorius and Tony Williams. The album, which featured Herbie’s voice singing through a Sennheiser vocoder, was widely panned as being not only not jazzy, but not funky. (I will say that having heard him perform “Come Running to Me” live in concert a few years ago that the material here is stronger than the performances.) He was also playing traditional jazz in concert, and today’s record is one of the most unusual in his repertoire: a two-piano duet album with his successor in Miles’ band, Chick Corea.

Armando Anthony “Chick” Corea was born in Chelsea, Massachusetts, to the north of what is now Boston Logan International Airport, in 1941, to a Calabrian family. His father had played trumpet in a Dixieland band in Boston, and introduced him to music and jazz at a young age. Corea moved to New York where he attended Columbia University and then Juilliard before dropping out so that he could perform more. He played in a number of different bands before joining Miles’ group during the sessions that became Filles de Kilimanjaro, and played with Miles until 1970. He left with Dave Holland to form a band, then in 1972 formed the Return to Forever band with Flora Purim, Airto, Stanley Clarke, and Joe Farrell. He played both jazz fusion and acoustic music through the 1970s, and in 1978 began what became a series of duo concerts with Herbie Hancock in which they performed in formal attire, playing each other’s compositions and jazz standards. This album was recorded live in a series of concert performances in San Francisco, Los Angeles, San Diego and Ann Arbor in February 1978.

“Someday My Prince Will Come” illustrates the way the two great pianists approached the collaboration. In the opening few minutes, Corea (in the right channel, facing Hancock) plays freely as Hancock, listening carefully, accompanies him. At about the 3:30 mark the two finally swing into something approaching the chorus of the famous Snow White tune, but there’s still a lot of give and take between them as one idea after another enters, is imitated, and leaves. This is music to listen carefully to, and as you start to hear the imitative work it becomes fascinating. However, it does not lend itself to casual listening: with both pianists in the same octave and often improvising with runs and digressions from the tune, there are moments where it seems to almost scamper hither and yon, leaving the listener searching for the tune.

“Liza (All The Clouds’ll Roll Away)” starts a little more immediately; indeed, this is the only performance on the album that comes in at less than ten minutes. This one has a raggy flavor to it, with both pianists experimenting with stride style accompaniment on the Gershwin tune, until about the 4:30 mark when they begin experimenting with alternating short four or five note phrases, which then become alternating four bar phrases, quick flashes of improvisation and impromptu response. My favorite of these comes at 5:22 where Herbie plays a four-bar phrase in strong meter which Chick immediately accompanies with a clapped Latin rhythm. They keep the audience on the edge of their collective seats until the end, when they burst into rapt applause.

“Button Up,” credited jointly to Corea and Hancock, takes up the entirety of the second side and is a more introspective, and intricate, work, leaning into A flat minor. At the 1:35 mark Corea breaks into a minor key riff that Hancock begins to improvise over, and for a moment it seems like we might be in for a blues, but then they move on to a sonata-like interlude that tapers off into silence. Herbie breaks the silence with a fierce interlude that Corea responds to and they again approach a more rhythmic feeling, which Corea emphasizes by pounding out a thudding syncopated rhythm on middle C, which he dampens by pressing on the string with his other hand so that the tone sounds more percussive and less ringing. After interludes of more rhythmic and wistful music, they return to the thudding rhythm, this time with Herbie playing a melody that centers around the F while Corea continues to hold the C. The overall effect is something like a particularly inspired bit of Keith Jarrett solo playing; both players use the technique all the way through the last few minutes of the work.

“February Moment” is introduced by Corea, with a spoken appreciation for Hancock’s rare solo work. The piece, credited to Herbie alone, picks up where “Button Up” left off, only instead of a syncopated rhythm we get repeated left hand eighth note patterns in which the emphasis notes are played an octave up. Herbie’s right hand provides the melody, which is more of a reverie than anything else. About six minutes in, Hancock transitions away from the etude and begins playing a twelve bar blues, with the left hand playing a very slow fingered bass as the right provides different interjections above. The rest of the piece takes us from the blues into an absolutely furious interjection at top velocity and then back into the blues for a quiet conclusion.

The last two tracks, “Maiden Voyage” and “La Fiesta,” are played together as a single 30+ minute suite. As the notes from producer David Rubinson indicate, he decided to compress the music to fit the single side of the record rather than break them apart; as a result on my LP the sound of this last side is not as immediate as it is in the rest of the performance. I have to confess that this version of “Maiden Voyage” is not my favorite; Corea’s improvisations are busy and to me feel like interruptions of the oceanic sweep of the composition. But Herbie rolls with it, introducing new patterns that rise and fall like the waves against Corea’s runs. After about ten minutes, both pianists begin to improvise a new tune, a bridge between “Maiden Voyage” and “La Fiesta,” ultimately returning to the former tune for a brief interlude before beginning the latter in earnest. This time Herbie begins Chick’s tune, and Chick responds with an improvisatory aside that takes us into the ongoing performance. There are moments of noodling, of brisk Latin melody, of pathos, of thudded muted strings, of orchestral noise and (it must be said) some uninspired noodling in the 20-something minutes here. Again, this is music for close listening, and doesn’t really take off into a dance-like ecstatic rhythm until something like the last few minutes—but when it does, watch out because these are a few minutes of ecstasy like nothing else on the album.

Herbie Hancock continued to alternate jazz-funk records with acoustic jazz records into the early 1980s, but there was increasingly a sense that the jazz-funk side was becoming a priority. There were still plenty of jazz purists around, though, and acoustic jazz was about to make a resurgence. We’ll hear an important moment in that transition next week.

You can listen to this week’s album here:

V.S.O.P., The Quintet

Album of the Week, October 26, 2024

As we saw last week, Herbie Hancock was at a crossroads in 1976 when he assembled his retrospective concert, later released as V.S.O.P. He could have doubled down on the jazz-funk that had been an ingredient of his music since the beginning and had been in overdrive since the release of Head Hunters. He could have returned to the intensely cerebral, far-out sounds of the Mwandishi band. (Somewhere there is a world in the multiverse in which the Mwandishi band kept playing and getting further and further out there, until radio transmissions of its shows were intercepted by aliens who returned to take Herbie home.)

But instead, he kept going with the quintet that he had reformed from Miles’ Second Great Quintet, with Freddie Hubbard continuing to play the role of trumpet. The musicians did some studio sessions together; a day-long session on July 13, 1977 with Herbie, Ron Carter and Tony Williams saw tracks released both as Herbie Hancock Trio and as Carter’s Third Plane, with all three contributing to the compositions on the Carter album. And on July 16, the three musicians were joined by Wayne Shorter and Hubbard in a performance at the Greek Theatre at UC Berkeley, and then a second at the San Diego Civic Theatre on July 18. They were billed as V.S.O.P., and a live double album combining highlights from both shows was released in October 1977.

“One of a Kind” is one of two Hubbard compositions on the record, and one of two compositions that make their first appearance here. The band starts with a Tony Williams drum roll and arpeggios from Hancock, and then a fast beat on Carter’s bass. The horns come in with the melody, and we’re off to the races. As often happens in a Hubbard composition, the melody consists of a descending arpeggio, played precisely and cleanly. His tone is still a marvel at this date, taking all the pristine bell-like quality of a young Miles and turbocharging it. When Shorter comes in, it’s from left field, not directly following Hubbard’s lead but picking up a thread of his solo and deconstructing it. Hancock responds, not playing chords under his solo but responding to Shorter’s assays with terse runs and replies. Wayne eventually follows Hubbard into the stratosphere, but instead of soaring he swoops up and down in jagged attacks. Hancock flourishes a series of arpeggios in response to Shorter’s solo but drops back into a Twilight Zone-esque vamp behind Carter’s insistent rhythm as the horns return to play the head once more, closing on a high supertonic.

“Third Plane” was recorded three days prior as the title track to Carter’s album, but you’d never know the quintet hadn’t been playing it for years if Hancock didn’t announce it at the top. The Carter original is taken at a faster clip here, and the two horns dialog with each other over a melody that seems taken equally from Carter’s bassline and Herbie’s piano lead. In its quintet version the 8-bar modulation that lifts the tune briefly from B to B-flat is somehow less strange and more natural, maybe thanks to Shorter’s straight-ahead-with-a-twist solo. Hubbard plays flugelhorn for his solo, finding a pattern that he tosses back and forth with Herbie, before yielding to the piano, who plays what sounds like a stride-influenced solo over Carter’s insistent walking bass. Carter and Williams take a quick sixteen bar intro to the last two returns of the melody, and the band seems reluctant to let the tune go, hitting the end three times before bringing it to a close.

“Jessica” sees a welcome return of the sad ballad from Fat Albert Rotunda. Hancock outlines the chords while Carter and then Hubbard play the melody, followed by Shorter; the latter plays as if choking off a sob. Hubbard’s solo seems to consider all the different corners of the melody in a solo that’s less than 60 seconds long. When Shorter returns for his brief solo, it is with breathtaking sustained notes that seem to underline the sorrow in the work. Herbie’s solo, which takes three verses, plays with restraint and delicacy, accompanied only by Carter and the barest hint of Tony Williams. The horns return for one more run at the melody, then fall back as Carter and Herbie take the tune to an end.

“Lawra,” a Tony Williams composition from the Third Plane/Trio sessions, Herbie begins with a riff in parallel fourths that could originate anywhere from Aaron Copland to nursery school to—as Williams enters on massive drum hits—a classic rock song. The rest of the band joins in to state the theme, with Hubbard and Shorter already trading beats, and thoughts, in the introduction. They continue this way for two full iterations of the tune before Herbie falls back and they continue to duet through the first pass. (An aside: the engineering on the album is superb, especially for a concert recording; the presence in this tune makes you feel as though Freddie Hubbard is standing just to the left of you while Shorter is somewhat to the far right side of the stage, a bit of stereo separation that’s particularly effective here.) The rest of the quintet drops back as Williams plays a polyrhythmic solo that leads back into the opening riff.

After an introduction of the players, “Darts” is a Herbie composition that here makes its only appearance in his discography. It’s a gnarly tune in a minor key, so naturally Wayne takes the first solo. Freddie Hubbard plays a solo that darts around several different modes before entering a give-and-take with Herbie. Herbie then improvises an extended run that centers on a diminished triad before returning to the head. It’s a nice enough track, but it’s clear why Herbie didn’t return to it.

By contrast, “Delores,” by Wayne Shorter, is the song with the second-oldest roots on the album, having been first recorded by Miles’ quintet on Miles Smiles. Wayne essays the melody by himself for the first ninety seconds in free time, then gradually speeds up to performance tempo and is joined by Carter, Hancock and Williams. Hubbard enters as the band plays the opening melody together, then Wayne takes an extended solo that trades ideas with Herbie. As with the original recording, Herbie soon lays out, so he’s accompanied only by Carter and Williams. Ron Carter can be heard throughout, first walking the line, then improvising along the scale, sometimes down alongside Williams holding down the low end, then sliding up into a higher improvisation. Herbie signals the end of Wayne’s solo and anchors Freddie’s, not playing through but trading ideas with him. Tony Williams turns on the energy throughout Freddie’s solo, burning up the cymbals. The players then take an extended coda that improvises on the penultimate tone, trading ideas before returning once more to the head. This performance, more than any other, earns the blurb on the back of the album: “the charisma generated by five masters who listened to each other’s inner ears, spoke to each other at multiple levels, and, no matter how dense the musical content, conveyed their message to the audience with amazing clarity.”

For my money the band only runs low on steam on the penultimate number, “Little Waltz.” This is the other Carter composition on the record, having made its debut earlier that year on Carter’s solo album Piccolo. It’s a slow waltz that opens with Shorter and Carter duetting. The rest of the band enters, taking turns on the tune, but the tempo never gets faster than sleepy, though Shorter tries his best to pep it up in his extended solo. The closer, “Byrdlike,” is the second Hubbard composition and is also the oldest on the record, having first been recorded on Hubbard’s 1962 Blue Note album Ready for Freddie. The band has a merry romp through it at something like twice the tempo of “Little Waltz”; true to the name, Hubbard keeps his solo solidly in the hard bop lane, with echoes of Donald Byrd in his solo. Williams trades bars with Shorter, then Hubbard, and then slips directly into a fierce drum solo. The band briskly closes out the tune, with Hubbard and Shorter taking turns to see who can close out the number on the highest note.

Hancock and the quintet could easily have filled an entire evening with performances of compositions they played with the Miles Davis Quintet. That they chose to foreground material from an album recorded just a few days before shows that they were still dedicated to creating new music. The quintet would continue to record its live shows; the Tokyo Tempest in the Colosseum recording, also made in 1977 just a week later, is more of a “greatest hits” concert but demonstrates enormous firepower. They hit the road once more in 1979 and even went into the studio to record Five Stars, but after that the players didn’t get together again until the early 1990s. But Herbie Hancock, in particular, continued to explore new ways into his compositions, and we’ll hear another approach next time.

You can listen to this week’s album here:

Miles Davis, In Person Friday and Saturday Nights At the Blackhawk, San Francisco

Album of the Week, September 7, 2024

In the years following Kind of Blue, Miles’ great sextet dissolved, with both John Coltrane and Cannonball Adderley choosing to begin their own careers as leaders. Perhaps responding to the change in personnel, Miles’ next album, Sketches of Spain, was another collaboration with Gil Evans in the mold of Miles Ahead (but even more so… we’ll have to review that record another day). We’ve seen how Miles convinced Coltrane to return, on Someday My Prince Will Come, recorded in March 1961. That record also featured Hank Mobley, who toured and recorded with Miles throughout 1961. We’ve heard his work on At Carnegie Hall; today we hear him with Miles, Paul Chambers, Jimmy Cobb and Wynton Kelly in one of the great trumpeter’s more famous live recordings.

Recorded almost a month before the Carnegie Hall set, on April 21-22, 1961 at the Black Hawk nightclub in San Francisco, the album is significant as a document of Miles’ live set and repertoire following Kind of Blue, in the same way that his Jazz at the Plaza captured the 1958 band at its peak. The album has been issued in various formats ranging from individual LPs of selections from the Friday and Saturday night performances, to a box set documenting the entirety of both nights, to today’s record, a two-LP set combining the individual LP releases from later in 1961. The copy I’m reviewing today is a mono first pressing.

Because of the wide deviation in groupings and track orders, I’m going to deviate from my normal practice of commenting on the album track by track. (Also, the most readily available versions of the album feature slightly different edits of the songs, and I’m not going to get into the differences here.) What I’ll start with is the sound. While this set features many of the same players that were with Cannonball Adderley on his In Chicago, there’s little of the soul that lingered at the edges of that recording. There’s also surprisingly little of the modal, cool sound of the Gil Evans recordings or Kind of Blue. This is a hot band, and (perhaps due to the vagaries of live recording) a lighter, more nimble sounding band.

Some of the credit for the former surely accrues to Hank Mobley. His solo on “Walkin’” is a taut, athletic bit of genius that gets to stretch out across a vast swath of choruses. He writes a different melody into “Bye Bye Blackbird” that seems to borrow equal parts from Johnny Hodges and John Coltrane. But he also seems at times to be apart from the band. Where Miles’ arrangements for the first great quintet or his sextet would have the saxophone(s) sharing the lead in harmonic writing with his trumpet, here the solos and recapitulations are Miles’s alone. One imagines Mobley standing near the back of the bandstand listening, stepping forward to play his solo, and stepping back again. The exception as always is “No Blues,” but in that gem the interplay between the horns is a part of the tune.

The longer performances also afford an opportunity for the rest of the rhythm section to stretch out. We get an arco solo from Paul Chambers in “Walkin’,” something we hear in other appearances by him but which had grown rather rare by this point. We don’t hear too many solo moments from Jimmy Cobb, who always preferred to provide unswerving, steady support from the background, but he and Chambers are flawless together as a unit and maintain a high degree of attention to the other players, particularly Kelly.

Kelly’s touch on the piano is a common thread between the two recordings, but here you can hear how his conception was drifting apart from Miles’. Where the bandleader was throwing out fiery, straight edged solos, Kelly maintained some of his soul-jazz leanings. There’s an interesting tension between the approaches that brings some bluesy notes to “Walkin’” and (ironically) “No Blues,” but the two don’t seem to be quite as telepathically joined as Miles would be with other accompanists.

That’s not to say there aren’t moments. Kelly’s intro to “Bye Bye Blackbird,” a Miles stalwart for years, seems to belong to a different recording, but when Miles unexpectedly changes mode in his first statement of the chorus, Kelly returns the favor in the chord voices under the second chorus. They seem to be prodding each other on. But Kelly’s playing on other cuts is less simpatico; for instance, his accompaniment “All of You” falls into decorative chords that seem to clutter rather than respond to Miles’ line.

The other noteworthy thing here is the material. Many of the standards here lean toward a lighter melodic approach, as do the originals. Miles was playing “No Blues” on Someday My Prince Will Come, as well as “Teo” (here called “Neo”), but the faster live tempo on “No Blues” knocks some of the languor off and turns the piece into what it remains today, a flexible almost-nothing of a tune that could be a 30-second signal for a set break or a 15-minute joyous improvisation.

This is also a rare opportunity to hear “Fran-Dance,” a lovely Miles ballad whose only studio recording came on Jazz Track, an “odds and sods” release from 1959 that collected three tracks from the Miles Davis Sextet together with the miraculous soundtrack to the Louis Malle film Ascenseur pour l’échafaud. Where the original studio version with the great sextet seems to straddle the line between mediative and lovely, the version here adds a touch of suggestiveness thanks to Mobley and Kelly’s more soulful playing. It’s a gift to have the recording; Miles stopped playing “Fran-Dance,” written for his first wife Frances Taylor (who also appears on the cover), after their separation in 1965.

The performances on In Person are an opportunity to hear Miles in a different place—not yet free of his harmonic conceptions from the Kind of Blue era, not yet with the new quintet that would take him to the birth of fusion. There are plenty of fantastic compositions and performances during this period, roughly from 1961’s Someday My Prince Will Come to 1964’s live masterpiece My Funny Valentine. But there was also darkness; Miles suffered from addictions to cocaine and alcohol that caused him to behave erratically, ultimately leading Frances Taylor to flee from him in 1965. He also began experiencing the hip pain that led to a series of operations in mid-1965; he finally recovered enough to return to recording in 1965, with E.S.P.

I don’t have more Miles recordings to dive into in this series, so we’ll let that thread of the story go; you can read more about what happened after this record starting with my review of Miles Davis At Carnegie Hall from the previous series. But I have lots more to talk about with the sidemen from that second great quintet; we’ll pick up with an album from one of them next week.

You can listen to this week’s album here:

Duke Ellington, Ellington Indigos

Album of the Week, November 12, 2022

I may have given the impression that, following Duke Ellington’s career resuscitation at the Newport Jazz Festival in 1956, he recorded nothing but works aimed at solidifying his artistic credentials. Certainly Black, Brown and Beige fits that description. But he—and Columbia Records—were not averse to recording more commercial music, either. Today’s record has eight* ballads, only three closely associated with Duke Ellington and his band, played in dance-friendly format. There are no sixteen minute suites here; exotic key changes are held to a minimum. For the most part this is just Ellington’s band playing it straight. And that’s the appeal of the record, because this band could play it straight and still zigzag your socks right off.

The opening is one of the great performances of Ellington’s signature “Solitude,” with the composer himself at the piano. He takes it freely for the first minute or so, until the arrival of Jimmy Woode on bass and Sam Woodyard on drums clicks things into tempo, followed by an entrance by the horns en masse. (It’s hard to resist the idea that they all came in from the subway at the same time, and snuck into the studio where Ellington was already hard at work.) The arrival of the trumpets about three minutes in is appropriately fanfare like, but the whole arrangement is remarkable. I’d really like to hear a version of this that’s just Ellington’s piano; he does some astonishing things behind the band, and brings the tune back into focus in a solo conclusion. It’s a four minute long symphony.

Richard Rodgers’ “Where or When” features a breathy Paul Gonsalves on tenor sax, with interjections from the other horns providing punctuation throughout. This tune has always struck me as feeling like a single sentence, and here the sentence builds to a joyous rhapsody for solo saxophone. It’s a quiet showstopper.

“Mood Indigo” begins with a statement of purpose from Ellington on the piano, but quickly yields the floor to Shorty Baker’s trumpet. Following his verse, the entire band takes up the chorus, spotlighting the amazing unity and singleness of purpose of this ensemble. Baker’s trumpet returns over the horns, who pause to let him speak before everyone comes back together.

“Autumn Leaves” is one of the tunes that is considerably different depending on which version of the record you hear. My CD copy* had a lengthy rendition with verses sung in both French and English by Ozzie Bailey, while the LP omits the French verse entirely. Both versions feature a poignant violin solo by Ray Nance both opening and closing the track. The longest performance on the album, it carries a deep melancholy.

“Prelude to a Kiss” has some of the same energy of the A-side’s opening “Solitude,” with the horns hinting at some of the energy of that number, but ultimately proves to be a more intimate number, with Johnny Hodges’ alto romancing the listener all the way through.

The next number on the vinyl release, “Willow Weep for Me,” brings back Shorty Baker on trumpet, but effectively functions as a solo for the entire band, with the saxophones providing an introduction that slides down the scale into the key. The pianist states the theme, followed by Baker’s forthright trumpet response, and they continue to trade bars of the melody throughout, with the rest of the horns serving as a Greek chorus commenting on the solos.

“Tenderly” is conceived as a duet for Ellington and Jimmy Hamilton on clarinet, and the first two chorus is taken out of time. The following calls the dancers to the floor, with Woode and Woodyard underpinning their steps. Finally, when the band comes in, Hamilton takes flight, his obligato entwining the final chorus, which ends on a moment of seeming finality—until Hamilton and Ellington return to tag the final eight bars again in free time, as a sort of final signature.

The last track on the stereo vinyl release, Arthur Schwartz’s “Dancing in the Dark,” is nominally a solo for Harry Carney on baritone saxophone, but also features some fine trumpet playing in the second verse, and closes out the album as a swooning dance number. The album itself repays listening closely to see how Ellington put his orchestra together, as well as how he and Strayhorn got the maximum emotional impact from each tune. Highly recommended for late night listening.

You can listen to the album here:

*I first came across this recording a year or so after graduating from UVA, in the 1987 CD reissue, which has ten tracks and a different running order. And apparently the mono release has different performances than the stereo release. So the point is, if you see a copy in a different format, it’s worth picking it up and listening to see what’s different.

Duke Ellington, Black, Brown and Beige

Black, Brown and Beige (1958) by Duke Ellington and His Orchestra Featuring Mahalia Jackson.

Album of the Week, November 5, 2022

We rejoin Duke Ellington in 1958, and much has changed from the 1951 release of Masterpieces by Ellington. Following the long-form recording breakthroughs of that album, Duke dove into avant garde compositional forms (Uptown), re-recordings of his own music as solo piano arrangements (The Duke Plays Ellington, later reissued as Piano Reflections), and relative obscurity. At this point in his career, his main income was compositional royalties, and he didn’t have a record deal. He is said to have booked his band into ice skating rinks so that he could keep them busy enough to pay them.

Then came the band’s 1956 performance at the Newport Jazz Festival, captured in the famous Ellington at Newport recording, and suddenly Ellington was hot again. I won’t be writing about that album at length (at least not right now), as I don’t have a vinyl copy, but it utterly jump-started his career, leading to a recording contract with Columbia Records. Columbia lost no time in capitalizing on his new popularity, and a series of recordings followed that mark some of the high points of the Duke’s output. One of them was Black, Brown and Beige, which revisited a work that Ellington had composed in 1943 for his first-ever appearance at Carnegie Hall.

Leonard Feather’s notes for the original suite describe a hugely ambitious work: “Black, the first movement, is divided into three parts: the Work Song; the spiritual Come Sunday; and Light. Brown also has three parts: West Indian Influence (or West Indian Dance); Emancipation Celebration (reworked as Lighter Attitude); and The Blues. Beige depicts ‘the Afro-American of the 1920s, 30s and World War II’.” The original performance received a lukewarm reaction, with critics objecting to the attempt to blend jazz and classical music. But when Ellington revised the suite in 1958, these objections were largely by the wayside, as the growing “third stream” movement had opened the door for jazz to cross over into other genres.

Still, Ellington did simplify the concept of the suite even as he expanded it. The 1958 revision essentially stripped the suite back to focus primarily on the themes from Black, “Work Song” and “Come Sunday.” In doing so, the suite becomes a meditation on the contrast of the African-American slave experience and the the Church, a point underscored by the groundbreaking inclusion of Mahalia Jackson as the vocalist.

It’s tempting to skip directly to “Come Sunday” in reviewing the album, but the degree to which “Work Song” shapes the suite and lays out Duke’s narrative intention should not be overlooked. The opening pounding drums of Part I are all that remain of the original narrative opening of the suite, and a peek at the score here is revelatory. The opening notes state:

A message is shot through the jungle by drums.
BOOM! BOOM! BOOM! BOOM!
Like a tom-tom in steady precision.
Like the slapping of bare black feet across the desert wastes.
Like hunger pains.
Like lash after lash as they crash and they curl and they cut. DEEP!

Ellington, opening notes to Black, Brown and Beige

Ellington was firmly grounding “Work Song” in the context of dislocation and enslaved labor, and returns to this theme over and over to emphasize this opening fact of African-American history.

In this context, “Come Sunday” comes as an almost revolutionary statement of hope. In the first statement, in Part II of the suite, the theme is played by the band, with an interpolation of “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot” by the trombones making explicit the connection to African-American spirituals. And it is visited by all the members of the orchestra in turn going into Part III, alternating with “Work Song,” as the first half of the album ends.

“Part IV”, opening the second side of the record, begins with just Ellington and Mahalia Jackson. At this point we should acknowledge how groundbreaking this moment was. Gospel singers didn’t cross over to other musical forms, at least not still remaining gospel singers. There were plenty who left the form, Sam Cooke and some of the other early soul singers among them, but for Mahalia Jackson, at this point indisputably the greatest living gospel artist, to collaborate with Ellington on this record was unprecedented. One suspects that producer Irving Townshend, who also had produced Jackson since her Columbia debut in 1955, had something to do with it.

Whatever the origin, this recording, and “Part IV,” mark the debut of Ellington’s lyrics for “Come Sunday.” And some lyrics they are. They are essentially a gospel statement of faith in the face of racial oppression:

Lord, dear Lord I've loved, God almighty
God of love, please look down and see my people through

I believe that sun and moon up in the sky
When the day is gray
I know it, clouds passing by

He'll give peace and comfort
To every troubled mind
Come Sunday, oh come Sunday
That's the day

Often we feel weary
But he knows our every care
Go to him in secret
He will hear your every prayer

After a reprise of the “Come Sunday” theme by Ray Nance’s violin (Part V), the suite concludes with Jackson’s improvised rendition of Psalm 23 in Part VI. The liner notes claim “on the last afternoon, Duke asked Mahalia to bring her Bible with her. He opened it to the Twenty-Third Psalm, played a chord, and asked her to sing.” The presence of orchestra accompaniment on this track suggest that the degree of improvisation in the final movement may be overstated here; still it’s a stunning vocal performance.

Ellington recorded the work on four days from February 4 to February 12, 1958. Six months before, the Little Rock Nine had entered Little Rock Central High School for the first time, and five months later, the first sit-ins were held at Dockum Drug Store in Wichita, Kansas. It’s tempting to just hear this iteration of Black, Brown and Beige as a gospel meets jazz performance, but the full story places it solidly as a statement of solidarity with the Civil Rights movement and an important precursor to more explicit Civil Rights themed jazz suites like Sonny Rollins’ “Freedom Suite” (June 1958) and Max Roach’s “We Insist! Freedom Now” (1960).

You can listen to the album here:

Duke Ellington, Masterpieces by Ellington

Album of the Week, October 29, 2022

I’ve written a little about Duke Ellington before, but not yet in this series. But he’s been at the back of much of what we’ve listened to, however distantly. When the pianist and composer Marcus Roberts (of whom we’ll hear more later) chose three composers to pay tribute to in his first solo jazz album, he chose Jelly Roll Morton, Thelonious Monk, and Ellington, and it’s that foundational compositional genius that’s on display in this record.

Ellington’s music grew to fit the recording space allotted. Much of the earliest Ellington recordings, on 78 RPM records, were dance songs, constrained by the space available in the technology format but also by the genre. My late father-in-law used to talk about going dancing when Ellington’s band was playing (though he preferred Tommy Dorsey). But as the technology for recorded sound changed, Ellington shifted to longer forms: suites, expanded arrangements, and more orchestral-sounding performances. This record, released in 1951, was one of the first 12” LPs offering an unprecedented twenty-plus minutes per side. Ellington and his longtime arranger Billy Strayhorn, together with his standing band including (among others) Harry Carney, Johnny Hodges, Jimmy Hamilton, Paul Gonzales, Ray Nance, and Mercer Ellington, took full advantage of the space provided. (I’m reviewing a 2017 reissue of the album on 12” 45RPM heavyweight vinyl, released by Analogue Productions. It sounds incredible.)

“Mood Indigo” opens the album, and is one of the dance numbers that Ellington is best known for. Here it is revelatory, with the horns introducing the theme and yielding to a lugubrious solo reading of the theme by Harry Carney on the baritone sax, with Ellington’s piano gently accompanying. And then it gets interesting. The next chorus sees the horns return, but in a higher harmonization. Hodges takes the next two choruses, with the second one breaking the general legatissimo as Ellington stabs the chords beneath him. Another horn chorus seems to break free of time and tonality, but stays anchored in B♭. Ellington’s next solo tugs again at the key and finally pivots it upwards to E♭, where it stays as the vocalist Eve Duke (here credited as Yvonne Lanauze) takes a chorus and a verse, the horns underneath helping her shift into E♭minor and then back to the major, and finally back down to B♭. And so the arrangement goes for nearly 16 minutes, with additional surprises ahead including two choruses of growler muted trumpet, another free exploration that seems to break free of key, an excursion into waltz time, a trombone solo, and even more.

“Sophisticated Lady” is another Ellington dance number that becomes a suite in this reading. A brisk piano introduction yields to the bass clarinet of Harry Carney and back to Ellington’s phantasmagorical chords. When Ray Nance’s trumpet steps in, it’s a clarion call, like the sun coming through the clouds. Eve Duke’s returning vocals shift the key from A♭up to D♭. Ellington takes a free solo that is capped with the horns entering in a fanfare that becomes a recapitulation, and the band takes it to a climactic resolution.

“The Tattooed Bride” is the most recent of Ellington’s compositions on this record. Written in 1948, it becomes a showcase here for Jimmy Hamilton’s clarinet, which opens the first statement of the chorus. The band embraces the brisker tempo, with the horns throwing bits of the melody to each other, and then shifting into a minor key as the bride, apparently, begins swing dancing. Hamilton’s clarinet returns in a meditation on the theme that’s punctuated by a blast from the horns, and finishes the tune on a high, sustained F as the horns anchor the tune.

The record closes with “Solitude,” another blue Ellington ballad. Here Ellington introduces the melody almost at a trot, and then the band arrives and settles the tempo down to a more meditative stroll for the first chorus. When they drop out entirely, the piano solo stops time for an eternity before Johnny Hodges returns to take us back into chronology. The trumpet underscores the intensity of the moment before the band shifts once more, this time bringing forward the clarinet and trombone, who picks up the tempo for the final chorus before swooning to the finish.

Listening to this album, it’s easy to hear the truth of the old saying about Ellington: that he played the orchestra like a piano, and played the piano like an orchestra. The album captures Ellington in true high fidelity, as the transition to the LP and to recording on magnetic tape offered himsonic palette of seemingly unlimited color, with which to paint his masterpiece. But this would not be the last time Ellington adjusted his approach to recording. When we hear him next week, he will be in very different surroundings.

You can listen to the album here:

Miles Davis, Champions

Album of the Week, October 1, 2022

As a jazz fan, for years I largely wrote off Miles after Bitches Brew. Everything before was transcendent; what came after was … well, something else. Granted, there were moments that captured my curiosity, like the incredible “Sivad” from Live Evil, but I couldn’t make myself dig into them. I almost ended my series on Miles and his sidemen with Weather Report.

But there was a part of me that said, go on. That reminded me how blown away I was by “He Loved Him Madly” and by Big Fun. That said, we shouldn’t deny the funk. So today we’re going to listen to a recent record that illuminates some of what Miles got up to in the early 1970s.

Champions is an archival release, of course, like every other “new” Miles record, but it comes from sessions that produced an album, Jack Johnson, that famed critic Robert Christgau called his favorite recording from Miles since Kind of Blue and Milestones. Miles assembled many of his best players in the studio, many of whom are familiar names to us—Herbie Hancock, Chick Corea, Wayne Shorter, John McLaughlin, Jack DeJohnette, Dave Holland, Airto—but also new names, including reed players Bennie Maupin (here on bass clarinet) and Steve Grossman (soprano sax), drummers Billy Cobham and Lenny White, bassists Gene Perla and Mike Henderson, the latter fresh off a stint with Stevie Wonder, and Keith Jarrett, here on the electric piano. But though many of the players overlapped with In a Silent Way (among other records), the style was much more straight-ahead funk than the mysterious jazz of that album.

The shift was deliberate. In 1969 Miles told a Rolling Stone reviewer, “I could put together the greatest rock ‘n’ roll band you ever heard,” and if you listen through that lens the affinity of this record for the chugging sound of early Funkadelic and late 1960s counterculture becomes apparent. The connection to rhythm was also deliberate, making a political point. Miles was uninterested in making art music; he wanted to make Black music for Black people. And he wanted to play loud. Chick Corea has said that during this period Miles was in the greatest shape of his life: clean, sober, exercising — in fact, he was working out in the gym with a boxing trainer every day, as he worked on music for this documentary on the great African American boxer Jack Johnson.

All of this comes together in the music on Champions, which is taken from the sessions that led up to the released Jack Johnson album (and which also appears on Columbia’s massive The Complete Jack Johnson box set). “Duran (Take 4)” is an extended groove over a monster rhythm section, with Miles’ trumpet wailing over a rubbery descending bass line and John McLaughlin’s guitar filling in the blank spaces. The overall rhythm is pretty foursquare, but where Miles and company go around it is where the magic is.

“That’s some raunchy sh*t, y’all,” Miles says as the band transitions into “Sugar Ray.” Here the rhythm is bent, and the harmonic progressions bend to match, as Miles’ trumpet bends into the adjacent major keys for a patch of the chorus. The effect is simultaneously disorienting and intoxicating, the latter especially when Wayne Shorter’s soprano sax arrives to soar over the groove.

“Johnny Bratton (Take 4)” is the hardest rocking of the tunes on the album, and possibly the most egalitarian in terms of group improvisation; both are largely due to Jack DeJohnette’s monster drumming and Steve Grossman’s extended soprano sax solo, which steps a little to the side of Shorter’s mysticism and into something closer to a blend of Pharoah Sanders and Raphael Ravenscroft (of “Baker Street” fame). Miles’ solo sketches a sizzling ascendant line above the group, contributing a bluer note above the 1-5-4-diminished 3rd chords that form the main progression of the song. John McLaughlin’s guitar solo actually switches into a different key entirely for the first part of his solo, dislocating the harmony in unexpected ways. It’s a workout. Miles returns, bringing the temperature down to a simmer punctuated by more unexpected guitar chords from McLaughlin and a fade-out.

“Ali (Take 3)” and “Ali (Take 4)” are two different takes on the same song, with the melody stated in the bass by Gene Perla; this was Perla’s only appearance with Miles, though he would go on to a long association with Elvin Jones and would later form a group with Don Alias and Steve Grossman. Take 3 opens up like a gutbucket funk tune that wouldn’t be out of place on Free Your Mind…, with mind-blowing distortion in the organ courtesy of Herbie Hancock, playing alongside Keith Jarrett’s relatively more conventional electric piano line. The solitary solo comes from the trumpet, with a tight doubling in the organ. “Take 4” is an entirely different thing, and is almost like a dub reggae version of the same tune. Opening with only the bass line, and interjections from John McLaughlin with barely audible sounds on the pickups of his guitar and Airto on the berimbau, the band improvises bits of the opening with barely audible coaching from Miles in the background (“Why you play that there?” “Now play it loud!”). When the band comes in, it’s with a nasty organ line over a restrained funk drum courtesy of Steve Grossman. The band was edging closer to the mindbending sounds that would elsewhere appear on tunes like “Honky Tonk.”

The compilation closes out with “Right Off (Take 11),” with a smaller, tighter group playing through a scorching funk instrumental, anchored by Hancock on organ, Henderson on bass, and Cobham on drums. Sounding a bit like a set-closing outro, the tune notably does not feature Miles, with the lead horn part instead going to Grossman. It’s probably the least essential of the tunes collected here, but is still a seriously groovy work, and a good way to close out the set.

Miles had come a long way from the days of Dig, and we leave him here, primarily because my record collection doesn’t have any of his later work. But I hope that as we’ve undertaken this survey of records from Miles and his sidemen throughout the past 33 weeks that you’ve found something new to dig into. I’ll continue to write this weekly review—I’m having way too much fun to give up now!—but we’ll be digging into some entirely different vinyl next week.

You can listen to the album here:

Weather Report, Weather Report

Album of the Week, September 24, 2022.

It’s not clear how it was that Wayne Shorter, Joe Zawinul, and Miroslav Vitouš got together to form the jazz-fusion supergroup Weather Report. One story has it that Shorter and Zawinul, who we last saw together recording on Miles’ In a Silent Way, started working together and then recruited Vitouš. Another story has it that it was Shorter and Vitouš, fresh off their collaboration on Super Nova, recruited Zawinul (who had collaborated with the Czech bassist on his eponymous album Zawinul). Regardless of who recruited whom, the three together then were joined by drummer Alphonse Mouzon, who had been working with pianist and Coltrane collaborator McCoy Tyner, and the percussionists Don Alias and Barbara Burton. As the recording progressed, Alias found Zawinul’s directive tendencies constraining and left, to be replaced by Davis collaborator Airto Moreira, otherwise mononymically known as Airto. So it goes.

But what was the music like?

I will be honest: growing up, I thought I knew what the music was like, and I avoided it for as long as possible. My earliest exposure to live jazz came from the inclusion of a jazz-fusion band, which if memory serves was called TRADOC Rock, at the US Army Fourth of July concerts at historic Fort Monroe in Hampton, Virginia, where my family would inevitably go to celebrate the holiday. I remember as a kid liking the rhythmic, guitar-heavy music, but as I grew older I found it increasingly cheesy. I thought that was what fusion was. And I knew that Omar Hakim, from Sting’s first band, had played in Weather Report, so I assumed that the band had that same kind of rock inflected jazz.

Then of course I heard Miles. First In a Silent Way, which I loved, and then Bitches Brew, which I was more ambivalent about; then tracks from Live-Evil on the Columbia compilation that covered Miles’s whole career with that label (highly recommended, if you can get your hands on it), which I found utterly fascinating for its combination of rock, funk, and electronic augmentation. When I reflected that Weather Report contained the mastermind behind In a Silent Way and the equally mesmerizing Wayne Shorter, I decided to check out their first album. It was completely different from my expectations in every way.

The first track, “Milky Way,” sounds like a transmission from Voyager. The sound is otherworldly, with distant echoes of harp and wind; I’ve read that they made the sound by closely miking piano strings, then having Zawinul hold down chords while Shorter blew his soprano sax directly at the soundboard, invoking sympathetic resonance. Whatever they did, it’s an utterly unique sound and completely hypnotic. In another world, they would have recorded whole albums with this technique; here, after just over two and a half minutes of transmissions from the Solar System, they’re on to…

“Umbrellas,” which more nearly fits the fusion stereotype, and features a severely fuzzed out electric bass, which (it’s hard to tell) may or may not be doubled by distorted synth lines from Zawinul, over a driving rock backbeat from Mouton and Airto. Shorter’s soprano sax plays the melody over a series of chords from Zawinul, then the beat abruptly shifts into a slightly faster, fatter funk groove, with Shorter and Vitouš trading phrases over Zawinul’s chords. Shorter’s solo comes in as if transmitting from another world, the soprano sax descending in a different mode, and passes into silence before the group drops back into the opening beat and theme. The sound world passes quickly, in only three minutes—a theme on the album, which seems determined to fit in as much experimentation as possible.

“Seventh Arrow” opens with a brisk burst of sound led by Shorter over a Zawinul electric piano line that you’d be forgiven for mistaking for Herbie Hancock. It’s the tune most like Miles’ work on the album, sounding a little like a group improvisation from the Bitches Brew sessions; that it was composed by Vitouš, who never collaborated with Miles, seems beside the point. Unlike the first two tracks this is a group workout, with each of the three lead players throwing licks back and forth over a ferocious bed of percussion.

The shift into the reverie of “Orange Lady” is a complete contrast. Zawinul’s echoing Fender Rhodes line, possibly supplemented with additional effects, leads into a plaintive solo line played on unison soprano sax and Rhodes. This might be the track closest in its genetic makeup both to In a Silent Way and the experiments on Zawinul’s self-titled album; unsurprisingly it is the first track on the album solely credited to him. After the contemplative opening, the gears shift and Vitouš lays down a bass line that climbs in open fifths back and forth, while Shorter plays a modal line that descends from the fifth of the scale down to the second and back, before the group comes back together to the opening reverie. It’s a stunning work closing out side 1.

“Morning Lake”, the second of the two Vitouš compositions on the album, sounds a lot like Zawinul with a funk twist and is a spiritual cousin to the more contemplative numbers on Infinite Search. With Airto (and possibly Alias and Burton) conjuring bird sounds and the bass line rippling out like circles in the water, the effect is a tone poem that sounds like a continuation of “Orange Lady.” Indeed, if there’s a criticism to be levied at the album, it’s the similarity of the tunes at its center, but the trance they induce is rewarding in its own way.

“Waterfall,” Zawinul’s turn at evoking this evolving musical concept, centers on a rhythmic repetition of the third of the scale in the piano while the other players explore around it. In some ways the composition anticipates minimalism and the works of John Adams, or even some of the later, more lyrical works of Philip Glass, as the bass and soprano sax alternate in an octaves-apart duet. It’s a more delicate and in some ways optimistic exploration, with Zawinul’s keyboard line evoking, in turns, a stream, an oboe, and a music box.

“Tears,” the first of two Wayne Shorter compositions on the album, eschews some of the avant-garde explorations from Super Nova in favor of pure melody — first lyrical in the saxophone, then a swerve into funk, then wordless song, courtesy of Alphonse Mouton. The overall effect is stunning and anticipates Shorter’s later 1970s work with Milton Nascimento. The track transitions seamlessly into “Eurydice,” which dives into the world of Super Nova with a group improvisation on a chromatic theme. The album ends with the group still searching.

With Weather Report, Zawinul, Shorter and Vitouš invented a new tonal language and created a new jazz brand. The original band would not stay together—Vitouš left during the recording of the third album and a rotating cast of percussionists played with the band during this career. But the group would stay together for nearly 15 years, promoting a brand of jazz fusion that was heavily influenced by R&B and world music. The tonal language that they invented—synths and keyboards, innovative percussion, serene soprano sax—stood well apart from many of the other practitioners of jazz fusion, not coincidentally including Miles Davis, who continued to explore his own fierce brand of musical innovation. We’ll hear from him next time as we close out this long series on Miles and his legacy.

You can listen to the album here:

Miles Davis, In a Silent Way

Album of the Week, August 20, 2022

There are liminal moments in music history, moments that stand perched on the edge of a knife, where music stands to move one way or another. Where it can fall back and recapitulate that which came before, or fall forward into something strange and new. Miles Davis stands alone among 20th century musicians because he embraced these liminal moments, and his finest albums came from them. There may be no greater such moment in his lengthy discography than In a Silent Way.

We have heard him searching for a new sound through the last few weeks, with the addition of guitar on Miles in the Sky, the use of electric keyboards on Filles de Kilimanjaro, the use of two keyboardists on Water Babies, and throughout a shift toward songwriting that moved much of the complexity of the arrangements down into the rhythm section, leaving the horns free to embrace uncluttered melodic moments. Those movements in his writing came together as Miles continued to record through November of 1968, but none of the recordings would see the light of day until years later. However, the sessions added one important musician to the lineup on the second to last day, when the players were joined by Joe Zawinul on the organ.

Josef Zawinul was a Swiss-born musician and composer who had come to the United States in 1959 to attend the Berklee College of Music, but dropped out after a few weeks to tour with Maynard Ferguson. He came to the notice of audiences in Cannonball Adderley’s group, where he composed in a more harmonically advanced version of the soul jazz that Adderley was playing. He came to Miles’s attention and was asked to join him in the studio to contribute ideas. This swelled the number of keyboardists in the group assembled in the studio to three, since Chick Corea and Herbie Hancock were still both working with Miles.

The group took a hiatus from the studio until February 18, 1969, where they came together with another new face: the English guitarist John McLaughlin, who had come to the States two weeks previously to play in The Tony Williams Lifetime. McLaughlin reportedly idolized Miles and was petrified to meet him in the studio. So these musicians, together with Wayne Shorter, Tony Williams and Dave Holland, formed the group with which Miles embarked into a new world.

The music that the group recorded on that day has the sound of exploration, but for years there was no way to hear the tracks as originally recorded, because Teo Macero was on hand to lend the finishing touch to the masterpiece by combining several songs into two album-side-long sonatas. (You can hear the individual tracks on The Complete In a Silent Way Sessions, which I highly recommend.) Miles had paid close attention to the studio work of the Beatles and Jimi Hendrix; this was the first recording where he embraced the studio as another instrument in the process.

“Shhh/Peaceful” comprises the entirety of Side One, and opens with the sound of both new members at once: an arpeggiated chord in McLaughlin’s guitar over a suspended minor chord in Zawinul’s organ. From there the melody unfolds in the guitar over the three keyboardists, anchored by the relentless pulse of Holland’s bass coming up a fourth and by Williams’ consistently steady rock pulse. The group comes to a pause, a silence that’s broken by Williams and Holland, and then everything starts again, this time with Miles bringing a major-key melody to the front above all the complexity, over a bed of chords in the electric pianos and organ. The echoing effects created by Herbie Hancock’s Fender Rhodes in particular lend a distinctive sound here, one that I’ve written about in the past as “jazz in inner space.” As with earlier works like “Fall,” the rhythm section circles around to the theme between solos, as Miles, then McLaughlin, and finally Wayne Shorter take a turn.

Because of Teo Macero’s work, when I first heard this music in my first year of college, I assumed that it must have been through-composed. How else could the musicians have recapitulated that opening so precisely? With the knowledge that the sonata form was constructed at the tape in the studio, rather than in sheet music, my astonishment at listening to the work is redirected to the brilliance of the improvisations that constitute the repeated sections. This is a group that listens closely to each other to produce those miracles of sound.

The second half of the album is a similar sonata, “In a Silent Way/It’s About That Time,” constructed around two different soundscapes. The title song began life as a Joe Zawinul composition that was meant to evoke the sounds of the Swiss Alps. Translated into Miles’ horn and the electric keyboards and guitar, the music is less Alpenhorn (though that inspiration is unmistakable when you listen for it) and more Also Sprach Zarathustra. This is a statement of the discovery of a new world, and Miles is our guide.

Once Miles concludes his statement of the theme, there is a pause and a shift, and we are in a different place yet again. The “It’s About That Time” portion of the track is outwardly a more straightforward rock tune. But even here Miles plays against expectations, with the chorus shifting into a modal blues, in patterns of three measures stated in Chick Corea’s electric piano with support from Dave Holland and Joe Zawinul’s organ. John McLaughlin plays a free improvisation over the ground laid down by the rhythm section, and then Zawinul brings forward another counter-melody that locks into the groove.

It is at this point that Wayne Shorter steps forward with a dramatic solo, for the first time on record played on the soprano sax rather than the tenor. Wayne had started to play on the soprano in the very last 1968 recording session of Miles’s group, and it quickly became one of his signature sounds. Lines that in the tenor would have had a more searching, visceral quality here seem to float serenely, providing a powerful contrast to the rhythm section below. There may have well been a practical reason for the use of the soprano sax, as the higher register would have punched through the rest of the instrumentation more easily. Whatever the reason, Shorter’s work on the soprano sax became virtually synonymous with early jazz fusion. The improvisation draws to a close with Miles blowing an incandescent solo above the group motion. The side draws to a close with a restatement of the “In a Silent Way” theme, again cut together into the track by Teo.

In a Silent Way pointed the way to the sound of future Miles groups, while keeping one foot in the past with the yearning, open sound of the solos. In the early 1970s he would add additional percussionists, foreground the guitar more, and change the personnel frequently, but the basic combination of horns, electric keyboards, electric guitar and bass, and drums would be the instrumentation on which he built jazz fusion, starting with the very next album, Bitches Brew. My record collection is shy on Miles fusion recordings, though there will be one more before all is done. But we’ll hear from other members of the quintet, and other Miles alumni, in their solo recordings, starting with next week’s entry.

You can listen to the album here:

Miles Davis, Water Babies

Album of the Week, August 13, 2022

We’ve talked about how Miles and his band—er, bands—spent a lot of time in the studio between mid-1967 through 1968, recording the sessions that became Sorcerer, Nefertiti, Miles in the Sky, and Filles de Kilimanjaro. But those albums aren’t the whole story. There was enough material left uncollected from these sessions to fill several albums. And in 1975, Columbia Records began filling them.

At that point, Miles had retired—temporarily, it turns out—due to “health reasons.” In this case the euphemism was at least partly accurate. His hip pain, still present after the replacement he had done in 1965, was worsening. But he was also suffering from the rock and roll lifestyle that he embraced (spoiler alert) following Bitches Brew, and his addictions to alcohol and cocaine almost certainly played a role in the decision to retire.

Whatever the cause, Columbia started looking in its vaults and realized it had a huge number of unreleased tracks, so they queued up the process of releasing them. One of the first sets to come out is today’s album, Water Babies. Recorded in two sessions, one with the Second Great Quintet following Nefertiti and one with Chick Corea and Dave Holland joining Tony, Miles and Wayne following Filles, and with all but one track composed by Wayne Shorter, the album is a fantastic transitional document that sheds light on what the quintet got up to among the other sessions we’ve heard. (Note: this review was written from the LP, so omits “Splash,” another Wayne Shorter tune that closes out the CD and digital versions of the album.)

In the case of the title track, they were recording a masterpiece. “Water Babies,” recorded the same day as “Nefertiti,” is a tense modal waltz that features all the trademarks of the quintet: telepathic handoffs between the horns, brilliant solos, and a genius rhythm section that elevates the tune to the next level. Like some of Shorter’s other comppositions, this one was released in versions both with Miles and with his own band; we’ll hear a very different version of the track soon.

The same group recorded “Capricorn” six days later. It’s a looser track that ambles without rambling, somehow. Anchored by Ron Carter’s brilliant walking bass, both horns go far out in solos that are unanchored by chords, as Herbie lays out for all but the choruses and his right-hand solo. The stylistic approach is a more relaxed version of the quintet that both foretells the genial humor of “Pinocchio” and looks forward to some later

“Sweet Pea,” the last of the numbers from the 1967 Nefertiti sessions, is a melancholy ballad that opens with Miles freely improvising over the rhythm section, and gradually moving into time, prodded by the accelerating exaltations of Tony Williams’ drums. Wayne Shorter’s solo is sublimely meditative in the spirit of “Iris” and “Miyako”; Herbie Hancock’s statement that follows is another in the series of proof points that the composer of “Blind Man, Blind Man” need cede no ground to Bill Evans or other subtle artists of the keyboard.

The second half of the album, recorded in a session in November 1968, features the Filles quintet, plus Herbie Hancock. At this point Miles had begun to explore the sound possibilities of multiple keyboard instruments, so we get to hear both Chick Corea’s chunky electric piano sound and Herbie’s Fender Rhodes under Miles’ initial free exploration of the harmonic space in the opening of “Two Faced.” An extended solo by Herbie follows, with the rhythm section leaning into a rock inspired riff by way of Tony Williams’ polyrhythms. A brisk Wayne Shorter solo follows over the sounds of the two electric pianos playing against each other, tossing riffs and sounds back and forth. When Miles’ trumpet returns, he and Shorter continue the duality theme by tossing phrases back and forth to each other, returning them extended, slurred, blurred, but otherwise still recognizable. Corea’s solo at the end seems to point the way to a different direction, with some of the atmosphere of Hancock’s electric piano but more of an incisive bite.

“Dual Mr. Anthony Tillman Williams Process,” which is sometimes mislabeled as “Dual Mr. Tillman Anthony” on reissues, The solo non-shorter composition on the record, this appears to start as an improv by Miles and Williams passing bars back and forth, Holland and the rhythm section pick up on the idea and morph it into a blues that wouldn’t be out of place on a later Herbie Hancock record, as we’ll see in a few weeks. Miles doesn’t return to take a solo for another four or five minutes, and both he and Wayne lean into the blues. The track ends as a meditation on the theme by the rhythm section. It’s a brilliantly tossed off bit of joy.

For a “compilation album,” Water Babies hits some pretty high notes. Far from scraping the barrel, it appears to open the door to a vast storeroom of possible discoveries from this incredibly fertile period in Miles and the quintet’s discography. We’ll hear the next official release in that series next time.

You can listen to the album here:

Miles Davis, Filles de Kilimanjaro

Album of the Week, August 6, 2022.

So we have now come to the last of the great albums of the Second Great Quintet. Although there was, chronologically, at least one more set of recordings from the group to come, and although many of the quintet members would record with Miles on one or more of his next albums, and although several tracks on the album feature a slightly different quintet!—still we must count Filles de Kilimanjaro as a significant milepost along the twisting road of Miles’ recorded output.  It is simultaneously the end and beginning of something, and in it you can hear how the polyrhythyms that appeared on Miles Smiles, the inversions in improvisational structure that he pursued in Nefertiti and the excursions into outright funk that surfaced on Miles in the Sky began to coalesce into something strange and new. It is also harder to write something new about Filles, for much the same reason, so I will have to settle for giving you a personal highlights tour, and you will have to agree to pursue with me my thesis, which is that Filles de Kilimanjaro discovers at least as much praise as is customarily heaped upon Kind of Blue.

The sessions that recorded Filles commenced four days after the last session for Miles in the Sky. Miles was restless, as we have established in the review of that album, and while one might assume that the funky lead-off track, “Frelon Brun (Brown Hornet),” would immediately follow the recording of “Stuff,” Miles and his band began with “Tout de Suite,” “Petits Machins (Little Stuff),” and the title track, all dense explorations of sound that bear strong family resemblances to “Footprints,” “Nefertiti,” and “Fall.” These sessions continue until June. There is a break, then a session on September 24 in which Chick Corea replaces Herbie Hancock on electric piano and Dave Holland sits in for Ron Carter. They record “Mademoiselle Mabry (Miss Mabry)“ and “Frelon Brun.” 

What motivated Miles to change up the personnel of the quintet? It may have been motivated by the members’ own restlessness. Carter apparently left of his own accord during the recordings, and Hancock was dismissed, supposedly for returning late from his honeymoon. One suspects, given the restlessness of Miles’ work, that he was also interested in incorporating new sounds, which he did with a vengeance from the very first track.

“Frelon Brun” is a mighty funk, with the one-two punch of Dave Holland’s slightly pitchy electric bass line doubled in places by Chick Corea’s electric piano over an absolute tsunami of drums from Tony Williams. The chorus is almost insouciantly stated over the bass line by the horns, and then Miles takes a commanding solo that rips through and over the rhythm section. Miles sounds energized and vital, and plays off the sounds of the rhythm section. Wayne Shorter’s tenor solo brings the sound into a minor mode, but is no less propulsive for that, finding a moment of levitation over Holland’s bass line and Corea’s alternating chords. When the sax drops away, Corea gets a moment of relative calm to explore the minor tonality between the chords, in a way that pursues the melody right back into a recapitulation of the theme. The overall effect is something like showing up to a black tie event in denim and leather, which one suspects is what Miles had in mind. It was this track that was the first from MIles’ great quintets to grace one of my mix tapes, once upon a time, in no small measure due to the aggressive blending of genre that the track demonstrates.

By contrast, “Tout de Suite” is on somewhat more familiar ground, though high ground indeed. Instead of Corea’s edgy electric piano tone, we get the round, bell-like sounds of Herbie Hancock’s Fender Rhodes, in perfect lock step with bass and drums. The horns enter in a modal melody that might not have been out of place on Sketches of Spain. Ron Carter’s electric bass line leads the way through the chord progressions of the opening chorus, as the horns explore a high suspension that never quite resolves, which leads into a quietly agitated dialog for piano and bass, over which Miles improvises a solo that moves from the minor tonality of the rhythm section back to the major mode of the chorus and around again. As he explores different rhythms — an ascending scale here, a smeared tone there — they follow and support him until he exits on a long suspended note, a minor third above the tonic. Wayne Shorter’s solo explores some of the bursts of dialog between the piano and the bass, serenely rising to a recap of the melody over the churning explorations of the rhythm section, then fading away as they explore an extended solo section in the agitated rhythm before returning to the swing of the chorus for a recap. The melody of this track, with its alternating blues and searching melodic line, has been my post-concert driving music at Tanglewood for many years as my heart rate drops back to normal following a performance and I look skyward into the stars above Lenox.

“Petit Machins (Little Stuff)” is, by contrast, simultaneously more straightforward and more complex, with an introduction in 11/4 that drops into a hard 4/4 almost immediately. The arrangement bears some of the hand of Gil Evans, who had been in discussions with Miles about incorporating some of the sounds of Jimi Hendrix into Miles’ repertoire. Marcus Singletary has written about the rhythmic complexities of the solos, but the track is remarkable for the continued forward melodic thrust, driven by the motif of the chromatic ascending four-chord pattern from the rhythm section. The track concludes with a second solo by Miles on the theme that he invented in his first solo, serving as coda to the tune.

This brings us to “Filles de Kilimanjaro,” whose circularity brings to mind “Fall” and “Nefertiti,” but whose sense of shifting meter, tonality, and insistent funk bass line situates it firmly as its own creature. The return to a major mode for the melody, together with the ascending melodic line in major fourths, fifths, and sixths, contributes to the sense of openness and exploration, while the continued descending motif in the piano and bass keeps the track grounded. It has the feel of a kaleidoscope constantly opening as the horns continue to return to the theme over and over again, bookending solos by Hancock, Miles, Shorter, and Miles again, who finds a second theme (which more than hints at the theme from “The Flintstones”!). Carter and Williams provide the constant pulse and ground over which the solos climb and descend. If this is the last statement, chronologically, of the second great quintet, it’s a worthy summation.

If the title track sums up what has gone before, “Mademoiselle Mabry (Miss Mabry),” the closing statement of the album, seems to come from some glorious afterworld. The longest track on the album, the opening melody is in a straightforward major key, over constant polyrhythmic improvisation by Tony Williams. The tune, which has been identified as a free rearrangement of Hendrix’s “And the Wind Cries Mary,” circles around in the rhythm section for several minutes before the horns enter, as Williams enters in a dialog with Corea and Holland. A note should be made here of Williams’ total mastery on this track, moving from subtle brushwork to rolling patterns of three in the snare to dryly humorous and understated single hits on the cymbal to punctuate the other players, it’s a miracle of understated magnificence. Miles’ solo, when it eventually enters, is one of the purest bits of melody on the record. Unlike with “Filles,” the melodic improvisation carries on for several minutes, without the circular return to the chorus. When Wayne Shorter comes in, he is in a similar melodic space, with his tenor showing the same purity of tone and conception that he was soon to bring to his soprano sax playing. Both horns bring a sense of complete serenity to the performance.

All in all, Filles de Kilimanjaro lives up to its packaging: it is in fact replete with “Directions in Music.” For those who welcomed the Miles Davis Quintet’s exploration of the frontiers of post-bop, it is the end of a long journey but of course also the start of something new. Miles’ restless recordings would continue through the summer of 1968; we’ll hear the next fruits of their sessions, together with a last love note from the Second Great Quintet, next time.

You can listen to the album here:

Miles Davis, Miles in the Sky

Album of the Week, July 30, 2022

Last time we checked in with Miles, he had spent weeks in the studio in June and July of 1967, following months of scattered recording sessions that produced other tracks, to record Nefertiti. Following the final July session which produced “Fall,” “Pinocchio” and “Riot,” the quintet took a break. They got back together for a series of European dates in October and November. But when they re-entered the Columbia Studio in December 1967 and January 1968, things were different, in a lot of ways.

First, the group that did the December 4 session, which recorded the track “Circle in the Round,” was a sextet, and the instrumentation was different. Herbie Hancock played the celeste instead of the piano, and Joe Beck joined the group on electric guitar. Beck returned for a session on December 28 that recorded a track called “Water on the Pond,” this time with Hancock on electric piano and harpsichord. A session followed on January 12 to record a song called, “Fun,” with Hancock still on electric harpsichord and Bucky Pizzarelli on electric guitar. (None of these tracks were released until years later.)

What sparked the change? It’s possible that Miles was explicitly influenced by rock music. He was clearly listening to it — he named Miles in the Sky as an homage to the Beatles’ “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds.” But I think the changes in Hancock’s keyboards, which subsequent interviews with Hancock have made clear were at Miles’ instigation, show that Miles was sonically restless. He was looking for a new sound.

The next session of the group found them still recording with a guitarist; this time George Benson joined them on electric guitar, recording a track called “Paraphernalia.” The group recorded sporadically through January and February, and finally came back into the studio over three days in May, minus Benson, to record “Country Son,” “Black Comedy,” and “Stuff.” The first two featured the traditional instrumentation, while “Stuff” had Herbie Hancock on electric piano and Ron Carter on electric bass.

It’s this track that opens Miles in the Sky, the album eventually released from this string of sessions. And it’s a radical difference from what came before, sonically and compositionally. The Miles-composed tune, while still in a minor mode, is a much more accessible, even funky composition. And Hancock’s Fender Rhodes is the sonic ingredient around which the rest of the band gels. (I’ve written and put a mix together about the sounds Herbie could get out of that Fender Rhodes.) But there are unguessed depths in the track, and the genius of “Stuff” is the fluency with which it veers from straightahead funk that wouldn’t be out of place on some of Herbie Hancock’s early 1970s albums to timeless oceanic jazz and back.

The secret is that Fender Rhodes. Herbie has said, “One thing I liked about the Fender Rhodes electric piano: the drummer didn’t have to play soft for me, he could play loud and I could turn the volume up.” But there’s way more than just volume going on with what he does with “Stuff.” At the end of each chorus, there is a section taken out of time where you can hear the chords of the Rhodes going up and down a chromatic progression, and it sounds a little like outer space—even coming out of his own solo, which reminds the listener that this was the guy who wrote “Watermelon Man.” Miles’s solo grooves in a way that he hadn’t done in a long time, but Wayne Shorter’s solo locates more firmly in the free jazz of the preceding few albums. Ron Carter’s bass provides a constant heartbeat throughout, as Tony Williams’ drum patterns explore and float free under the horns. In a different world, with a different sax player, “Stuff” might tilt all the way over into James Brown flavored R&B. But this is thinking funk, and it’s all the more remarkable for that.

“Paraphernalia,” written by Wayne Shorter, is the sole track on the album on which an electric guitar appears, courtesy of George Benson. You’d be forgiven for being underwhelmed. Benson’s role is mostly rhythm and texture, providing some of the crunch that the Fender Rhodes provided on “Stuff.” But it’s a novel ingredient in the sound, and it prompts a different approach from the players on what might otherwise have fit nicely alongside the tracks on Nefertiti. In particular, Carter locks in with Benson’s groove, leaving Williams free to pulse and explode throughout. During Benson’s brief solo, the piano drops out, leaving a guitar trio with bass and drums that wouldn’t be out of place on a Wes Montgomery album—until those horns bring back the transitional chords again. Shorter’s composition borrows the trick he used on Nefertiti of keeping the space for solos wide open but contained with frequent repetition of the chorus. As a result, the track feels like an exercise in synchronicity, with seemingly diverse approaches and ideas coming together in one briskly simmering pot. Or something.

Tony Williams’ composition “Black Comedy” opens side two, and is a more straightforward tune. But it’s a burner, and Wayne Shorter’s solo finds the core of the stuttering, stopping and starting melody. In fact, on both this track and Miles’ closer “Country Son,” the band seems to double in intensity. On the former, the core chord progressions keep coming back to raise the temperature of the band. “Country Son” seems to start in the middle of something (and may have been a segment of an extended jam), with the band coming in on a white hot tidal wave of sound, led by Miles’ muted trumpet. We haven’t heard Miles lean into the mute in many records, as that approach was largely left behind by the time the second quintet started, but here it’s back in force above a volcano of sound from Tony Williams. Then Miles seems to call the band to pause as he surveys the landscape, and they shift gear into a vibrant, swinging melody, led by Wayne Shorter’s sax. There’s another shift as Herbie Hancock takes the solo in a sort of gnomic piano trio, with flavors of Latin jazz, funk, and free jazz all coming together, shifting from one to the other at the drop of a hat. There was real telepathy among the rhythm section of the quintet, and hearing them exercise it here is remarkable. When Miles comes back, sans mute, the final statement of the theme is made over that Latin-flavored counter-melody. And there’s just a little taste of a melody that we’ll hear in earnest in a few weeks.

Miles wasn’t done recording after these sessions. The group was back in the studio four days after the final session for Miles in the Sky and would be there through the end of June. We’ll hear the fruits of those recordings, and the next big change in Miles’ group, next time.

You can hear all of Miles in the Sky here:

Miles Davis, Nefertiti

Album of the Week, July 23, 2022

1967 was a fruitful year for the Miles Davis Quintet. After a quiet period in the winter and early spring (during which Wayne Shorter recorded Schizophrenia), Miles entered Columbia’s New York studios with the quintet to begin recording on May 9, 1967. He would be in the studio for a total of ten sessions between May 9 and July 19, and recorded material that appeared on three albums, of which we’ll talk about two in this column. The first four sessions yielded tracks that ended up on the underrated Sorcerer album, which sadly isn’t in my vinyl collection. But session number five yielded two tracks: one that would sit unreleased for years, and the title track for the group’s next album, Nefertiti.

After Miles Smiles and the subsequent tours, Miles increasingly featured Wayne Shorter’s compositions on his albums, and Nefertiti has three. It begins with the title track, which moves around so many modes in its opening statement that it’s hard for sure to say what key it’s in (C sharp?). It pivots between keys, in a trick that we’ve seen Shorter do before in tunes like “Miyako.” Here the trick is that the horns repeat the melody over and over again while the rhythm section improvises beneath, the well-honed rhythmic experiments of Williams supporting the increasingly elaborate melodic explorations of Hancock. The session reel (released on the Columbia “bootleg” set Freedom Jazz Dance) captures the dialog between the band after the first take:

MILES: “Hey man, why don’t we make a tune … with just playin’ the melody, no play the solos…”

WILLIAMS: “Right, now, that’s what we’ve been doin’…”

A similar vibe pervades the next track, Shorter’s achingly lovely “Fall.” Here there are solos, quiet introspective moments from both Miles and Shorter and limpid romanticism from Hancock, but they are brief and the band returns again and again to the chorus. Ron Carter’s bass anchors the melody, which seems to spiral around a fixed point in itself like a leaf in an updraft. And Tony Williams’ drums punctuate the shifts in sound as the band goes from one chorus to the next, in search of something unnamed.

The moment of endless search is brought to an abrupt end with the opening notes of Williams’ “Hand Jive.” A slightly more conventional straight-ahead post-bop number, the tune burns from the start, with Miles taking the first solo over Carter and Williams and crafting a melodic statement from a chromatic line that rises and falls. Wayne Shorter picks up the rising and falling motif to begin his solo, and follows it around the block and down the street just to see what happens with it. Ultimately what happens is a sort of recapitulation of the melody, before Herbie Hancock picks up the melody with a solo in the right hand that returns to the opening progression, punctuating his solo with two chords in the left hand before the horns restate the chorus. It’s an exploration that takes the sound of the band to a completely different place.

They continue exploring this new sound in “Madness,” a Herbie Hancock composition that finds the horns opening in unison over stabbing chords in the piano. Miles’ solo finds him in similar territory to “Hand Jive,” once again soloing over Carter and Williams alone. Hancock’s entrance presages Shorter’s, who again picks up an idea left by Davis and takes it forward. Here the interplay between Shorter and Carter, who picks up and restates ideas from Shorter within a bar of their first utterance, is the thing to listen for. When Hancock enters next, Carter and Williams step way back; it’s as if Hancock’s entering chords briefly stop time, before a series of repeated runs in the piano restarts the clock. The final restatement of the chorus comes over Hancock’s repeated chords, but this time instead of an insistent stabbing they are more of an ebbing throb as the madness recedes.

“Riot”’s melody is stated in the horns over another distinctive melodic hook from Hancock. This time Shorter takes the first solo before passing to Miles, but Hancock’s insistent chords continue underneath. Eventually Miles mimics Herbie’s rhythm, then lays out as the pianist plays a compact and muscular solo. The final chorus ends with Hancock repeating the main figure by himself again. The whole thing takes only a hair over three minutes—possibly the shortest work in the Second Great Quintet’s book, certainly the most terse.

The transition to “Pinocchio” is a study in contrasts. Easily Shorter’s most playful composition for Miles, the opening motif of four descending notes repeats over and over again, descending and ascending dizzyingly as the horns seem to careen around the corner over Herbie’s chordal statements. As though preparing to repeat the experiment of “Nefertiti,” the horns play the chorus unmodified four times as the rhythm section builds in intensity, before the piano and saxophone drop out and Miles plays the first solo. His statement briefly underscores the melodic development before returning to the main chorus. Then Wayne Shorter finds a similar path through the chord progression, before returning to that four-note motif. He repeats it six times, in five different keys, before returning to the chorus. It’s a brilliant trick and one that he would subsequently use to open the arrangement in live performances. Herbie’s solo calls out another rhythmic motif before the quick return to the chorus and a fade out on a vamping, repeated chord.

A measure of the alchemy that this band had together can be grasped when listening to the alternate take that is included in the 2000s remaster of the album. It’s played at about half tempo, and sounds a little like “Nefertiti,” with similar improvisation by the rhythm section. One can imagine Miles suggesting that they apply the same trick they did to “Footprints” on Miles Smiles and speed it up to increase the energy. However they decided to get there, the finished version is one of the most spectacular tracks in the Quintet’s repertoire, with the players grasping ideas from each other at breakneck speed.

All in all, Nefertiti is a uniquely satisfying album in the output of the Quintet. Not as experimentally untethered as Miles Smiles, not as grim as Sorcerer, and more assured than E.S.P., it finds the quintet at the height of their collective power. But things were about to change in the next batch of recording sessions, beginning with the instrumental sound of which the quintet was composed. We’ll hear the first exploration of that sound next time.

You can listen to the whole album here: