Wonder of wonders...
I just recently got a hold of courtesy of those excellent folks at . Put out by the relatively obscure French label , it was only available for about a week on Jazz Loft before the Sony bigwigs (who STILL own everything Miles Davis) demanded they quit selling it, although it looks like they're still advertising a and you can easily find . Why this hasn't been commercially released is beyond me - this is pretty much the holy grail for fans of the mid-60s Miles Davis Quintet, which I most definitely am.
I remember taping the documentary Miles Ahead on PBS when I was about 16 years old and being so knocked out by the copious excerpts from these Stockholm performances that I transferred the soundtrack to audio cassette so I could listen to them over and over in my car (which didn't turn out to work so well for picking up girls). That excellent documentary is another one that should be released on DVD - it's something like ten years old now and a new copy of the VHS will run you close to (yikes!) .
As earnest as Sony/Columbia has been in putting out the unreleased Miles sessions these last few years, it's disappointing that the only video they've let sneak out has been the total-waste-of-time of a documentary , originally a British TV special that's more a collection of irrelevant and uninteresting anecdotes than actual performance footage. But as for these 1967 performances, the video footage is significant in that it represents the only filmed document of this quintet in concert. Musically this represents the culmination of Miles's dealings with the popular song tradition on one hand (“I Fall in Love Too Easily,” “Walkin’”), and his embrace of open improvisation and free structure on the other.
Form and formlessness are traversed with such attention to nuance, texture, color… it's as if no detail in the music has been taken for granted and every single sound is given its own meaningful place. There's not another group in the history of jazz that I hold in higher regard - I'm always left with the impression that the music could go anywhere, and yet it doesn't, it remains so tightly focused and there's never any waste of energy. Forty years later this music is just as powerful, and I was never much for believing Miles's assertion that the music was only relevant in the 1960s, that it had somehow "gone flat.
" I also never understood why a lot of writers seem to contextualize this period as a transitional moment - the bridge between his earlier acoustic work and the coming electric period, as if all Miles had to do was plug in the rhythm section and suddenly, there's Bitches Brew. This point of view doesn't take into account all of the drastic changes that happened in the deeper structure of the music when Miles began adding electric instruments - from 1968 on he was dealing with very different kinds of bass lines (rock-like ostinati and vamps), a polyphonic textural approach to harmony (three or four chordal instruments as opposed to one pianist), a more focused use of both groove and melody, and sectional forms with cued transitions as opposed to strophic song structures. From In A Silent Way on the music was so radically different than anything he had done before (except for maybe certain moments in Kind of Blue).
So Miles Davis in 1967 is Miles at the peak of the second broad swing in his music, the first being his orchestral or Third Stream explorations with Gil Evans beginning with Birth of the Cool and ending with Sketches of Spain and the unfortunate Quiet Nights. The 1960s quintet was the logical extension and the conclusion of everything he had done in the 1950s quintets onward. You might say, then, that the music on Filles de Kilimanjaro or In A Silent Way marked the beginning of a third, entirely new approach to rhythm, melody, texture, harmony and form that would take him at least through the 1970s.
Now it is debatable whether Miles was able to develop his electric music between 1968-91 to the same level that his acoustic music reached between 1950-68. Albums like Live/Evil, Big Fun, and Star People are among my favorites, but while I'm obviously no purist, I'll admit I have no palette for much of his post-retirement synthesizer pop music of 1981-91 (or the "smooth jazz" era it ushered in), or even the 1974-75 Agharta-era stuff when it seemed Miles was bent on confronting his personal demons on stage in an aggressive wash of electrified noise, dissonant stonewalling on the organ, and stop/start grooves that seemed to obscure and betray his previous concern with the gradual development of texture and melody. Miles, quintessential modernist that he was, I think sometimes was unable (or just refused) to see that what is newest or most contemporary is not necessarily the most musically valid.
.. which is perhaps why certain of his periods don't hold up to the scrutiny of hindsight and reflection as well as others.
I can't get with his 1980s music for exactly this reason - he forsook quality for modernity, timeless art for immediate relevance. Of course it sometimes seems that he felt the need to move ahead at the expense of continuing to play the music he loved (Herbie makes the point during the Miles Ahead documentary that Miles had to quit playing ballads because he loved playing ballads so much). Is this conundrum part of the essential drama in his music?
Sure, and it's the inherent tragedy of it as well. He had to move on, even when moving on wasn't the most creative thing to do. So here is Miles in 1967, the modernist at perhaps his most postmodern moment - simultaneously embracing and expanding upon everything that had come before in his music, he transcends that brief moment in 1967 and leaves us with an altogether timeless vision.
.. it's a pinnacle that he reached several times in his music but never with such magical precision, and part of the wonder is the knowing that he was about to tear it all down and start again.
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