tonywilliams – Jarrett House North

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:

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:

Herbie Hancock, V.S.O.P.

Album of the Week, October 19, 2024

What comes after a career arc like the one Herbie Hancock had from the early 1960s through 1976? We’ve talked about many of his Blue Note Records albums during this run—Takin’ Off, My Point of View, Inventions & Dimensions, Empyrean Isles, Maiden Voyage. We’ve written about a great many of his appearances as a sideman during that same time—Speak No Evil, The All Seeing Eye, Adam’s Apple, Schizophrenia, Life Time. We’ve written about his great run with Miles, from the early live appearance on Miles In Berlin through the untouchable run of E.S.P., Miles Smiles, Nefertiti, Miles in the Sky, Filles de Kilimanjaro, Water Babies and In a Silent Way. And we’ve touched on some of what he did in the late 1960s and 1970s, from more sideman appearances on Infinite Search, Zawinul, Road Song, Red Clay, Straight Life, First Light, Moon Germs, Sunflower, In Concert, Vol. 1, and Penny Arcade to his own classic Fat Albert Rotunda.

And, amazingly, that’s only a fraction of what he got up to during this time period. In particular, my record collection doesn’t cover the two great next phases of his career following Fat Albert Rotunda. First, he put together a sextet featuring Buster Williams on bass, Billy Hart on drums, Bennie Maupin on reeds, Julian Priester on trombone, and Eddie Henderson on trumpet, and recorded an amazing trio of out-there albums Mwandishi, Crossings, and Sextant. (I included one of the songs from Mwandishi on my collection of late-1960s/early-1970s “space jazz” from a few years ago; one of these days I’ll add that amazing album to my physical collection). And then he made a hard left turn into jazz-funk with his Headhunters band, famously after observing that his Mwandishi band and their impeccable explorations didn’t get nearly as much excitement from the audience as when the Pointer Sisters entered the venue on roller skates. The Headhunters band made six albums all told.

And after that? Well, in June of 1976, Herbie mounted a retrospective concert at the Newport Jazz Festival in New York City. Billed as covering three different stages of his career, the performance featured the then-current evolution of his jazz funk band, the reunion of the Mwandishi sextet, and what was billed as a reunion of the Miles Second Great Quintet—including Miles. That would have been quite a feat as Miles had temporarily retired by then, and had stopped playing acoustic jazz in favor of increasingly “out there” explorations of jazz fusion. On the night of the concert, a notice on the door stated that Miles couldn’t perform, and that appearing in his place would be trumpeter Freddie Hubbard. So effectively, what appeared during the first set was an amalgam of the Second Great Quintet and Herbie’s band on Maiden Voyage.

“Piano Introduction” features Herbie alone—not on the acoustic piano, but on a Yamaha Electric Grand Piano. He improvises across a series of chords, landing on a suspension on the 6th of the scale, then begins the opening chords of “Maiden Voyage” to the excited applause of the audience, who also give audio cues through their cheers as Ron Carter, Tony Williams, Wayne Shorter, and Hubbard take the stage. Carter, who by now has evolved a glissando technique on the strings that, along with amplification, renders his bass a more forthright presence, plays along with eight bars of the intro, before the rest of the band joins (the crowd cheering as the horns play the opening melody). Wayne Shorter takes the first solo, and at first it’s colored by his own experiments in jazz fusion; then he starts playing in bursts and runs, and it’s as if we’re hearing something like a straight line from his late-1960s works. When Freddie Hubbard comes in, it’s similarly informed by his precise, nuanced Blue Note playing rather than his jazz-funk work from the immediately preceding run on Columbia, which was even more commercial than his CTI work (which is really saying something). Throughout both horn solos, Carter keeps a steady double-time pulse, Williams drops bombs a-plenty, and Herbie sounds like he’s having the time of his life digging into the corners of this signature composition. A breath as Hubbard drops back to the slower tempo, and Hancock takes his solo, with a more prominent Carter underscoring the shifts in tonality with one glissando after another. Hancock likewise moves into the faster tempo until the wave crests and the band settles back into the rocking groove at the beginning.

The second number by the quintet, “Nefertiti” loses a little of its strangeness from its original incarnation with the Second Great Quartet; Hubbard isn’t quite as sure of his approach as was Miles, but the rest of the band carry ahead with gusto. Shorter in particular seems to have grown into the tune since its original writing, playing it at a brisker tempo, and the rhythm section freely innovate under it as on the original recording. At the very end, Hubbard gets comfortable enough to play with it, entering behind Shorter and setting up a dialog, and only then do we get to the dark strangeness at the heart of the tune.

Hancock gives us a tongue-in-cheek introduction to the players, declaring each of them “the greatest” as they enter with a quick solo, and then settling into a groove that becomes “Eye of the Hurricane” (also from Maiden Voyage) upon Shorter’s entry. He rips through a blistering improvisation that turns the corner into the quick chordal runs of the tune. Hubbard then rips a lightning fast solo, alongside which Hancock locks into a telepathic dialog. Shorter returns with another super-fast solo, playing runs at about twice the speed of Carter’s walking bass, before slowing down into a different rhythm and finally passing to Herbie. He follows the path of general mayhem that the others have blazed until, as though at a lookout point, he locks into a different groove entirely before hurtling back down the hill, as it were. The other players drop away as only Hancock, then Carter and Williams, go on playing in the relative stillness of the “eye.” You find yourself marveling that these musicians had never played together in this full configuration (though certainly the individual players had all collaborated many times over the years), and also that all of the above happened just on the first two sides of this double live album!

The Herbie Hancock Sextet, also known as the “Mwandishi” band, takes the stage with “Toys,” which actually predates the band, having originally been recorded on the Speak Like a Child album with a different lineup of players. That may explain why it feels like a completely different mood than the uncompromisingly avant-garde numbers the sextet was known for on their original three albums, but it serves as a pretty effective link from the material performed by the Quintet. Sonically, Eddie Henderson’s flugelhorn comes across with less of a brilliant edge than Freddie Hubbard’s trumpet but is no less adventurous. The sextet (after an introductory interlude in which Hancock introduces Henderson, Bennie Maupin, trombonist Julian Priester, Billy Hart, and Buster Williams as “the finest” and gives their Swahili as well as Christian names), then pivots into “You’ll Know When You Get There,” still the most mind-expanding of Hancock’s explorations into what he has called “space jazz.”

While not as long as the album version, this live rendition manages to get to the same strange heights. The composition alternates two different heads, or main melodies. The first melody features a melody in the trombone and flugelhorn in rising fourths and fifths that is repeated several times until suddenly everything stops and Henderson’s flugelhorn plays through a distorted effects pedal, as though disappearing down a dark tunnel—or entering a space warp. The band burbles beneath his improvisation until they come together in the second main melody, a five note pattern that rises in a major scale and falls in a minor one, that then links back to the first melody. Where in the album version there’s a solo opportunity for Priester and Maupin, here the tune ends on a quiet note from Hancock’s synthesizer.

The last side of the album is given over to jazz-funk with what’s here called “the Herbie Hancock Group,” consisting of “Wah Wah” Watson on guitar, Paul Jackson on electric bass, Bennie Maupin on saxophone, James Levi on drums, Kenneth Nash on percussion, and none other than Ray Parker Jr., of “Ghostbusters” fame, playing second guitar. “Hang Up Your Hangups” and “Spider” are tight jazz-funk workouts, unfortunately sounding dated to the modern listener thanks to the chicken-scratch guitar. There’s plenty to like in the sound, but it’s no Mwandishi band, and it doesn’t reach the improvisational heights of the quintet.

Some versions of jazz history call out V.S.O.P. as a pivot point in the history of the music, in which an audience that had grown fatigued with the ongoing jazz funk fusion trends of the decade could celebrate the resurgence of a more traditional style, paving the way for other neo-traditionalists to claim the stage as the 1970s turned into the 1980s. What seems clear is that Hancock, always the most commercially canny of the major jazz artists of the 1960s and 1970s, saw that there was an audience for the music—one that could fill an arena, as opposed to just a club. He would leverage this observation again, as we’ll hear next time.

You can listen to this week’s album here:

Tony Williams, Life Time

Album of the Week, October 5, 2024

Of all the members of Miles’ second great quintet, the one we’ve written the least about is the youngest member, drummer Tony Williams. Just 17 when he joined the quintet in the spring of 1963, he was already a modern jazz veteran, having begun playing with brilliant free jazz saxophonist Sam Rivers when he was just 13 years old. A gig with Jackie McLean at age 16, during which he recorded on Jackie’s pivotal album One Step Beyond, brought him to the attention of Miles Davis, and the rest is history.

Or so the story goes. But Williams continued to record sessions with other Blue Note artists, and shortly after he joined Miles’ quintet, he recorded his own sessions at Rudy Van Gelder’s home studio in Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey, on August 21 and 24, 1964. The earliest of those sessions, collected as Life Time, are our subject today, and they make for more adventurous listening than the work his bandmates in Miles’ group were recording (though some of those same bandmates joined him). The record features Sam Rivers on tenor sax (four months before Williams would join Rivers on his pivotal Fuchsia Swing Song), Bobby Hutcherson on vibes and marimba, and Herbie Hancock on piano, with Ron Carter, Richard Davis, and Gary Peacock joining on bass with the different configurations of players.

Album opener “Two Pieces of One,” true to its title, comes in two parts, “Red” and “Green,” that comprise the entirety of side one. A sparely led group featuring just Williams and Rivers backed by both Peacock and Davis on bass, the work highlights Williams the composer rather than the virtuoso drummer. It opens with the sax and basses playing the opening melody chords, opening up to a repeating figure in Richard Davis’s arco bass, and then closing down again with a splash of Williams’ cymbals. The two bassists duet, with Peacock’s fierce pizzicato over Davis. Then finally something approaching a “normal” post-bop sound, with Rivers improvising over a steady yet kaleidoscopically evolving beat from Williams. This segment closes with another duet between the basses, who seem to be discussing what’s just transpired, and a repetition of the opening chorus.

“Green” opens with a duet between Rivers and Williams, in which Rivers throws out at least six or seven melodic ideas around the central progression. Williams falls back to cymbals and accompanies Rivers as he slows in contemplation, then surges forward when Rivers finds a major melody. Williams takes a solo next that’s notable both for the rhythms and the timbres he explores across his snares, toms and cymbals. At the very end the basses rejoin as Rivers recapitulates what originally seemed to be an improvised idea from the opening but which actually turns out to have been the composed melody; the track closes with a fiercely propulsive solo from Williams.

“Tomorrow Afternoon” has something much more like a traditional melody, performed as a trio by Rivers, Williams and Peacock. Rivers leads the charge with a bright melodic statement, but underneath Williams and Peacock are constantly shifting, and a pulsing pattern from Peacock leads into his rapid solo, which is joined by Rivers before Williams swings the trio back into the opening theme. It’s a concisely argued bit of free jazz.

“Memory” is a different beast entirely. Williams and Bobby Hutcherson play polyrhythmically, trading ideas and beats, for the first part of the piece. Herbie Hancock steps in about three minutes in, improvising along Hutcherson’s melody in the right hand before jumping to another pattern. Hutcherson takes a solo that sounds like something out of Steve Reich’s “Six Marimbas,” which Hancock responds to with another idea, which seems to spur another recollection from Williams. The whole work plays out as these interchanges of ideas and melodies bounce from one instrument to the other.

Hancock introduces “Barb’s Song to the Wizard” with the telepathic Ron Carter, who plays the melody as Hancock provides a rhythmic chord progression in the upper octaves of the piano. The players switch roles as they break into something like a somber waltz, then a ballad. Ultimately the track comes to a delicate close as you realize that Williams only appears as the composer here—an unexpectedly generous gesture from the young artist on his first album.

Williams reveals himself on this inaugural outing to be an inspired composer, albeit not in a traditional mode. His other album for Blue Note, Spring, is perhaps better known precisely because it has more recognizable song structures, but it’s still more “out” than most of what the Second Great Quintet recorded during this time… at least until later in the decade. Next up, we’ll hear more from a Williams bandmate who made a practice of blending approachable and ambitious.

You can listen to this week’s album here:

Herbie Hancock, Empyrean Isles

Album of the Week, September 21, 2024

Herbie Hancock’s 1960s Blue Note records were often a study in contrasts, with pure soul hits alongside deeply complex improvisations. Today’s record, made on June 17, 1964 at Van Gelder Studios in Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey, is the best example, featuring one of his best-known hits alongside a thirteen minute free jazz odyssey.

For this outing Hancock brought along the rest of the rhythm section from Miles’ Second Great Quintet, with Ron Carter on bass and Tony Williams on drums. For a horn, he asked another member of the young Blue Note roster, trumpeter Freddie Hubbard, to join (this time playing cornet). We’ve listened to a lot of Hubbard’s 1970s output, but at the beginning of his career he was as melodically and technically advanced a player on his instrument as anyone in the world, and in many ways this record is a showpiece for his playing as much as it is for Hancock’s compositions.

“One Finger Snap” is a case in point. Opening with the trumpet and piano playing the slightly knotty theme together, the trumpet takes a brilliant solo turn, with Hancock supporting and anticipating him at every step, including Hubbard’s cascading “sheets of sound” like repeated arpeggios which show up as a motif at several points. Carter supports the proceedings with a walking bass line that hugs the high end of the octave and drops down to give a little more color under Hubbard’s line, then drops back down into the lower ranges when Herbie takes his solo. Hancock does some surprising things with his line, not content to merely arpeggiate or play scales (though he does some of this) when he can jump by thirds and sixths within the line; in the context of an ascending run causing the listener to mutter, “wait, what was that?” Throughout Tony Williams keeps the time and also adds accents as a kind of running commentary. When the melody returns, Hubbard finds a second tune for a moment before rejoining the group, only to fade away with everyone but Williams who provides a thunderous but tuneful solo before the final chords.

“Oliloqui Valley” begins with a bass obbligato from Carter that wouldn’t feel out of place on one of Freddie Hubbard’s 1970s CTI albums. The melody shifts from minor mode to major between the first and second chorus, and then gives over to a solo from Hancock that foretells some of the modes he would investigate on the very next Blue Note outing. Carter plays more freely here, supporting the major key choruses with an octave suspension and exchanging bursts of energy with Williams. When Hubbard enters, it’s in his melodic mode, demonstrating the brilliant clarity of tone and easy technique on swift runs that made him so in demand as a sideman at this stage of his career. Carter takes the next solo turn, with some pauses in the melody that he fills with portamento and chordal beats before the band takes a deep breath with him and re-enters the chorus.

“Cantaloupe Island” is far and away the most well-known track on this album. Opening with the familiar chords of Hancock’s piano opening over a simple bass figure by Carter and a straight ahead drum pattern on the cymbals and snare by Tony Williams, the main theme is Freddie Hubbard’s, a modal blues that circles around the minor root of the scale. Initially the trumpeter plays it cool, but as he goes through multiple choruses he gets increasingly fiery, ultimately carrying the tune into about four or five different modes. When Herbie Hancock’s solo comes he brings the temperature back down, as the rest of the band drops to a simmer around him. Hubbard’s return likewise plays it cool again on the chorus, which is one and out; the track fades out on the rhythm section continuing to stoke that magnificent bluesy engine. Special note must be paid to the snare hit that Tony Williams hits after each chorus (the first one is at around 34 seconds). Just a paroxysm of cool.

We’re in a different isle entirely for “The Egg,” literally. Aside: I’m not sure how I got this far into the review without mentioning the bonkers story by Nora Kelly that makes up the majority of the liner notes, literally laying out the mythology of the Empyrean Isles, but with “The Egg” I feel I have no recourse but to refer to Kelly’s description:

On clear, windy days, when the breezes are strong enough to dispel the vapours, it is possible to discern the smooth, shining, dome-shaped peak of The Egg, a mountain about which the strangest mists and tales are woven. Veiled, inscrutable bastion of strength, its silent presence suggests ever-present danger, dormant perhaps, but ominous in its potential. And occasionally, when some vast tremor from the bowels of the earth shakes the waves and sends towering mountains of water across the placid Eastern Sea, people say that The Egg is ripening and becoming impatient at its long confining.

Later reissues of the album have suggested that Kelly’s story came first and that Herbie wrote the tunes to match. I suspect that’s balderdash. Whatever the case, “The Egg” begins as a free improvisation in 9/8, with the rhythm section locked into a circling pattern as Freddie Hubbard pushes at the edges of it, as if trying to break free. The pattern eddies and shimmers, changing key and morphing into a four beat as Tony Williams finds new rhythmic patterns. Herbie and Freddie exchange patterns, then bleats, and there seems to be hope that the pattern will break—right up until the point that it reforms. Then a clearing: the bass drops out for a minute, then reenters with a bowed line that stops time, with occasional pings from the piano and Williams’ cymbals echoing off the chamber walls. The bass gives way to Hancock playing an almost sonata-like solo, followed by splashes of arpeggio, then a fast chase-like melody that almost feels like incidental music to a film noir. It’s slippery, though, and keeps morphing until it seems to melt into a puddle, then reforms into the film music, then into a careful exploration, the explorer’s snare-drum heart echoing in the silence. But then: the bass insistently starts back into a repeated pattern, the drums splash up around us, and the piano comes back to that circular motif from the beginning. And the trumpet, which once pushed against the gyre, now rides it as we realize there is no escape.

Empyrean Isles, maybe more than any of Herbie Hancock’s other 1960s Blue Note records, revealed the breadth and depth of his compositional and performing skills. The follow-up, Maiden Voyage, would cement this reputation through a combination of brilliant tune writing and fantastic arrangements. But Hancock was not the only great compositional mind in Miles’ second great quintet. We’ll hear from another such member next time.

You can listen to this week’s album here:

BONUS: Donald Byrd did a pretty funky version of “Cantaloupe Island” on his Up With Donald Byrd in 1964—with Herbie Hancock on piano and arrangements. Here it is:

BONUS BONUS: While Us3’s album Hand on the Torch arrived in the era of sampling, there were also some live horns to go with the band’s substantial re-purposing of “Cantaloupe Island” as “Cantaloop (Flip Fantasia)”:

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:

Miles Davis, Miles Smiles

Album of the Week, July 9, 2022

When Miles finally re-entered Columbia Studios with the Quintet, in October 1966, it would be poetic to say that they picked up where they left off. In fact, the group had to rebuild some of the telepathy they had showed on E.S.P. due to the long period of time between their performances at the Plugged Nickel in December 1965. Shorter had followed up his time in the studio with Bobby Timmons to cut Adam’s Apple and to appear on Lee Morgan’s Delightfulee. Herbie Hancock had recorded a movie soundtrack, Blow-Up, for the film by Michelangelo Antinioni. Tony Williams had recorded his first album as a leader for Blue Note, the avant-garde Spring. Ron Carter had recorded in sessions led by Shirley Scott, Bobby Timmons, Pepper Adams, Eddie Harris, Wes Montgomery, Gábor Szabó, Stanley Turrentine, Chico Hamilton, and (just three days before these sessions) Oliver Nelson. But, despite the triumphant return of the Quintet at the Plugged Nickel, Miles didn’t get them back into the studio until the fall. What emerged out the other end of the two days in the studio was like nothing that had ever been heard before.

If you listen to the finished record, which features studio chatter and what sound like a few glitches and false starts, it’s easy to imagine you are listening to the quintet jamming live in the studio, first take after first take. However, thanks to the release of Freedom Jazz Dance in Columbia’s Miles Davis Bootleg Series, we now know that the quartet sweated each arrangement, with “Freedom Jazz Dance” itself requiring more than ten takes to get right. Small wonder. This is music of high complexity that sounds effortless and joyous.

Some part of that sound of effortlessness comes from Miles speaking to the producer, Teo Macero, after several of the takes. Macero had worked with Davis from the beginning of his Columbia days, but Miles had avoided working with him following the failure of the sessions for Quiet Nights with Gil Evans in 1963.

The very first track, “Orbits,” a Wayne Shorter composition, sets the tone for the album as the two horns state a complex figure in unison, but freely, without meter, over a descending bass line by Carter. When the whole band comes in, they sharply swing into meter, with Miles playing an unhinged solo. A notable feature of the work is what’s missing: Herbie Hancock does not appear until several bars into the song, and he plays only a right hand melody. The other instruments are left to sketch out the chords via the melody and improvisations. It’s an unusual approach but one the quintet visited a few times during this album.

The next track, “Circle,” is a Miles Davis ballad that may be his tenderest performance on record. Peter Losin notes that Davis based the tune on the chords from his own “Drad-Dog,” from Someday My Prince Will Come, but taken out of order. Herbie Hancock has much of the heavy lifting, opening the ballad with arpeggiated chords and later playing a version of the Bill Evans inspired piano that reinforces the influence of classical piano technique on this generation of players. In between, Wayne Shorter’s solo opens with what is almost a bridge section, with his first eight bars in the relative major key (F to the opening D minor). But he too comes back to the opening tonality, then pivots between the two, as though he is literally circling the key. It’s a stunning – and highly melodic – solo. Carter stays suspended above the tonic for large sections of the solos but again brings complex melodic statements alongside Shorter and Hancock, and Williams performs some of his most delicate brushwork to date underneath all. Listening to the outtakes and rehearsals from the recording sessions, we learn that Teo Macero stitched the album version together from two complete takes of the song, with the final solo and descending line from Miles coming from a later take (along with his voiceover at the end of the track, “Let’s see how that sounds, Teo”).

The next track might be the most written about from the sessions. “Footprints” is a Wayne Shorter composition that originally appeared on his album Adam’s Apple, recorded in February 1966. On Shorter’s album the track is a slow ballad in six-eight time, with a main theme stated in a structure that appears inspired by classic twelve bar blues (AAB).. Here the arrangement is different, with Carter opening with the main theme on the double bass, Hancock entering with different chords, and the horns playing the lead melody at approximately double the tempo of the original version. But the thing that gets you, and gets this track written about, is the drumming. Williams plays a complex polyrhythm throughout that plays the triple meter against the duple, underscoring the tension between the two meters in the 6/8. He opens in a swinging three and switches to two at the end of the first chorus, pivoting back and forth on the cymbals and emphasizing the rhythm of the main melody on the rest of the kit. It’s wild, constantly shifting, and somewhat hypnotic. Carter plays the opening progression (5-1-5-1(octave)-3(minor octave)) throughout the entire work. Shorter states a countermelody at the opening of his solo in the relative major, then explores the corners of the minor melody until he hands off to Hancock, whose chords sketch the space around Carter’s bassline. The horns return with a restatement of the melody that purges almost all of the swing feeling of the original tune, repeating it three times before leaving it to the rhythm section. Williams and Carter take a turn before the horns come back for one more statement of the melody, then the rhythm section joined by Hancock finishes the track. Miles says to Teo, “You can take any part of that you want.”

The second half of the album opens with Shorter’s “Dolores,” which is a freer composition formed from a statement and two inversions of a melodic pattern (112351216). Following Shorter’s exposition of the theme, he and Miles restate it, trading off on the melody, then Miles is off. Carter and Williams underpin the action throughout, but Hancock is not heard until he takes a solo following Shorter—again, played only in the right hand, with no chord voicings heard. The band repeats the theme over and over, with Williams getting increasingly frantic underneath and Hancock dropping an occasional chord for emphasis, until Miles plays an ascending scale and Williams brings it to a end with a drumroll. It’s an astonishing, albeit brief, display of casual perfection.

“Freedom Jazz Dance” is something else again. Before “Bitches Brew,” before Miles’ later explorations, I would argue the deeply syncopated descending bassline that Carter plays throughout qualifies this as Miles’ first funk song. Eddie Harris gets writing credit here, but the quintet rearranged the song in rehearsal and across eleven takes, inserting space at the end of each melodic statement in the chorus so that the rhythm section can be heard. During Shorter’s solo he and Carter trade melodic lines back and forth, and Williams alternates playing a straight rock-like 4/4 and funky New Orleans style drum patterns enlivened with lots of cymbal. Herbie Hancock puts a pin in the bassline with a single chord on each repetition of it in the chorus, and finds a second melody in his solo statement that always reminds me, just a little bit, of “Sesame Street.”

The closer, Jimmy Heath’s “Ginger Bread Boy”, has a similar feel in the melody, but lacks the funky rhythm underneath. Instead, the final track feels brisk, as though Miles is determined to sum up the ideas that the quintet has explored elsewhere. Wayne explores the descending pattern at the end of the melody in his solo, finding a place in the melody where he halts time briefly on a high blue note. Again Herbie limits himself to exploring the melody in the right hand with his solo, this time with both Carter and Williams breaking into a straight 4/4 pattern before resuming their brisker rhythms. Interestingly, Herbie avoids playing the root of the scale in his melodic exploration. One wonders whether Miles had made a comment to him (along the lines of the infamous “butter notes” episode) prior to the solo. The horns return to restate the melody three times, then Williams and Carter play the final pattern out for another minute.

The last sounds we hear on the record are Miles’ voice: “Teo, play that. … Teo … Teo … Teo…” The whole thing is a brilliant exploration of the chemistry between the players, and while fully rehearsed sounds fully spontaneous. Miles Smiles is one of the jazz albums that I return to over and over again, and each time hear something new.

You can listen to the album here.

Herbie Hancock, Maiden Voyage

Album of the week, June 18, 2022

Listening to the opening of “Maiden Voyage,” it’s hard to believe that it was recorded just two months after E.S.P.—and with three of the same members. It’s also hard to believe that it opens Hancock’s fifth solo album in four years—to say nothing of his work with Miles.

The band that entered Van Gelder Studio in Englewood Cliffs on March 17, 1965 bore some strong resemblances to the one that had recorded with Miles at Columbia Studios in Hollywood on January 20-22. In addition to Hancock, Ron Carter and Tony Williams returned to the rhythm section; they had performed with Hancock on his preceding album, Empyrean Isles, as had Freddie Hubbard. George Coleman, who had played with Herbie on the live recordings of the Miles Davis Quintet from Carnegie Hall, My Funny Valentine and “Four” and More, rounded out the group on tenor sax. But though many of the players on the album had played with Miles, this album is distinctively Herbie Hancock’s work.

I write a lot about chordal structure, rhythmic interplay, and other facets of jazz improvisation in this series, but there is one essential element without which no jazz album can reach greatness: melody. One of the few weak points of E.S.P., to my ear, is the lack of distinct melodies on the second side, after the strong opening of the title track, “Eighty-One” and “Little One.” There’s no such weakness here, and “Maiden Voyage” opens the album with one of the all time great jazz melodies. It’s simple, persistent, and yearning, with a simple tune—up a fourth, then down a whole step and a four note run up a minor scale. But it’s slippery, with the same pattern repeated at a different part of the scale a few bars later, and the whole thing is set over suspended seventh chords, evoking a sense of mystery. It conveys everything about the sense of wonder of the beginning of a solo journey, combined with the mystery of the ocean. It is also unforgettable, and a substantial step forward from the Herbie Hancock who wrote the calculated hit tunes “Watermelon Man” and “Blind Man, Blind Man.”

The whole track is a remarkable performance, but especially worth listening to is Tony Williams’ drum work under Hancock’s solo. Through a combination of cymbal work, snare rolls, and a bass drum heartbeat that slightly anticipates Ron Carter’s bass line. It’s an amazing evocation of the ocean, complete with creaking timbers and salt spray, and yet it’s utterly placid on the surface.

From the tranquility of the opening track we are immediately dropped into a storm. “The Eye of the Hurricane” provides an opportunity for Freddie Hubbard to demonstrate the combination of keen melodic sense, rhythmic complexity, and sheer technical acumen that would become his signature sound for the next fifteen years. His solo is astonishing. Coleman’s tenor solo following is less technically precise but is propulsive and carries the energy forward into Hancock’s solo, which is carried out almost entirely in the right hand as the chords drop way back, providing a feeling of calm at the center of the work. It’s a neat trick, but it makes me wonder what the piece would sound like in the hands of McCoy Tyner.

Hancock’s “Little One” follows, and he wisely rearranges the solos a little compared to the version on E.S.P. Here, both horns play the opening phrase, while Hubbard takes the following climb upward over Coleman’s lower accompaniment, and Hancock plays the yearning part that was Wayne Shorter’s on the earlier version. When the waltz comes in, George Coleman creates an entirely new melody over the opening, demonstrating the versatility of the tune and his own unique melodic gift. Freddie Hubbard follows the trail blazed by Coleman but quickly takes the melody to his own territory before passing it back to Herbie Hancock. His work on the solo finds him deep in impressionistic territory. Indeed, with his rhythmic chords alternating with melodic runs, he sounds like a livelier Bill Evans—a distinctively new voice from Hancock, who stretches out in several new directions on the record.

The furthest out direction he visits comes to the fore on “Survival of the Fittest.” What was I saying about melody? Here the hook is memorable but not hummable: slowly crescendoing chords, a saxophone line that sounds a lot like the opening to Wayne Shorter’s “Yes or No” (recorded seven months earlier), a scream in the trumpet, stabbing chords from the horns, a quick fragment of a melody, and then… burnout. Not in the pejorative sense, but in the sense that Branford Marsalis’s band has used it. Solos stretch past boundaries of bars and choruses and into different times and tonalities, anchored by Williams’ frantic drumming. Even here Hancock finds lyrical melody, but in a constantly shifting tonality and tempo. Finally the rest of the rhythm section falls away and it’s just Herbie playing a scherzo over chords that rock back and forth between two minor modes. It’s stunning and time stopping, and when Tony Williams comes back in he maintains the timeless feel with rolling drums in the deep. The horns come back in six bursts, restating the opening melody before abruptly halting.

And then: a surprise. “Dolphin Dance” swings gently and offers us the second most memorable melody of the record, an ascending run from the third to the fifth of the scale then down to the second, an easygoing pattern that continues with the same intervals but then starts from the tonic, the sixth and the third. It’s a vivid image, suggesting dolphins breaching out of the water one after another. And the soloists follow. Freddie Hubbard breaks out of the second repetition of the melody, taking flight for a moment, swimming along with the melody, then kicking it into a new key before passing it to George Coleman. The saxophonist swings his solo hard before going into double-time and eventually employing something like Coltrane’s “sheets of sound.” Hancock brings it back to the circling pattern, touching the other points of the scale before generating a new melody that reaches upwards, pauses, then climbs once more. The final recapitulation underscores the serenity of the melody, drifting into the distance.

It’s a fitting sendoff for the album, which stands as one of the high points of Hancock’s work—and of Blue Note Records in general. Next time we’ll hear a very different work from another member of Miles’ quintet.

You can listen to the album here.

Miles Davis, E.S.P.

Album of the Week, June 11, 2022.

In Miles in Berlin, we heard Miles’ new quintet in action on his standard repertoire, but that’s only a part of the story of this new group. The compositions on E.S.P. , recorded less than a month after Wayne Shorter’s Speak No Evil, brought new vitality to the sound of the group and spurred higher levels of performance and contribution from all members.

The title track, “E.S.P.,” provides a strong sound out of the gate and a sonic link to Miles’ immediately proceeding studio albums, with a memorable melody comprised of a concise downward triad that’s immediately repeated, then followed by a sketch of a different chord. It’s a memorable, simple melody but one one that provides chordal space for the group to explore. Indeed, throughout Miles’ solo, Hancock exchanges chordal fragments in response to Miles’ bursts of melody, blurring the edges of the melody and shading the performance further toward free jazz without ever losing the curve of the melody. It’s an astonishing performance, displaying the telepathic playing that famously provided Shorter with the track’s name.

The next tune, “Eighty-One,” is credited to Ron Carter and Miles Davis, and shows one of the few hints of soul jazz crossover in the group’s repertoire. The tune is again memorable and melodic, and at first reads as an eight-bar blues — only the repeated sections are only two bars each rather than the normal four. The dramatic “hit” on the horns at the end of the second two-bar pattern shows unexpected humor, particularly in later live performances when the band would sometimes lay out an entire measure after the horns! Carter plays a loping bass line that keeps the rhythm for the group, leaving Williams free to add fills in different patterns around the soloists, including following Miles into a brisk swing partway through the trumpeter’s solo. Shorter’s solo uses sixths and ninths to stretch the harmonic series and also adds a swung section. Hancock takes a short solo of only two choruses, exploring melodic patterns and calling out the blues of the track in the second chorus. After a recapitulation of the melody, Carter and the rhythm section play a coda that brings the track to a close.

Herbie Hancock’s “Little One” follows. The slow ballad shifts in tonality through the first few chords and a melodic pattern in minor from Shorter before Miles enters with an inversion around the relative major of the key. Shorter follows with a modal gesture in a higher octave and Davis chases him around the key. The ballad then kicks into a brisker three with Davis exploring the tonality sketched out by the opening. Carter provides a consistent ground in the tonic, leaving Williams to underscore the tempo on the cymbal with both brush and stick. Shorter’s entrance finds different melodic and rhythmic paths, with Hancock following him closely throughout. Generally on this album but especially here, Shorter finds a different voice. If earlier solo works like “JuJu” could strongly bring Coltrane to mind, his playing here demonstrates a more wistful, meditative side that is quite distinct from the elder tenor. Hancock’s solo turn explores the tension between the triple meter and the more straight ahead melody, and is accompanied by some unique support from Williams, who plays brisk rolls on the snare. The track ends with a recap, with Davis and Shorter finishing each others’ musical thoughts, followed by another short outro from the rhythm section and a final recap. The overall performance runs from a tender, impressionist melody to a more articulated yearning, thanks in no small part to Shorter’s solo. The tune would remain in Hancock’s solo repertoire; we’ll hear it again.

“R.J.,” which closes out the first half of the record, is another Carter composition, with Shorter and Carter jointly stating the gnarly theme over a free accompaniment by Williams, before Miles takes the first solo. Again, the playing is free, but returns to the same progression of six chords from Hancock in different inversions, rather like striking chimes in an unusually tuned carillon. Shorter’s solo follows Miles’ patterns but picks up the second half of the theme, repeating the descending motif before passing the ball to Hancock. Herbie elaborates the chordal pattern around the repeated chord clusters before Shorter and Carter jointly close the track out. It’s a bravura performance.

Miles’s “Agitation” opens the second half, beginning with a massive drum solo from Tony Williams. It’s been observed that the Second Great Quintet flirted with rock sounds long before the band electrified, and Williams’ solo provides evidence of that, with the drummer dropping in and out of meter before settling into a rapid alternating beat on the cymbals, keeping pace with Carter’s brisk bass accompaniment. Miles’ solo states the melody, sounding rather as though it’s stumbling downhill on a rocky slope before picking up velocity, dropping into a half-time restatement over a swung beat from Williams and Carter, and handing off to Shorter. Wayne’s solo chases the melody through some sheets of sound before briefly restating the melody in quarter notes, establishing a brief ground, and yielding ground to Hancock, whose solo lays bare the alternating chords under the melody in a series of arpeggios. The entire track is both playful and ominous, as the return to the melody is rendered somewhat claustrophobic.

Wayne Shorter and Miles’s “Iris” follows. A ballad that infuses the harmonic experimentation on the rest of the record with a palpable longing, it finds the band in high telepathic form, with the interplay between Hancock and Williams under Miles’ solo especially remarkable. Miles is in tender form here, though some of the agitation of the prior track persists. Shorter echoes the descending pattern that ends Miles’ solo, and steers the ballad into a more plain spoken territory. It’s worth noting that while Miles famously encouraged his sidemen to subtract unnecessary notes and embrace space in their playing, here it is Shorter whose solo seems to breathe, taking the track new places. Special attention must be paid to Carter’s bass line under the final statement of the melody by Shorter; an apparently simple ground reveals flights of countermelody on closer inspection.

“Mood,” another Carter composition, begins with the bass pattern that ended “Iris,” but finds the group more terse, slowly oscillating between F major and C minor in a slow three. Miles almost whispers as he sketches the outline of the chords, and Shorter whispers back, playing around the edges of the melody. On another record it would have been showstopping; here, coming after “Iris” and “Little One,” it feels like a recapitulation, like the band is restating the ideas throughout the album before gathering their energy for a big step forward.

It would be another year before the band returned to the studio for that step. Miles’ personal life would force a pause, as he had hip replacement surgery that had to be repeated after a fall later that summer. Also, his temper, famously erratic at the best of times, would finally spur Frances Taylor Davis, his first wife and the model on the cover of the album, to divorce him. But the members of the band weren’t idle; next time we’ll hear how E.S.P. pushed Herbie Hancock to his own mid-1960s Blue Note masterpiece.

You can listen to the album here.

Miles Davis, Miles in Berlin

Album of the Week, May 28, 2022

Jumping forward a year from last week’s Herbie Hancock album, we find another Miles Davis quintet on tour in Berlin. Much is the same as when we last saw Miles with a small group: the format is the same, much of the repertoire is the same. But the players are completely different, and that puts this date on a different planet.

After recording Someday My Prince Will Come and the two live albums that followed, Miles’ rhythm section had split to form a piano trio. Miles spent much of 1962 trying to make an album with Gil Evans and his orchestra, but the result (Quiet Nights) was enough of a disappointment artistically and commercially that it put an end to that long collaborative string between the two men. Miles formed another quintet, this time with George Coleman on tenor, Victor Feldman on piano, Frank Butler on drums, and a young bassist named Ron Carter, who had debuted a year previously in a trio with the avant-garde Eric Dolphin and Mal Waldron. They recorded the album Seven Steps to Heaven, which stands out in Miles’ early 1960s output as a cohesive, well played recording with strong tunes (mostly written by Feldman). But Feldman and Butler didn’t want to move to the East Coast, and by May of 1963, Miles had recruited the young Tony Williams, then Herbie Hancock, to join the trio.

The new quintet played at Philharmonic Hall (recording the live albums My Funny Valentine and Four and More), and toured widely through the end of 1963 and most of 1964, but Coleman wasn’t clicking. Miles had played in mid-1963 with another tenor player, Wayne Shorter, who had been the chief composer in a well-regarded run with Art Blakey’s Jazz Messengers. Miles finally convinced Shorter to join his group in the summer of 1964, and on September 25 they played a concert at the Berlin Philharmonic. It would be the first recording released of the new quintet.

The repertoire may have been familiar but the performances weren’t. From the opening of “Milestones,” Tony Williams signals that something is different, playing a polyrhythm under the opening cymbal ride and dropping bombs at unpredictable points under Miles’ solo. The challenge invigorates Miles, who briskly runs through modal scales until he finds a countermelody, all the while playing with bebop velocity. He finishes the solo, then hands off to Wayne Shorter, who similarly embraces Coltrane-like runs, then drops into a swinging turn for a moment only to return to the trapeze. Over Hancock’s block chords, he embraces another run, then drops back into a swinging pattern, then imitates the block chords in the piano, playing in triplet groups, breaking down the melody into bursts of sound, Williams and Carter imitating him along the way. It’s a remarkable opening, and completely transforms the standard. This would be the rule for the night.

“Autumn Leaves” is opened with an atmospheric solo by Miles, with the barest sketch of chords in the piano underneath, until he suddenly locks into a swinging groove. Williams follows the groove, keeping the beat with the brushes but introducing patterns which Miles reflects in the trumpet, then Herbie picks up in the piano. It’s simultaneously the most traditional and the most free performance on the record.

“So What” opens with Carter and Hancock trading off over another Williams polyrhythmic accompaniment in the cymbals. (Much of Tony Williams’ playing on this record makes me long for a meeting between him and Stewart Copeland.) Here Herbie’s chords take the changes into unfamiliar territory around the outside fringes of the mode. Shorter bends the melody and chords further as Herbie gives him more and more space to open things up, then comes back in with clusters of sound. Shorter’s performance here underscores one of the chief differences between him and Coltrane at this stage: both embrace a reaching style that uses runs of notes as a building block, but Shorter finds patterns of silence in the middle of his performance, as well as rhythmic patterns that form countermelodies. Throughout the rhythm section plays almost telepathically with the soloists.

“Walkin’” returns as a theme and becomes another brisk workout for the soloists. Here Miles picks up on Shorter’s trick from “So What,” varying the runs with alternating rhythmic patterns before yielding to Tony Williams for a drum solo. Throughout Shorter’s solo he and Hancock trade ideas, discovering a new melody and actually falling into the tag of the melody from “Milestones” before handing off to the rhythm section. In later years, Miles and his band would play long uninterrupted sets where the tunes would telepathically flow into each other, and this moment feels like a forerunner of that. Hancock takes a breath in his solo, decelerating with Williams into something like a blues by way of Debussy before accelerating back to the breakneck tempo of the opening over 32 bars. Finally, “The Theme” provides Carter with a brief spotlight followed by the emergence of yet another new melody courtesy of Herbie Hancock.

With this quintet, Miles had found musicians who challenged him and pushed him further to innovate, even as together they found something like a group mind. And this recording was just the very beginning. Soon Shorter would bring his compositional voice to the party, lifting the band to the next level. We will hear that voice in one of his early masterpieces next time.

(Note: This review is written based on the LP version of this live recording—in this case, a 1981 reissue of the original 1967 release. The full concert, which is available on CD and in streaming and downloadable version, also included a performance of “Stella by Starlight.”)

You can hear Miles in Berlin here.

Herbie Hancock, My Point of View

Album of the Week, May 21, 2022

Say you’re Herbie Hancock. You have, at the age of 22, released your first album for Blue Note Records, and it’s a hit. The single cracks the Top 100, and your friend Mongo Santamaria’s re-recording of it cracks the Top 10. You’ve demonstrated that you can compose soul jazz, modal jazz, and ballads. What do you do for an encore? Well, if you’re Herbie Hancock, almost a year to the day you get back in the studio, and you do it again, with a bigger band.

To call My Point of View similar to Takin’ Off is a little unfair. The writing is more assured and distinctive, for one thing. Where you could be forgiven for mixing up “Three Bags Full” and “Empty Pockets” on the first album, each tune on My Point of View is distinctive. And the orchestration is fuller. In fact, the band on this date reads like a Who’s Who of early 1960s Blue Note, with Donald Byrd stepping in for Freddie Hubbard on trumpet, Hank Mobley (fresh off his stint with Miles’ band) replacing Dexter Gordon, and Chuck Israels, who did not release albums for Blue Note as a leader but who would later anchor one of Bill Evans’ most essential trios, on bass. Two other Blue Note luminaries, the brilliant guitarist Grant Green and the cerebral composer and trombonist Grachan Moncur III, appear on half the tracks.

And on the drums: Tony Williams. Aged seventeen years and three months when he went into the studio, Williams was already demonstrating his genius behind the kit, keeping things boiling even on tracks that might have been sleepier ballads like “A Tribute to Someone,” and positively lighting up the stage on the modal burner “King Cobra.”

So where’s the similarity? Mostly it is in the consistency of Herbie’s compositional voice. When he writes a soul jazz number like “Blind Man, Blind Man”—written, as he says in the liner notes, as a conscious evocation of his Black childhood—or “And What If I Don’t”—you can immediately hear the kinship to “Watermelon Man” from his first record. They are still catchy tunes, but there’s not a lot of compositional development from one to the next.

I mean, yes, Herbie’s arranging prowess leaps ahead substantially. The guitar lick that Grant Green drops at the turn in the chorus of “Blind Man, Blind Man” is a note of genius, as are the thick blocks of chords that open “King Cobra.” But in the end, you’d be forgiven for thinking that both albums were recorded in the same delicious session.

The album was revolutionary in one way, though, at least for Herbie’s career; it introduced him to Tony Williams. By June of 1963, they would both be playing with Miles, whose next great quintet was beginning to take shape. We’ll hear the first recorded (but not first released!) album from that group next time.

You can listen to My Point of View here.