The band pictured above, plus John McLaughlin and Airto Moreira, is possibly one of the great unsung jazz-funk-rock combos of all time. "Unsung" is a funny thing to say about any Miles Davis group, but (a) Miles was very good at juggling underdog-ness with bravado, and (b) this core group is only really associated with one Davis release - Live-Evil. That changed last year when "The Complete Live at the Cellar Door Sessions" came out. I'm a bug sucker for most of these Miles re-releases. I have a lot of the albums up to the mid-70s, and though I've pored over them exhaustively, I still find new material listening to these sets. This one, much like "The Complete In A Silent Way Sessions" set, really seems to capture something unique about process.
"In A Silent Way" is known for being, possibly, the quietest jazz release ever. It's like a still lake. You can practically hear every musician hesitating before disturbing the silence during the session. Miles is known to many, unfairly, as a trumpet player, and he was a great soloist. For how much his music changed over the years, it's worth noting that every phrase Miles played in his cheesy 80s groups is a phrase that he could have played in 1957. His playing style hardly changed over time, and I think that is largely to his credit. What made him astute and relevant in the late 1960s and early 1970s - the time during which jazz was struggling for relevance - is also probably what makes most of us cringe when we listen to his 1980s catalog. He was a man of his time, wholly given to whatever might have been the vicissitudes or merits of the decade in which he was recording.
What he rarely lost a knack for doing was assembling great talent and working those motherfuckers, as he might say, until the music happened. To draw a very tenuous analogy, just as Madonna is able to come out with a new album that bites whatever is popular using the best producers that season, Miles was able to draw from rock and funk groups when he sensed that jazz no longer had the ears of the street. If you were good enough, and you came up, it was just a matter of time until Miles sunk his fangs into you and got some of your energy into his group. He might or might not need you afterwards, but you were still grateful. As is the case with Dylan, I think you have to respect the singular, autocratic nature of his vision. Michael Henderson, the bassist pictured above, had been playing with Stevie Wonder. Miles simply came along and plucked him from the group. Courtesy of EDS aka the Black Rider, I heard a great story about Miles and Bill Evans, but I'll save that for later or will yield the mic to EDS at a later date.
Back to "In A Silent Way." Having read his autiobiography and listened to his music for a long time, I knew that it was often the result of a long and arduous process. I was both frustrated, and I guess a little relieved, sometimes, that we didn't get to see the process, just the final product. I mean, hearing an alternate take of "Flamenco Sketches" on the Miles and Coltrane Columbia set was a profoundly unsettling experience for me, because the version on "Kind of Blue" features so many moments that rank in my all-time favorite musical moments: Adderley's and Coltrane's solos; Bill Evans gentle "solo" (it's not fair to call something that breathtaking a solo); etc. Hearing this other version almost felt like being told that, I don't know, my real parents weren't my parents. It's being confronted with an alternate version of a thing that seemed, to me, to be so firmly entrenched in the real world that it had no alternative but to exist in that form.
The cool thing about the "In A Silent Way" set is that you can literally hear the band getting quieter and quieter with each successive take. At least that's how I hear it. I imagine Miles after every jam shaking his head, and trying to convey the sense to the rest of the enormous group convened for that session that there was still too much, too much going on. When, at the end of three long discs, you finally get to hear the versions you know so well, it is indeed a revealing moment, because you can tell you have arrived, and you imagine (naively) that all the other musicians there knew it too, especially Miles.
The "Cellar Door Sessions" is a night-by-night chronicle of four nights at the now-defunct Cellar Door (which used to be in Georgetown, I'm told, on M Street, close to the Key Bridge) in December 1970. Cool fact for me: it includes my birthday, though I was still not among the born at that point. Anyway, the first four discs chronicle Wednesday through Friday and they are impressive: we get a kind of skeletal funk, and we can hear the band growing in stature. But according to Miles, something was still missing. So he called his friend, guitarist John McLaughlin, that Saturday morning and asked him if he could join the band that night. McLaughlin hopped a train and made it down to DC in time to play a good portion of the night with the group. Mind you, it's not like McLaughlin had been practicing with these guys or anything. But the result is something truly incredible: he shows up for the second set and the band, which was already playing at a high level, suddenly explodes. Everything just crackles at once, and the group becomes sharper, meaner, fiery. I have to assume that Miles knew he finally had the sound he wanted.
What's puzzling is that this was released as a bit of studio wizardry - Live-Evil is a composite of the 6 discs, and it's not linear. It sounds, in hindsight, like a bit of a funky mess, to be honest. It's a good product, but this and the "In A Silent Way" set have both convinced me that, sometimes, you do want to see the process and not just the finished product. While the "Cellar Door" set diminishes "Live-Evil" as a product, it seems fair to point out that "Live-Evil" was always an artificial product and that what we've been given instead is a more genuine end result, even if it does take up six cds instead of two.
There's lots more to be said about Miles, but I'll save it for when I get around to owning the complete "On the Corner" sessions.
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