Send "Miles Davis " Ringtones to your Cell 
| Thephoenix |
 Given the consensus that the CD era is drawing to a close, labels have begun to look increasingly toward the well-heeled — those who not only still buy their music on something they can hold but aren't averse to buying it in supersized, extravagant configurations they can show off and savor. Still, it's hard to imagine who the intended audience is for Miles Davis's The Complete Columbia Album Collection, a 70-CD/1-DVD boxed mammoth containing all the music Miles recorded for the label between 1949 and 1985, a set that weighs five pounds and retails for $365.Confirmed Miles-oholics will already have availed themselves of many of the individual titles collected herein, and likely Sony/Legacy's previous Miles boxes, as well (Miles Davis and Gil Evans: The Complete Columbia Studio Recordings, The Complete Bitches Brew Sessions, etc.). Whatever their reasons, those who make this definitive statement on Davis's Columbia era theirs will find much to relish. Among its 52 official albums, the package includes expanded editions of four titles plus Miles's complete 1970 Isle of Wight performance, a typically electrifying gig from the Bitches Brew period that includes Chick Corea, Keith Jarrett, and Jack DeJohnette....full text |
| Nymag |
| H ere it is, the ultimate boxed set, a completist’s wet dream that makes the recent Beatles trove (thirteen CDs, in mono and stereo) seem a piddle by comparison. Miles Davis: The Complete Columbia Album Collection, Sony’s stab at the gargantuan-reissue sweepstakes, consists of 70 CDs, comprising all 52 albums that the dark prince of jazz trumpet laid down for Columbia Records over a 30-year span, plus the customary array of alternate takes and previously unissued tracks (available only from Amazon for $364.98, just over five bucks per disc). What makes this truly valuable, and not just another marketing trick to squeeze more money from a dead jazzman, is that Miles Davis was a perpetual pioneer who transformed the music four or five times in the course of his career. And so these discs lay out the evolution not only of Miles Davis but of modern jazz itself. The saga wends its way from a Paris concert in 1949, when Miles was still tethered to the syncopated rhythms of bebop, which he’d mastered as a sideman to its inventor, Charlie Parker; to his mid-fifties studio sessions, when he put a Harmon mute on his trumpet bell and bathed standards and show tunes in a golden glow; to his collaborations with Gil Evans, Porgy and Bess and Miles Ahead, which shifted orchestral jazz from swing to cool; to the best-selling Kind of Blue, where he abandoned bebop’s foundations, improvising not on chord changes but on scales, allowing more focus on melody and mood than on rhythm and speed; on into the sixties, when he loosened the music’s structure further, adding a jangled, almost free-form intensity; and, finally, to the electric jazz-rock fusion of Bitches Brew and Dark Magus, an era that gradually devolved into a mechanical rut but reemerged at the end, in 1985, with Aura, a jolting synthesis of jazz, rock, and Messiaen-influenced classical music that lit up a future path lamentably unfollowed....full text |
| Entertainment |
| Here comes a blockbuster. Spread across 70 CDs, the box set to end all box sets surely represents one of the most imposing bodies of work in the whole of modern music. Although the trumpeter signed with the label in the mid-1950s, the collection opens with the Paris Jazz Festival appearance of 1949 and wends its way through to Aura, the suite recorded with Palle Mikkelborg in 1984. Even if you accept that 1969’s In a Silent Way was the last true masterpiece, there are marvellous flashes of creativity in the fusion years that followed. Frédéric Goaty’s bilingual booklet provides an introduction, while the stylish sleeves are reproduced in miniature....full text |
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