wayneshorter – Jarrett House North

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:

Wayne Shorter, Adam’s Apple

Album of the Week, October 12, 2024

Wayne Shorter as a composer in the 1960s was stretching his wings. Over the course of a few albums for Blue Note, he went from the Trane-inspired writings of JuJu to the incredible cool of Speak No Evil to the avant-garde leanings of The All Seeing Eye. For those who might have been expecting more of that latter album, recorded in late 1965, Adam’s Apple must have initially seemed a throwback. But this February 1966 recording, coming during the long break between E.S.P. and Miles Smiles, highlights two aspects of Shorter’s genius—his knack for a great melody and his prowess as a soloist. Supported by familiar bandmates Herbie Hancock, Reggie Workman, and Joe Chambers, the smaller forces on this album put a stronger spotlight on Shorter’s saxophone prowess, and it really shines.

“Adam’s Apple,” the lead track, is an insanely catchy blues that somehow answers the question “what if you combined the pop instincts of Herbie Hancock and Wayne Shorter on the same song?” The liner notes by Don Heckman call it a blend of jazz and dance music, but I think only in the sense that Vince Guaraldi’s “Linus and Lucy” is dance music (which it absolutely is). What’s striking here is Wayne’s solo, which manages to be bluesy and perfectly melodic without succumbing to the temptation to play all the notes, all the time. He leaves a lot of air around his playing in the arrangement, which Herbie happily colors with a soulful chord-forward accompaniment and solo. (This is presumably before Miles had the “butter notes” conversation with Herbie; his playing still has some of the exuberance of his earliest work here.)

“502 Blues (Drinkin’ and Drivin’)” is the sole cover on the album. Written by Jimmy Rowles, the work, despite the “party time” title, is unexpectedly subdued. It opens with a figure in Herbie Hancock’s piano for four bars, then continues with the tune, a ballad in A minor. Shorter’s solo seems to peek around the corner at us, wandering into a relative major for a brief moment before circling back to the original tone via a circular path, as if climbing a staircase. Herbie’s solo digs into the soulful corners of the tonality over the crisp swing of Joe Chambers’ snare and cymbal work.

“El Gaucho” opens with a brisk Latin rhythm in the bass and drums, leading us to ask whether a samba might be afoot. Perhaps one played by aliens; the tune takes us through five different keys, building on the same rhythmic backbone in each key, then rolling into a Wayne Shorter solo that seems to revel in hoquetus and interruption as much as it does in melody. The tempo is bubbly and the overall performance is too, with Hancock keeping things moving along. The pianist’s solo leans into the slightly Caribbean rhythms while also embracing chromatic movement between the different keys of the work. When Shorter returns with the melody, it’s as if to remind us of the mystery at the heart of it all—the tune circles around without resolution, constantly repeating and never really ending.

The most famous of Shorter’s compositions on the album is undoubtedly “Footprints.” Here in its first recording, about eight months before the Quintet essayed it for Miles Smiles, the tune is the same but the performance is totally different. For one thing, Wayne’s original tempo is more restrained than Miles’ (the evolution of which you can hear on Freedom Jazz Dance: The Bootleg Series, Vol. 5). This performance also swings more, led by Joe Chambers and Reggie Workman’s rhythm section. Again, we are in a blues, but one built on echo-like repetition throughout the main melody. Wayne’s solo pushes at the edges of that repetitive melody, finding other melodic patterns and at one point even beginning what feels like a “Love Supreme” like circle-of-fifths migration before handing back over to Herbie Hancock. Herbie plays an unusually verbose solo, responding to some of the “sheets of sound” like hints in the end of Wayne’s solo before finding a countermelody and alternate rhythm that seems to point ahead to the ingenious polyrhythm that Tony Williams famously found in the piece when the Second Great Quintet got into it. Reggie Workman’s solo finds unexpected scale runs in between the chords before the tune returns once more.

“Teru” is cut from a similar cloth to Wayne’s other great ballads from this period, looking back to “Iris” and anticipating “Nefertiti” and “Fall.” It’s contemplative and a quiet miracle, as Wayne and Herbie appear to read each others’ minds throughout the piece, which is played more as a duet with quiet rhythm section accompaniment than a solo with trio backing. One can only imagine what the Quintet would have done with this one; Joe Chambers is lovely in his solo but Ron Carter would have eaten this one up.

“Chief Crazy Horse” closes out the album (at least in the original vinyl release; later CD and digital reissues append “The Collector,” a Herbie Hancock composition recorded during the sessions but not issued until 1979, when it became the title track for a Japanese release of other Shorter odds and sods). The ending track is strong, with the rhythm section swinging through as though being suspended on swinging iron chains—moving, but with some serious momentum. Wayne subverts the climbing tune by diving down an octave at the opening of his solo and seemingly side-stepping into a completely different tonality; whenever Herbie piles on the chords, he responds with suspensions and slow moving notes, until the pianist gives room and he responds with a step forward, swinging through the changes. Herbie’s solo brings all the momentum forward, exchanging pounding chords with Joe Chambers’ truly apocalyptic drum rolls. This may be the only of Wayne’s compositions to dwell so happily in triplet meter; even when Herbie’s solo starts out in common time it soon finds its way to triples. The final melody, like “El Gaucho,” fades rather than ending; we imagine the chief riding into a desert sunset aboard a horse with waltz-like tendencies.

As Wayne’s impeccable series of small group albums on Blue Note continued through the decade, the cheery optimism of Adam’s Apple was soon to give way to the more abstract searchings of Schizophrenia and Super Nova. But this album stands as a milestone among Wayne’s 1960s output as a showcase for both his composition and his soloistic verve.

Next week we’re going to hop ahead about ten years, past the dissolution of the Quintet and the advent of jazz fusion, and check in with our players on the other side of that historic movement.

You can listen to this week’s album here:

BONUS: While “Footprints” was covered almost from the moment of its writing, the other compositions on Adam’s Apple are also endlessly coverable, and have been visited by young jazz artists in the past 20 years as they encounter Wayne’s legacy. I put together an alternate running of the album with covers of each of the tunes to show you what I mean. (Updated to point to an Apple Music playlist since one of the videos on the original YouTube playlist became unavailable.)

Wayne Shorter, JuJu

Album of the Week, September 28, 2024

Miles’ Second Great Quintet took a while to gel, and the hardest position to settle was the second horn. Miles had worked with John Coltrane in the first quintet, and whether through conscious comparison to that titan’s stature or by some other means, the saxophonists—including Hank Mobley and George Coleman—who joined the quintet would leave without making much of an impact. It took the arrival of Wayne Shorter in late 1964 to bring all the pieces together; we’ve listened to the document of that beginning, in the recording of a live performance of the quintet from September 1964 released as Miles in Berlin.

But Shorter was hardly sitting on his hands prior to joining the quintet. In April 1964 he recorded his first album as a leader for Blue Note Records, Night Dreamer. He followed this with today’s session, recorded August 3, 1964 at Van Gelder Studios in Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey, just about six weeks after Herbie Hancock’s session that became Empyrean Isles. Unlike Hancock’s session, though, JuJu featured not his bandmates in Miles’ quintet, but the rhythm section of a different saxophonist entirely: McCoy Tyner, Elvin Jones, and Reggie Workman, all of whom had worked with John Coltrane. In fact, Tyner and Jones had been in Van Gelder’s studio with Coltrane a week after Hancock’s band, on June 24, 1964, recording the tracks that would be released over fifty years later as Blue World.

The use of Coltrane’s rhythm section was controversial at the time for Shorter, who was fighting a mistaken impression in some quarters that he was only a Coltrane imitator. But JuJu would prove how wrong that impression was by foregrounding not only Shorter’s brilliant improvisation but also his compositional genius in a way that hadn’t been exposed to this point.

Shorter has said that “Juju” was inspired by African chant, which it may well have been, but what is most striking about it is its use of whole tone sequences in the descending opening note, over huge block chords from McCoy Tyner. Tyner takes the first solo, and it’s striking how without Shorter’s melodic line and that whole tone scale how normal everything sounds, at least until the head of the melody comes back. When I first heard this tune, on the Blue Note Best of Wayne Shorter compilation sometime in my early college years, I was struck by the echoes of Coltrane’s sound. Listening now, many years later, there’s definitely the sound of Coltrane’s band, but Wayne’s soloing is a completely different thing. He finds different corners of the melody and scale around which to improvise but never seems to disappear into the music the way that Trane was doing in 1964. The incredible moment for me in this work comes near the end, where after two minutes of intensely rhythmic soloing, Wayne surrenders to the harmonic imperative and simply blows a trill, then returns to his solo with octave jumps and shorter phrases as though he’s catching breaths. But he isn’t surrendering to the dance, as the inversion of the melody he plays at 5:30 shows; he continues to play consciously through the whole work. An intense drum break from Jones separates Shorter’s solo from the final choruses, and even here Shorter doesn’t bring the piece to a neat close; in the last 30 seconds he’s found a new melodic pattern, and Van Gelder fades out the end as the band still explores.

“Deluge” opens out of time, but quickly pivots into a swinging minor melody that is pretty conventional… until Shorter’s solo descends its scale from the supertonic and we’re reminded that we’re in the presence of a harmonic genius. Tyner’s solo remains grounded in the original chords. For a player who was himself no compositional slouch we can hear the difference in their imaginations and approaches to the music at this stage, as Tyner improvises across chords and rhythm while Shorter thinks melodically across a wide harmonic range.

“House of Jade” opens with a meditative arpeggio that might have appeared on one of Tyner’s later Blue Note albums, but was actually written by Shorter’s then-wife Irene. When Shorter’s saxophone enters it returns us to the moment with a 16 bar minor key melody that then transitions into a series of held suspensions, played as delicately as possible. The reverie lasts even as Shorter and the band take the melody into a double-time section, then back into the slower reflection to close.

“Mahjong” opens with that greatest of gifts, a sixteen-bar Elvin Jones drum solo in which we get to hear his full harmonic and rhythmic command of his instrument. Nat Hentoff’s liner notes point out that the tune is structured in a way—four bars melody, “4 rhythm, 4 melody, 4 rhythm, 4 bridge-type melody, 4 melody, 4 rhythm … the 4 bar sections of rhythm without melody suggest players pausing to think of their next move.” Mostly, though, the piece gifts us another brilliant Shorter improvisation, particularly at the end where his descending scales taper into a crepuscular hush…

… which makes the impact of the opening run of “Yes or No,” probably the second best known of the compositions on the album after the title track, all the greater. While the form of Shorter’s melody is blueslike, we’re definitely not in the harmonic language of the blues; the tune arpeggiates around a major triad but then leaps the octave and drops a minor third down to the 6th, repeats the pattern, and then climbs up a minor scale and descends down a set of minor triads to return to the tonic. All those words aside, it’s an immensely memorable melody and one that, even with the minor colors in the last four measures of the tune, is upbeat and exuberantly happy. McCoy Tyner follows, picking up from Wayne in the middle of a chorus, and playing through the changes with a gorgeous light touch, only occasionally falling back on the heavy clusters of chords that mark so much of his playing through the rest of the album. Elvin Jones’ extroverted drumroll at the end puts the cherry on top of what is a delightfully rich sundae.

“Twelve More Bars to Go” is, as Shorter says, both a nod to the 12-bar blues form of the piece and a picture of “someone having a very good time, going around to every bar in town.” The portrait plays out through the solo, as Shorter injects an inversion of the harmonic pattern at the very beginning, as he says, “to picture a man, slightly intoxicated, who, as he tries to go forward, backs up.” There are intermittent pauses, long stretches of fluent playing, repeated ideas — it sounds as though Shorter’s narrator has been having a wonderful time. As have we.

Wayne Shorter wasn’t done recording outstanding music with JuJu. On Christmas Eve 1964 he went on to record Speak No Evil, and the following month began recording E.S.P. with Miles. All told, Shorter and the other members of Miles’s band were on track to make the 1964-1965 period one of the most fruitful in modern jazz recording. We’ll hear another album from one of the members of the quintet that was also recorded at the same time, with some of the same players, next week.

You can listen to this week’s album here:

McCoy Tyner, Extensions

Album of the Week, April 27, 2024

As McCoy Tyner continued on his post-Coltrane career, his version of the modal jazz that he had begun playing with Trane from the earliest days continued to evolve. We saw some of the developing hallmarks of the style with Expansions: use of minor modes, unusual percussion, and drones. These continue on Extensions, recorded by Tyner on February 9, 1970 at Van Gelder Studios in Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey, but not released by Blue Note until 1973, after he had already left the label.

Tyner brought to the sessions not only his compositional A game but an incredible band. Returning from Extensions were Gary Bartz, Wayne Shorter and Ron Carter; new members included his old bandmate Elvin Jones on drums, and another Coltrane—Alice—on harp.

Alice McLeod, born 1937 in Detroit, began her jazz career at an early age, performing on piano in Detroit clubs in the late 1950s and moving to Paris to study with the great Bud Powell. She married a jazz musician there, trumpeter Kenny “Pancho” Hagood, and had a daughter, but was forced to return to the States as Hagood’s heroin addiction worsened. She performed with her own trio and with vibraphonist Terry Pollard; she was playing in Terry Gibbs’ quartet in 1962-1963 when she met John Coltrane. They married in 1965, and Coltrane became her daughter’s stepfather; they had three children together. Alice joined Coltrane’s band in 1966 after McCoy Tyner’s departure and played piano in the quartet until Trane’s 1967 death. She encouraged Trane’s growing interest in spiritual matters from as early as A Love Supreme, and he encouraged her musical development, even ordering a full sized concert harp for her without her knowledge which was delivered after his death.

Alice Coltrane wasn’t the first to adopt the concert harp as a jazz instrument; others, notably Dorothy Ashby, pioneered the instrument in a jazz setting. But she was the first to bring its sound into spiritual jazz, where she denuded it of any classical affectations. The harp sound that she adds to the album evokes music from earlier traditions, including African and Middle Eastern, a connection reinforced by the album’s National Geographic inspired cover.

Together on Extensions, Tyner and Alice Coltrane conjured a jazz sound that took the hallmarks of Tyner’s spiritual jazz style and added an element of repetition, almost to the point of mantra, and groove. Trane had all but abandoned traditional meters by the time of his death, but the form of spiritual jazz that Tyner plays here is anchored in a constant heartbeat.

That heartbeat begins with Ron Carter, who opens “Message from the Nile” with a pulse on an open fifth. Alice Coltrane follows after four bars, adding harmonic complexity by bringing out the supertonic and seventh notes of the chord in her rhythmic harp patterns as Elvin Jones enters on cymbal and snare. Tyner enters, stating the melody with repeated, strongly rhythmic piano chords. Shorter and Bartz join at the second chorus, playing the melodic pattern in parallel fifths. The whole tune essentially consists of two tonal centers a minor sixth apart, and in each part of the tune the same melodic patterns are repeated four times, as if establishing a mantra for meditation; the static melodic and harmonic pattern still moves thanks to the strong rhythm established by piano, bass, drums and harp. Tyner solos, exploring the corners of the tonality established at the top, and then passes to Shorter, whose soprano saxophone echoes some of Coltrane’s melodic searching without dipping into the growled or smeared tones practiced by Trane. Those effects appear in Bartz’s solo as he returns over and over to the tonic. Alice Coltrane’s harp solo returns some measure of the opening ethereal meditation, underscored by a high-pitched wooden flute, uncredited but possibly played by Tyner himself (he was credited with playing the instrument on a subsequent Blue Note date). The whole thing is an active meditation, which WHUR-FM music director André Perry argued in the liner notes was influenced by the “history of the Black man … deeply rooted in the experiences that transpired on and along the Nile river.”

“The Wanderer” takes a more straightforward compositional approach and is the only track on the album on which Alice Coltrane does not appear. In contrast to “Message from the Nile,” the tune moves through eight chord changes in as many measures, the restlessness giving the tune its name. There’s a thematic connection to the prior tune, though, in the strong rhythmic pulse and in the playing of the theme in parallel fifths by the saxophones. However, there’s an abrupt gear shift about one minute in following the third statement of the melody, as Wayne Shorter takes off on a tenor exploration around the melody that’s underscored by Ron Carter’s running bass line. Carter indeed seems to find new tonal centers as he grounds the line in a sustained pulse on the tonic and the seventh. Shorter tapers off in a series of triple note runs, at which point Bartz picks up the solo torch in the alto that explores the ideas that Shorter was just playing with before returning to the melody, shifting it into a few different keys and then passing to Tyner. Tyner’s solo continues shifting the tonal center around until the players fall away and Jones wanders into several different rhythmic patterns, before transitioning back to the strong beat of the beginning as the band recapitulates the opening.

By contrast, “Survival Blues” begins with Tyner playing solo, an opening that seemingly straddles the spiritual jazz in which the record is centered with more traditional blues chords, even seeming to reach into some Duke Ellington inspired moments around the 30 second mark. At about the one minute mark, he settles into a strong rhythm backed by a repeated bass ground and supported by Jones in full polyrhythmic splendor, as well as by Alice Coltrane, who provides both chordal continuity and moments of chromatic accent. The tenor saxophone states the melody, which runs an octave via the seventh, three times before Shorter begins to shift things around, both chordally and rhythmically. His lines explore the entirety of the space around the melody before handing off to Tyner, who finds secondary rhythms and a second center of gravity around the fifth of the chord. Coltrane joins him on the second half of the solo, as she both picks up some of the secondary rhythms and reinforces the underlying chords with carefully chosen accenting notes in the upper octaves. Ron Carter takes a solo, accompanied by shaken sleigh bells, that walks the core rhythm around the entirety of the octave, finding unsettling tensions in the slide from the second to the third and down to the octave. The introductory melody returns before Jones takes an extended solo that explores the core pulse. The band returns, including Coltrane who performs an extended glissando into the restatement of the opening theme before Shorter returns once more to state the opening theme. (Bartz appears to have sat this one out.)

Coltrane brings that magnificent glissando back to open “His Blessings,” as Tyner explores the opening chord while Carter’s arco bass plays a melody that expands into a tremolo, Bartz pulses small fountains of sound, and Jones’ oceanic rolls keep things moving along. Shorter plays a line in the soprano saxophone that brings John Coltrane’s melodies on Sun Ship to mind while simultaneously calling back to In a Silent Way. Alice Coltrane takes a solo, performing glissandi in the upper strings while playing a melodic line with her other hand in the middle strings, over Carter and Tyner. Shorter returns for one more extended solo over a tremolo bass solo that hangs suspended on the fifth. If other tracks on the album call to mind some of Tyner’s earlier compositions, this one is unique, a spiritual meditation that seems to hang like a sphere in the air. The liner notes credit this as “the reflections of my life and the time afforded me with John Coltrane.”

In early 1970, Tyner was at the peak of his compositional and performing career, and Extensions reflects it. This was a peak period for his writing and performance that would continue even as he left Blue Note, a transition that delayed the release of Extensions for several years. But part of the credit for this album inevitably accrues to his players, especially Alice Coltrane. That debt becomes clearer when we listen to her work next week.

You can listen to the album here:

https://youtu.be/Yj1-m9Y_4KQ?si=vOycjqfYql86Yxw6

McCoy Tyner, Expansions

Album of the Week, April 13, 2024

The classic John Coltrane Quartet was no more after December 1965, as first McCoy Tyner then Elvin Jones despaired of being able to follow Trane to the places he was going. Trane died, unexpectedly and awfully, of liver cancer at the age of 40, on July 17, 1967. But Trane’s musical legacy lived on, most notably through those who played with him and the unmistakably audible legacy his works left in theirs. Tyner was one of those, and as we’ll hear over the next few weeks, Trane’s influence ran strong in Tyner’s works for years afterwards.

Following Tyner’s departure from the Quartet, he signed with Blue Note Records and recorded a series of albums that gradually expanded Tyner’s compositional and performing concept beyond the boundaries of the jazz quartet. On Expansions, the fourth in the series (following The Real McCoy, Tender Moments, and Time for Tyner), we get an intriguing mix of modal jazz, the avant-garde, and more traditional sounds, delivered by a septet of players that included Woody Shaw on trumpet, Gary Bartz on alto sax (and wooden flute), Wayne Shorter on tenor sax (and clarinet), Herbie Lewis on bass, Freddie Watts on drums, and Ron Carter, who plays cello here.

Shaw would go on to record on sessions with Joe Zawinul (he actually appears on Zawinul), as well as . Gary Bartz had previously performed with Tyner in Charles Mingus’s workshop and would record with him again before working with Miles Davis in 1970 (resulting in the Live-Evil album) and beginning his own influential band, the NTU Troop. Herbie Lewis recorded with a long list of influential 1960s players including Cannonball Adderley, Stanley Turrentine, Bobby Hutcherson, Freddie Hubbard, Jackie McLean, Archie Shepp, Harold Land, and others. And Freddie Watts worked with Max Roach, Kenny Barron, Andrew Hill, Joe Zawinul, Freddie Hubbard, and others.

When you hear “Vision,” you could be forgiven for thinking you were hearing a leftover melody from a Coltrane session, at least until the horns enter. Tyner’s harmonic imagination is strongly influenced by Trane’s modal material. But the horns, who play the opening statement of the melody add a new element that’s distinct from the Coltrane style. And Ron Carter’s cello solo, which provides both melody and texture by playing with light pressure on the fingerboard while bowing (sul ponticello), takes the tune even further into unknown reaches. Wayne Shorter, Gary Bartz, and Woody Shaw each take a solo. Shorter’s harmonic imagination is interesting here as he plays unusually aggressively compared to his performances as a group leader. There are touches of some of his playing on Miles Smiles in the speed and bite of his playing. Bartz plays more melodically by contrast, but brings in some distortion in the saxophone. And Shaw goes even further out, playing into the upper reaches and moving well beyond the chords of the tune. The overall tune pushes beyond traditional jazz forms, urged on by Tyner’s percussive playing and Freddie Watts’ drums.

“Song of Happiness” comes from a more meditative center. The opening is played over a static chord with the piano and bass constantly in motion without moving far from the central tonality. A melody starts in the bass and is accompanied by the constantly rolling piano and, ultimately, by wooden flute and clarinet, played by Bartz and Shorter. Finally, the horns come in on a secondary melody and are answered by the bass and piano, tossing the development of the melody back and forth in eight bar patterns. Solos follow from Tyner and Shorter, and the group returns to the flute for the long coda. There’s more than a hint of the East in the arrangement, and it shows how Tyner’s imagination was broadening beyond the minor key workouts of the classic quartet.

“Smitty’s Place,” by contrast, feels almost like an Archie Shepp workout, with a clear melody alternating with free playing from the band. Shorter’s solo here is much closer to his normal playing of the late 1960s, with shadows of his Schizophrenia. The pizzicato cello solo by Carter is one of the farthest-out things on the whole record, and Tyner’s closing solo definitely the funniest.

“Peresina” finds us back in a familiar minor modal groove, led by Tyner’s assertive solo and followed by the melody which is stated in the horns. But at about the two minute mark the tune takes a left turn into something more complex chordally, and suddenly the feel is less percussive, more dancelike. It’s an interesting tune, well played by the band; again, Shorter’s solo stands out for its left turns into unusual tonalities and moments.

Last, “I Thought I’d Let You Know” is the only non-Tyner composition on the album. Written by Cal Massey, who played with Tyner and Jimmy Garrison in Philadelphia in the 1950s, the work opens with a cello feature by Carter before turning to a tender piano solo from Tyner. The two alternate with support from the rhythm section throughout. The overall effect has the serenity of “Song of Happiness” in a more traditional format, as if to say: this, too, remains.

On Expansions, McCoy Tyner’s compositional skills and range are on full display. While still touched by the shadow of Trane’s influence, tracks like “Song of Happiness” and “Smitty’s Place” show that Tyner could stretch convincingly into his own definition of the avant-garde and could command a substantially broader tonal palette. We’ll hear more of that in coming recordings from him; next week, though, we’ll check out another post-Trane recording from one of his later collaborators.

You can listen to this week’s album here:

Exfiltration Radio: Too Short

When Wayne Shorter died on March 2, 2023, it was like the closing of a book that you knew was going to run out of pages soon, but hoped it never would. Shorter had retired from performance in 2018 due to worsening health, but was still composing and releasing new music up until last summer.

Having already put together an Exfiltration Radio episode of Shorter’s music, I debated doing another—I could easily do twelve or thirteen episodes of his works. But I decided to dedicate this episode to his music by highlighting performances of his compositions by others. Most of the recordings here come from the last few years, but there are two from the 1990s and one contemporaneous with Wayne’s most productive period as a composer in the 1960s—albeit with a very different approach.

I considered doing the entire album with covers and performances of “Footprints,” the Shorter classic that was dramatically reimagined by the Miles Davis Quintet on Miles Smiles. In the end I settled for two very different approaches to the standard, starting with Herbie Mann’s 1968 version. Recorded with an unusually star-studded group—Sonny Sharrock on guitar, Roy Ayers on vibes, and a very young Miroslav Vitouš on bass, with drummer Bruno Carr—the recording will surprise those who primarily associate Mann with his notorious early 1970s record Push Push.

David Ashkenazy’s “Chief Crazy Horse” is a 2008 performance compiled on a 2021 tribute album on Posi-Tone Records. Drummer Ashkenazy leads a quartet with Matt Otto on tenor sax, Steve Cotter on guitar, and Roger Shew on drums, playing a version of the closing song from Adam’s Apple that manages to be at once familiar and new, thanks largely to Cotter’s sterling guitar work.

One of my favorite large-band renditions of Shorter’s work, David Weiss’s “Fall” comes from a live tribute to Wayne recorded in 2013 with a group that includes Ravi Coltrane on tenor, Joe Fiedler on trombone, and the great Geri Allen on piano. While the arrangement undoes the innovation of the original Miles recording, in which the horns repeat the theme while the rhythm section improvises underneath, the performance is not to be missed, especially for Weiss’s trumpet solo.

More “Footprints” follow, this time in a duo recording by Dave Liebman and Willy Rodriguez from the 2020 compilation album 2020. The album is credited to Palladium, an effort by Shorter’s social media rep Jesse Markowitz to get his music better known. The performances here run from more traditional to more avant-garde and this one is firmly on the latter side of the spectrum, with Liebman’s soprano sax and Rodriguez’s drums moving things along briskly.

Walter Smith III is having something of a moment, coming off several collaboration albums with Matthew Stevens as In Common, guesting with Connie Han on several of her excellent recent albums, and about to release his Blue Note debut. The performance of “Adam’s Apple” here from his 2018 release Twio foreshadows much of that greatness, including his impeccable taste in sidemen. I’m not sure how the studio didn’t explode with the fury of Eric Harland’s drums on this number, and Harish Ragavan’s bass is nothing to sneeze at either.

The vocalist Clare Foster recorded an entire album of vocal adaptations of Shorter’s work at the beginning of her career, in 1993. While some of the lyrics are flights of fancy only tangentially connected to the work, her “Iris” precisely captures the mood of Shorter’s ballad. This track is followed by the other 1990s performance on the mix, the great Kenny Kirkland’s take on Shorter’s “Ana Maria” from his sole outing as a leader before his untimely death in 1998.

We close with another performance from Shorter Moments, a 2009 performance of Wayne’s phenomenal “Infant Eyes” by Wayne Escoffery on tenor sax with Avi Rothbard on guitar. While Shorter did not only write ballads, there was arguably no one in the second half of the 20th century who was better at writing ballads, and this recording makes a persuasive case in favor of that argument.

Full track listing and link for playback are below. Enjoy!

Footprints – Herbie Mann (Windows Opened)
Chief Crazy Horse – David Ashkenazy (Shorter Moments – Exploring the World of Wayne)
Fall (Live) – David Weiss (Endangered Species: The Music of Wayne Shorter (Live at Dizzy’s Club Coca-Cola))
Footprints – David Liebman & Willy Rodriguez (2020)
Adam’s Apple (feat. Eric Harland & Harish Ragavan) – Walter Smith III (Twio)
Iris – Clare Foster (Clare Foster sings Wayne Shorter)
Ana Maria – Kenny Kirkland (Kenny Kirkland)
Infant Eyes – Wayne Escoffery (Shorter Moments – Exploring the World of Wayne)

Do not attempt to adjust your radio; there is nothing wrong.

New mix: Exfiltration Radio, Cooking With Fat

It’s a Veracode Hackathon, so it must be time for an Exfiltration Radio playlist! This time, naturally, the musical choices were influenced by all the Miles-related jazz I’ve been writing about over the last few months, as well as an unlikely source: my Apple Music library maintenance.

So, when you source your library from iTunes Store purchases, third-party high-res music providers like HDTracks and Bandcamp, and CD and vinyl rips, you end up with pretty big music files and a lot of music. Too much music to fit on the internal hard drive of most Macs. I’ve been using an external drive for my media for many years now. Mostly it works fine. When it doesn’t, though, it’s disastrous. There is some kind of error condition in Apple Music that causes it to freak out when the external drive is temporarily unavailable and re-download all the music in the iCloud library. Which is OK, I guess, except when the external drive comes back online, you now have two copies of all the music in your library. Or, if it happens again, three.

I’ve figured out a rubric for cleaning this up, which will be the subject of another post. But I’ve been going through all the music in my library album by album, and in the process creating new genres to make it easier to find some types of music. In particular, the genres that inspired this mix were Jazz Funk and Fusion. The latter needs no explanation due to our journey with Miles; jazz funk is just the hybrid of a bunch of different strains of African American music with a heavy focus on improvisation over a funky beat. The end mix combines some tracks I’ve already written about with some more modern jazz from my collection; I’ll provide notes for each track below.

“Wiggle-Waggle,” from Fat Albert Rotunda: the track that got the most comments from my write-up of Herbie Hancock’s TV show soundtrack, with friends noting how it sounds like this track dropped in from another dimension.

“Chunky,” from Live: Cookin’ with Blue Note at the Montreux Jazz Festival, by Ronnie Foster. I’ve programmed Foster’s great “Mystic Brew” in past Exfiltration Radio segments, including the Hammond special. This is a live version of the opening track from the same album, Foster’s great Blue Note debut Two Headed Freap. There’s a lot that’s different about his approach to the Hammond organ compared to earlier artists, but all I can say is: he funky.

“Flat Backin’,” from Moon Rappin’ by Brother Jack McDuff. Speaking of earlier artists, a lot of McDuff’s early work was squarely in the “soul jazz” category (like his great Hot Barbecue), but by the time of this 1969 album McDuff was on another planet, and the electric guitar and bass land the music in Funklandia.

“Funky Finger,” from The Essence of Mystery by Alphonse Mouzon. We have seen Mouzon on the first Weather Report album, but his solo debut for Blue Note is another thing entirely. Despite the name, it’s got less of the mystery of Weather Report and more of the funk, and this track is a great example.

“Sugar Ray,” from Champions by Miles Davis. “That’s some raunchy sh*t, y’all.” Listen to how the chord changes are so wrong, the way they just walk over to an adjacent major key and then settle back into the original as though nothing happened. Also note the remarkable Wayne Shorter solo.

“Superfluous,” from Instant Death by Eddie Harris. Sampled on “What Cool Breezes Do” from Digable Planets’ Reachin’, this is an instant classic.

“The Griot,” from Henry Franklin: JID014 by Henry Franklin, Adrian Younge and Ali Shaheed Muhammad. Composer Younge and former Tribe Called Quest member Shaheed Muhammad have been having a blast recording albums with their jazz idols in the Jazz is Dead series, and this newer release with bassist Franklin, who played with Freddie Hubbard, Bobbi Humphrey, Archie Shepp, Willie Bobo, Stevie Wonder and others, is a tasty slice of funk anchored by his acoustic double bass.

“Tell Me a Bedtime Story,” from Fly Moon Die Soon by Takuya Kuroda. This funky cover of Herbie Hancock’s original from Fat Albert Rotunda is a great example of latter-day jazz-funk, with the arrangement draped (or smothered, depending on your taste) in layers of Fender Rhodes, synths, and electric bass. Kuroda’s incisive trumpet anchors the arrangement and lifts the funk to another level.

“Timelord,” from Inflection in the Sentence by Sarah Tandy. A great 21st century London jazz album, featuring Tandy on both acoustic piano and electric keys, the latter notably apparent in this moody track.

“Where to Find It,” from SuperBlue by Kurt Elling. I’ll write more about this track another time, but it’s worth noting that Elling is one of the few vocalists to brave the task of putting lyrics to modern jazz tracks like this one, Wayne Shorter’s Grammy award winning “Aung San Suu Kyi.”

Enough words. “We have taken control as to bring you this special show, and we will return it to you as soon as you are exfiltrated.”

Miles Davis, Champions

Album of the Week, October 1, 2022

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

You can listen to the album here:

Weather Report, Weather Report

Album of the Week, September 24, 2022.

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

But what was the music like?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

You can listen to the album here:

Joe Zawinul, Zawinul

Album of the Week, September 17, 2022.

We last met Austrian keyboard player and composer Joe Zawinul when he arrived, seemingly from nowhere, to explore the unknown realms of in a Silent Way. On this appropriately self-titled album, Zawinul continues the journey, this time as leader and not merely as mystic guide. The album is a journey into outer space; it is also an instructive guide in the different ways to create jazz music.

Zawinul’s approach to this album was less group improvisation and more Gil Evans. The group features both Miroslav Vitouš and Walter Booker on bass, multiple drummers and percussionists (on different tracks, Billy Hart, Joe Chambers, Jack Dejohnette, and David Lee can be heard, usually in combinations of two or three), and a front line including Woody Shaw on trumpet (with Jimmy Owens on one track), George Davis on flute, Earl Turbindon on soprano sax, and Herbie Hancock on the mighty Fender Rhodes, alongside Zawinul on acoustic and electric pianos. One track features Wayne Shorter, Hubert Laws, and Dejohnette in lieu of Turbindon, Davis, and the other drummers. And the whole group performs in through composed suites that are strongly reminiscent of Gil Evans’ style, though still keeping room for solos.

“Doctor Honoris Causa” opens the album in a demonstration of this approach. The melody, written in honor of Herbie Hancock’s honorary doctorate from Grinnell University, is cut from the same cloth as “In a Silent Way,” with a slow chromatic drift of chords from the keyboards and the horns yielding to an insistent bass line supported by a steady backbeat. The front line then enters, with Turbindon, Shaw, and Davis playing the melody line with one voice as it circles the tonic before climbing up to a diminished sixth. There is a short break of around four measures before the second part of the melody returns, again in unison. Following the same arrangement pattern as some of Miles’ work on Nefertiti, the melody returns over and over again, with longer solos between. Shaw takes the first extended solo, his trumpet climbing over strong support from the Fender and Zawinul’s organ. Turbindon takes the next one, with his soprano sax exploring minor modes around the tonic and drifting away, with the Echoplexed Fender Rhodes of Herbie Hancock taking the next solo, reverberating through the cosmos. Zawinul takes the final solo, steering the group’s improvisations through turbulent air before gently bringing them to a landing. The work may celebrate Hancock’s accomplishments in title, but in execution it’s an evocation of flight.

“In a Silent Way” returns to Zawinul’s iconic composition that lent its title to Miles’ pioneering fusion album. Here we hear the work in its full extended form. In doing so, he gives us an insight into Miles’ compositional methods. The original arrangement heard here takes us through an extended introduction in multiple modal chord changes before bringing us to the famous melody. In doing so, the work takes on a very different character from Miles’ wide-eyed, searching rendition. At the last Tanglewood weekend of this summer, I heard WCRB commentator Bryan McCreath point out that much of the power of the opening of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony comes from the open fourths and fifths that constitute the opening theme, because of their harmonic ambiguity. Minus a third in the progression, they could either fall to a major or minor key. The same is true of the Miles version of “In a Silent Way,” which keeps its progressions open for as long as possible before finally revealing its mode. Zawinul’s original extended introduction, which pivots from major to minor with richer harmonies throughout, is more fully voiced, but the ambiguity is lost. It’s still a stunning performance, evoking the Swiss Alps of Zawinul’s youth, albeit with less mystery and more sentimentality.

“His Last Journey” is a different animal altogether, a tone poem for bass, piano, chimes, and trumpet. The melody is played in the uppermost ranges of the arco bass over the second bass and a descending piano line, with the trumpet sketching an alternate melody around the edges. It’s a brief dream of a composition that is over all too soon.

“Double Image” is the outlier here. Recorded in a different session in late August 1970 with Shorter and Laws, the work is more of a group improvisation than anything else on the record, with the two keyboardists and two bassists alternately working together and improvising separately, with the extended bass arco solo at the beginning exploring the outer reaches. (I’ve gotten pretty good at telling the players apart on these albums, but am not sure whether we’re hearing Vitouš or Booker there.) Zawinul takes the other solo on the track, with the horns and flute providing the echo of the melody in between. The energy level and level of abstraction comes closer here to the more frenetic tunes on Super Nova and Bitches Brew than anything else on the record; unsurprisingly, this is the one composition from this period that would later be recorded by Miles’ electric group on Live-Evil.

“Arrival in New York” closes the album with something else again: a sound collage, with taped segments of bowed bass, organ, and percussion manipulated to evoke the cacophony of the New York streets, subways, and harbor as Zawinul remembered them from his arrival in the United States in 1959. As a composition it’s an island unto itself, but it would not be the last time Zawinul would embrace different studio techniques to discover new soundscapes.

So Zawinul points toward a different way to embody Miles’ searching while taking some of the great trumpeter’s collaborators in a different direction. He would continue working with Shorter and Vitouš; we will hear that collaboration next week.

You can hear the album here:

Wayne Shorter, Super Nova

Album of the Week, September 3, 2022.

We’ve tipped over the edge of the world with today’s Album of the Week. Super Nova is our first post-Bitches Brew album, the first Wayne Shorter solo album to feature him on the soprano sax, the first album to tip from post-bop to free jazz that we’ve featured. It’s by turns intoxicating and disorienting. When I bought it in college, I had no idea what to make of it, and I’m still learning my way through it. It’s a ferocious album from an extraordinary group of musicians, deployed in a most unusual way.

For this session, recorded beginning eight days after the last session for Miles’ fusion masterpiece Bitches Brew, Wayne assembled an all-star cast of early fusion players. Guitarist John McLaughlin returned from Bitches Brew and In a Silent Way, playing guitar; he was joined on drums and vibes by Chick Corea (!!). Chick brought Miroslav Vitouš, a young Czech bassist who had played on several of his recent recordings and done sessions with Herbie Mann and Roy Ayers. From Miles’ Bitches Brew band, Jack DeJohnette was the primary drummer for the sessions and also played the kalimba; he was joined on percussion by Airto, the mononymous percussionist that was starting to appear with regularity on jazz fusion albums. Rounding out the band were avant-garde electric guitarist Sonny Sharrock and Niels Jakobsen on claves. And Walter and Maria Booker would memorably appear on one track together as well, on acoustic guitar and vocals.

The title track opens the album in full free jazz mode. Part of the dislocation of the album is immediately apparent in the instrumentation. With no keyboard instrument to center the chords, the soprano sax is the focus of the tonal energy, serene above a swarm of guitar and bass. What sound like screams reveal themselves to be interjections from Sonny Sharrock’s electric guitar. The whole thing might be as close as Shorter gets to the energy of some of Coltrane’s post-A Love Supreme recordings.

“Swee-Pea” opens more peacefully, with the vibes, chimes and guitars creating a bed for Shorter’s tranquil soprano sax melody. We’ve heard this tune before, as “Sweet Pea,” on the Miles compilation album Water Babies. Here, Shorter’s threnody for Billy Strayhorn subtracts much of the lushness of the arrangement of the earlier recording, revealing a melody simultaneously more powerful and more fragile on the soprano sax.

“Dindi” is a completely different thing again. The opening gives us chaos, in the form of percussion and guitars underpinning the single note solo on the soprano saxophone, all riding over the ostinato bass note that pulses a relentless rhythm. Then everything falls away except for the acoustic guitar of Walter Booker, accompanying the plaintive Portuguese vocals of his wife Maria. Overcome as she begins the second chorus, Maria’s solo ends in a choked sob, and the chaos returns. This was the track that made me put the album down for several years when I heard it as a college student; I just wasn’t ready for the naked emotions at play here.

“Water Babies” is sonically worlds away from the version recorded by Miles a few years earlier. And then again: many of the bones are there, only reconfigured. The pulsed base note of Miroslav Vitouš grounds us in waltz time, and the melody, here are in the soprano sax, retains some of its plaintiveness. But the performance is freer. And the ringing chords in the guitar, while continuing to locate the tone in the same minor mode as the prior performance, here leave more possibilities for the other players to explore.

“Capricorn” seems destined to be another exploration into chaos, with the intensely powerful opening by bass, electric guitar and drums. Indeed, Jack DeJohnette‘s drums continue throughout the song to roll chaos in the deep. But Wayne Shorter and John McLaughlin are up to something else. Shorter’s solo, by turns serene and fiercely impassioned, takes us to the emotional center of the album, and McLaughlin’s chords support the melody, turning it almost into a second conversation within the cacophony of the rhythm section. It’s a powerful contrast and a stunning performance.

“More Than Human” closes the album, with Shorter’s melody seemingly having completely committed to the sonic world created by DeJohnette, Airto and Sharrock. The soprano melody descends chromatically as though landing on the surface of an alien world, buffeted by gusts from Sharrock’s guitar and Airto’s percussive attack. At the end, Shorter steps away from the microphone, still playing, as though exploring the new vista unfolding before him.

The final track’s title gives a clue to a thematic impulse behind the album. More Than Human, the Theodore Sturgeon novel that was published in 1953, is about the gestalt, humans who can pool their minds and abilities together into a whole that is far more than the sum of its parts. It’s a good description for what Shorter’s band accomplishes on this unusual outing. It also explains the album cover, which feels a bit like a pulp science fiction novel itself.

You can listen to the album here.

Miles Davis, In a Silent Way

Album of the Week, August 20, 2022

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

You can listen to the album here:

Miles Davis, Water Babies

Album of the Week, August 13, 2022

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

You can listen to the album here:

Miles Davis, Filles de Kilimanjaro

Album of the Week, August 6, 2022.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

You can listen to the album here: