Send "Miles Davis " Ringtones to your Cell 
| Pitchfork |
 The Miles Davis quintet of the mid-to-late 1960s occupies a weird place in the trumpeter's canon. Critics (this one included) will tell you that it isn't just the best band Miles ever led, but one of the choicest small groups in jazz history. If you're not a jazz nerd, though, you may not know it existed. This is because the outfit-- rounded out by tenor saxist Wayne Shorter, pianist Herbie Hancock, bassist Ron Carter, and drummer Tony Williams-- doesn't register on Miles' pop-cultural timeline. The group issued a string of brilliant studio LPs during its 1965-68 run, yet there's no Kind of Blue or Bitches Brew among them; by this period, Miles had pushed way beyond the sumptuously chilled-out sound of the former but hadn't arrived at the murky psych-jazz of the latter.So if the Shorter/Hancock/Carter/Williams band (often called Miles' second great quintet, in deference to his stellar 1950s group) was transitional, a checkpoint between consensus masterpieces, why should you care that there's a new box set featuring previously unreleased live recordings from this time? Given that nearly every microphase of Davis' career has been expanded into box form by this point-- ask an expert before gifting a random one at Christmas-- casual consumers are right to be suspicious. But Live in Europe 1967, which presents five concerts from October and November of that year on three great-sounding CDs and one DVD, is no footnote: This set, Volume 1 in a new Davis Bootleg Series built on the Bob Dylan model, offers a chance to hear one of the greatest bandleaders of the 20th century push his collaborators into a creative frenzy and be pushed back in return. Aside from Carter, each of these players would become giants of electric jazz (Davis and Hancock transitioned into something like pop stardom), and the period documented on this set represents their farewell to their bebop roots: both an ecstatic celebration and a ballsy deconstruction of how small-group jazz had been played for the previous two decades. Live in Europe 1967 won't soundtrack any romantic dinners or inspire dorm-room acid trips, but it does show off the central thrill of jazz-- spontaneous interplay among dangerously skilled players-- as well as almost any other collection you could name....full text |
| Popmatters |
| 1967 was a strange time for jazz music. John Coltrane died in July, leaving his followers in free-jazz floundering for a direction. Coltrane had, in a lot of ways, taken some of the jazz spotlight from Miles Davis sometime in the mid-60’s. His work the last few years of his life was strange and exciting, explosive and volatile, huge in its fury, in a time where life itself was volatile, unpredictable, subject to its own unpredictable ferocity. For that reason, his sound—difficult and towering as it was—resonated, and Miles Davis took a backseat for a while. He got it back, though, with his second great quintet (Coltrane was, of course, part of the first great quintet in the ‘50s). The music he made with Tony Williams, Wayne Shorter, Herbie Hancock, and Ron Carter between 1964 and 1968 represents a strange and exciting moment in jazz, where the tight, propulsive more traditional structures met with the experimental out-there nature of free-jazz. It’s instructive to know that Davis himself wasn’t all that into the “free thing”—as he calls it in his excellent Miles: The Autobiography—nor was he into some of Coltrane’s late work. He felt Coltrane and other free-jazz musicians were playing too much for themselves and not for the group. “I’ve always felt,” he says at one point in Miles, “that what the group does together is what makes music happen.” This quintet was a group through and through, a unified unit that took the “free” experimentalism and tightened it up in twisting structures. Miles Davis, always the innovator, would stretch sound further with later groups, later sounds. But this, the second quintet, might be the last purely jazz sound we get from Miles, his final statement on the jazz music he’d grown up in and would soon outgrow. The use of electric elements and Teo Macero’s innovative editing on 1969’s In a Silent Way made it divisive, both a brilliant departure and a stepping stone to more far-out sounds. Bitches Brew would follow, and it is a fascinating, wonderful record, but it’s more about stretching those electric sounds, and its patchwork production, than about the purity of the jazz group. The stuff that followed that saw Davis divisively (perhaps greedily) but still excitingly making other genres—particularly funk and rock and roll—his own....full text |
| Milesdavis |
| The New York Times has published a stellar review of "Miles Davis Quintet - Live In Europe 1967: The Bootleg Series Vol. 1," which will be in stores everywhere starting September 20, 2011. The newspaper writes that the collection "captures Davis's finest working band at its apogee ... the music sounds staggeringly contemporary, pointing toward some crucial attributes of our present jazz era even as it ratifies, more firmly than ever, the singular dynamism of Davis's 1960s quintet. And as the first release in a series of previously unsanctioned music — the plan is to put out at least one a year for the next several years — it answers the question of what we could possibly hope for from a Miles Davis estate." The review also calls the concert from the Tivolis Kocertsal in Copenhagen "the fiercest of the bunch. ... If it had ever been released as a single album it would be recognized as one of the most thrilling live recordings of Davis's career." Read the complete review at The New York Times website....full text |
Miles Davis lyrics
