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Friday, 01 August 2014 00:00

Miles Davis - Miles At The Fillmore: The Bootleg Series Vol. 3

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  Corea and Jarrett join Miles at the Fillmore in June 1970

The third edition of Columbia’s superb Miles Davis Bootleg Series captures his June 1970 concerts at the Fillmore East. As with the second edition, it captures a relatively short-lived line-up – this time featuring both Chick Corea and Keith Jarrett on keyboards. The rest of the band comprised Steve Grossman on saxophones, Dave Holland on bass, Jack DeJohnette on drums and Airto Moreira on percussion and flute.

The concerts have never previously been released in full. Producer Teo Macero edited what he considered to be the best of each night’s performance as one side of a double LP (‘Wednesday Miles, Thursday Miles, etc), which was originally released in December 1970 as ‘Miles Davis At Fillmore’. A bootleg recording was released a few years ago entitled ‘Complete Wednesday – Miles At Fillmore’, but this was not an official Columbia release, and was hard to come by. The new release adds approximately 100 minutes of new music to the original release. The tunes have been correctly identified, and whilst the set list did not vary significantly from night to night, the interpretations differ quite radically. In addition, the original sound recording has been re-produced by Michael Cuscuna and Richard Seidel, and offers much greater clarity than the original vinyl or the remastered CD.

As a bonus, one unissued track has been added from the Fillmore West live recording from April 1970, which was later released as ‘Black Beauty’.

In hindsight, we can see that 1970 was one of the most productive of Miles’s long career. He finished the recording of his landmark ‘fusion’ album, ‘Bitches Brew’, in January 1970 – although the bulk of the recording took place in August 1969. Two concert recordings were made that spring; ‘It’s About That Time’, which was recorded live at the Fillmore East in March 1970, which featured Wayne Shorter on saxophone, and ‘Black Beauty’, which was recorded at the Fillmore West in April, by which time Steve Grossman had replaced Wayne Shorter. Around this time, Miles also recorded the studio album ‘Jack Johnson’, which was pieced together from various studio recordings in New York.

In August, Gary Bartz replaced Steve Grossman on saxophone, and this line-up can be heard on the Isle Of Wight recording, which was originally issued as part of Columbia’s massive Miles Davis box set in 2009. That wasn’t the end of it; ‘Live-Evil’ was also recorded in 1970, and comprised of a mix of studio and live recordings from Washington’s Cellar Door (December 1970), and then in 2005, a box set appeared of the Complete Cellar Door Sessions.

If one were to include the box set of the Jack Johnson sessions, over 20 CDs of material have now been released from 1970 alone. So how does this recording stack up amongst the wealth of other live recordings from this era?

The first observation to make is that Miles sounded more confident in this new direction than he had one year earlier; in the summer of 1969, Chick Corea and Dave Holland took the band in a more abstract direction, and Miles would sometimes seem lost, urging drummer Jack DeJohnette to bring them back into line. Miles is more assertive here, playing with a burning intensity that can astonish. The second observation is that the dual-keyboard line up was something of a mixed blessing on stage. ‘In A Silent Way’ left enough space in the music for three keyboards; in a live setting, however, Corea and Jarrett were still figuring out how to play around one another. Jarrett keeps to the organ, and whilst he plays some incredible music, there are times where it all sounds too cluttered, particularly on the first of the four CDs. Thirdly, Steve Grossman – who was not even twenty years old at the time – was no match for Wayne Shorter, and there are times when he sounds somewhat out of his depth here. Finally, it’s worth noting that DeJohnette’s playing was quite incredible, holding this amazing band together when all hell threatens to break loose on stage.

By working with this new, younger generation of jazz musicians (Holland and Jarrett were 24 and 25, respectively – almost 20 years younger than Davis), Miles felt he could compete with the rock (and funk) bands of the day. In March, he played opposite Neil Young, whilst in August he played at the Isle of Wight Festival, and toured with Santana. The flip-side of this success was that his band members were eager to branch out on their own. Holland and Corea soon formed their own band, Circle, whilst Jarrett went on to start his own trio with Charlie Haden and Paul Motian. Whilst Miles continued to explore the direction heard on these recordings, he found it hard to find musicians of quite the same quality. As a consequence, I have always preferred his earlier ‘fusion’ live recordings – ‘Black Beauty’ and ‘At Fillmore’ to the later recordings, such as ‘In Concert’ (1972), ‘Agharta’ and ‘Panagea’ (both 1975), which always seemed more uneven in their execution.

 

At last we can now hear ‘At Fillmore’ in all its glory, and listen to the band gradually evolve over time. By definition, the ‘Bootleg Series’ is for collectors only, but this represents a considerable improvement over the original CD release – both in terms of sound quality and value for money – and is highly recommended.

Read 5098 times Last modified on Saturday, 02 August 2014 07:46

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