The Complete Jack Johnson Sessions represents a stunning crossroads where boxing, the Black Power movement, the development of rock music as an expression of vast changes in American society, the electronic amplification of jazz, and Miles Davis all came together. That the music heard on this newly-released 5 CD set was boiled down to a mere hour's worth of a soundtrack album, with snippets turning up on Live-Evil and Get Up With It, is amazing. Listening to the music here, most of which has never been released previously, is like finding out something new about someone you thought you knew well.

That Miles Davis should have been drawn to the figure of Jack Johnson is no surprise. Johnson, the first black heavyweight champion and star black sports figure, fought during the early 1900s, at a time when racism was de rigeur and jazz music was only beginning to develop. Johnson liked the high life, enjoyed fast cars and liked women, particularly white women. While Miles preferred black women, he certainly appreciated beautiful ones, had sartorial style, like his home to be well appointed and modern, and also adored fast sports cars. Much has been made of the fact that Miles was born into a middle class background (his father was a successful dentist) but that only seems to have made the racism that he encountered that much more unpalatable, and Davis did encounter his share. The well known incident that occurred in front of Birdland, when Miles was hassled by police for standing outside the club and took a blow to the head from a white detective, seems to have set him firmly on the path of not taking any crap from anyone, an attitude that was certainly in line with that of Jack Johnson as well as boxers that Davis had seen during his lifetime.

Davis was in a highly productive and inspired mode at this time, a mode that had started with the recording of In a Silent Way and continued through Bitches Brew. He also made a big switch with his live bands, moving from the repertoire he had been playing, which was comprised largely of music he’d created with his second great quintet between 1963 and 1967, to the new material he was recording. His live bands changed personnel more frequently, with Chick Corea, Keith Jarrett, Michael Henderson, Jack DeJohnette, Dave Holland, Steve Grossman, Gary Bartz, and others moving into and out of the band at various times. “I was seeing it all as a process of recording all this music” said Davis, “just getting it all down while it was flowing out of my head.” In A Silent Way had been a bellwether, signaling that changes were afoot, not only in Davis’ performances of his new music, but in the very methods that were used to create that music in the first place. Both In A Silent Way and Bitches Brew were recorded in small sections, with Davis directing the musicians and allowing them to play freely without worrying about what the final mix for release would be like—in fact, many times the musicians had no idea what would or would not be released. Davis and producer Teo Macero then constructed the final tracks from these performances. On In A Silent Way they took shapeless but incredible segments of music and spliced the performance together to create a piece that had form and structure. The technique was used again on the Bitches Brew album, both on Joe Zawinul’s “Pharoah’s Dance” and on the title track.

The album A Tribute to Jack Johnson, the soundtrack to the William Clayton-directed film of the same name, was probably the end of the high point of the Davis/Macero edited recordings cycle. The same approach was applied to live recordings such as At Fillmore and to source recordings done at Washington D.C.’s Cellar Door club, resulting in the album Live-Evil. The results were decidedly mixed, with the continuity and structure of the live performances missing. But on Jack Johnson, the producer was able to take what was essentially a studio jam and turn it into the best melding of jazz, funk, and rock music of all time. Considering the furor that Bitches Brew had caused, it is amazing today to consider that Jack Johnson sank without a trace when it was released more than a year after it was recorded, in the summer of 1971. By that time, Miles had rolled his electric band out to live audiences, performing at Fillmore East and West as well as at other important venues, generally as an opening act for some of the most successful rock bands of the day. At the end of August 1970 Davis performed at the Isle of Wight Festival, one of the major rock festivals held in the wake of the successful fests at Monterey and Woodstock. The sessions that are represented on this box set, all recorded between February and June of 1970, were Davis’ last recording sessions until 1972, when he recorded the sessions for his highly controversial On the Corner album. Consider this, though: by the time the public heard the recording Bitches Brew (released in April 1970) Davis was already unleashing a much more heavy electric sound on audiences at the Fillmore West (released unedited as the Black Beauty album). And, three days before this performance, he had recorded most of the source material that would be edited into the Jack Johnson album—material that was based much more on straightforward rock and funk concepts with fewer free jazz leanings and which would represent probably his most accessible music until his return to the scene in 1981 after a self-imposed five year silence. In other words, by the time the record-buying public heard Bitches Brew, Davis had already moved another several steps ahead. No wonder the public was unable to keep up with him during this tumultuous period—the man simply had too much music, and too many ideas spilling out of his head for the slow-moving recording industry to keep up with.

Miles was always interested in boxing, and as a youngster he used to love to box and to swim. He listened to Joe Louis bouts on the radio, and he noted in his autobiography how the entire neighborhood would go crazy in celebration when Louis knocked out his opponent. Later, in 1952, he approached trainer Bobby McQuillen about taking him on as a boxing student. McQuillen told Davis he wouldn’t work with an addict, and that he should kick his habit first. Inspired in part by the disciplined nature of fighter Sugar Ray Robinson, Miles returned to St. Louis where, with the help of his father, he managed to kick the heroin habit that had temporarily derailed his career. In his essay on Mike Tyson, Gerald Early says of Robinson: “Robinson was the first and only boxer who ever gave the impression of being sophisticated, a cosmopolite—and yet he was unmistakably a black man, perfectly at ease with himself and his blackness.” The same might easily be said of Miles Davis, who made understatement and exactitude highly important elements in the birth and maintenance of his cool persona. “The reason I’m talking so much about Sugar Ray” Miles tells us, “is because in 1954 he was the most important thing in my life besides music. I found myself even acting like him, you know, everything. Even taking on his arrogant attitude. Ray was cold and he was the best and he was everything I wanted to be in 1954. I had been disciplined when I first came to New York. All I had to do was go back to the way I had been before I got trapped in all that bullshit dope scene.”

By ’54 Miles had quit heroin, was back on top with his Miles Davis Allstars recording Walkin’, and was training with McQuillen at Gleason’s Gym in midtown or, sometimes, at Silverman’s Gym in Harlem. He was still working out with McQuillen (now going by the Muslim name of Robert Allah) in 1970 when he recorded these sessions. In fact, Davis may have been in the best physical shape of his life around this time. He was working out consistently, boxing with McQuillen, eating well, and working to stay off drugs. The clear-mindedness, physical exhilaration, and stamina show on Bitches Brew as well as on the live recordings of Miles from 1969 and 1970, and they show clearly on these sessions as well. Miles was playing well, his breath control was excellent, and his trumpet playing had a new, more aggressive attack that fit well with the electronics his bands were using.

“I had that boxer’s movement in mind” says Davis of the music on Jack Johnson, “that shuffling movement like boxers use. They’re almost like dance steps, or like the sound of a train…That train image was in my head when I thought about a great boxer like Joe Louis or Jack Johnson. When you think of a big heavyweight coming at you it’s like a train.” Indeed the first of the two pieces found on the original Jack Johnson album, “Right Off” is a shuffle, the kind of bluesy, swinging beat that Count Basie had championed in Kansas City. But in Paul Tingen’s book Miles Beyond, John McLaughlin remembers that the piece started off as a spontaneous jam session that was recorded. In any event, Miles is referring in this quote to the music that actually ended up on the Jack Johnson album. That music was mostly put down during the session held at Columbia Studio B on April 7, 1970. Reference has been made to a November 11, 1970 session (which was supposed to have yielded the track “Right Off”), but this is inaccurate. From the music recorded on this date plus an unaccompanied trumpet solo by Miles that he had recorded at the end of a session late in 1969, producer Teo Macero constructed the 26 minute 52 second final version of “Right Off.” “Yesternow” utilizes much of the April 7 material as well, but Macero also interjects segments from several different takes of the piece “Willie Nelson,” the unaccompanied Davis trumpet solo, an orchestral interlude, and a segment of “Shhh/Peaceful” from the February 18, 1969 session that yielded In A Silent Way.

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