"After the breakup of his great sextet including Bill Evans, John Coltrane, and Cannonball Adderley" writes Harvey Pekar, "Miles seemed to have reached a plateau in his career..."

In 1959 Miles Davis released what is arguably the most influential jazz album of all time, the introspective, meditative Kind of Blue. On that album Davis and his sextet created a jazz recording that emphasized overall mood over the form of any individual tune. Instead of basing their work on the complex harmonic structures that had been the standard in jazz since the inception of bebop, they worked instead with modes, which were scales that had been the basis of medieval and renaissance music. Neither major nor minor, each different mode created a different ambience. Davis and company based their improvisations on long passages based on the tones of a single mode. This allowed the soloist greater freedom, because he no longer had to conform to the twists and turns of conventional chord changes, allowing his solo to flow more freely from a melodic standpoint. In addition, since modal music tended to be more static, rhythm became more important, both as an element in the soloist’s arsenal and as laid down by the rhythm section. The group on Kind of Blue included Julian “Cannonball” Adderley on alto sax, John Coltrane on tenor, Bill Evans on piano (with Wynton Kelly filling in on one track) and Paul Chambers and Bill Cobb on bass and drums, respectively.

Following the breakup of this group, Miles worked with a group that utilized the Kind of Blue rhythm section made up of Paul Chambers, Jimmy Cobb, and Wynton Kelly. To this he added tenor saxophonist Hank Mobley, who Davis didn’t find a particularly inspiring bandmate and who fared poorly in fans’ eyes because he followed John Coltrane’s tenure with Davis. This group is heard primarily on the Live At the Blackhawk collection, though Mobley also appears on Miles Davis at Carnegie Hall and Someday My Prince Will Come.

Much has been made of the fact that Miles never wanted, at any point in his lengthy career, to repeat himself, didn't want to go back and revisit what he had already done. He is not the only jazz musician or artist to express this idea: Lester Young said he didn't want to go over what he had already done with a "repeater pencil". But prior to the creation of his second great quintet, Miles was repeating what he had already done, and appeared to be stagnating. "After the breakup of his great sextet including Bill Evans, John Coltrane, and Cannonball Adderley" writes Harvey Pekar, "Miles seemed to have reached a plateau in his career. He continued to employ top-notch sidemen, including Hank Mobley and (George) Coleman, and to make excellent albums. On them, however, Miles often seemed content to record standards ('My Funny Valentine', 'Stella By Starlight', 'Autumn Leaves') and compositions that he'd made famous in the past ('Walkin'', 'So What')." Why was this? There is some indication that Miles wanted to go further with the modal explorations of Kind of Blue but for some reason did not or could not. He had exhausted his other options: The partnership with Gil Evans had petered out with the debacle of Quiet Nights. Miles did not want to return to the straight bop playing that marked the first great quintet. He had feelings that bebop as practiced by Charlie Parker and his contemporaries was a southwestern style with its roots in Kansas City, and that hard bop, with stylistic influences that included gospel and R&B, was the real sound of the east coast. He wanted to move toward more freedom, away from the harmonic structures of bebop and the great American songbook, but he didn’t want to abandon form altogether. He also wanted to use the language which he saw as a quintessentially African American language, an amalgam of gospel, R&B, and the blues. Miles had helped spearhead the hard bop movement (and revived his career following his bout with heroin addiction) with his 1954 recording of “Walkin’,” setting in motion the antithesis of the cool style he was pioneering by the decade’s end.

Coltrane had released Giant Steps and Ornette Coleman’s Shape of Jazz To Come had set the jazz world on its ear in 1959, the same year as the release of Kind of Blue. Miles wanted to incorporate some of the freedom and excitement of free jazz, and he had already embraced the harmonic freedom of modalism, but he also wanted the earthiness of hard bop. At all phases of his career, Miles knew when he wanted things to change, but he initiated that change slowly, and this is often reflected by the slowness with which his repertoire changed. So, although Pekar is right in pointing out the fact that Miles did not change much about his style of playing and his repertoire in 1963 and 1964. That all changed in 1965 when the pieces of the second great quintet fell into place and they went into the studio to record the album E.S.P., which featured new material by Ron Carter, Herbie Hancock, and Wayne Shorter. Seven Steps, the 7 CD box set that comprises the latest of Sony Music’s reissues of Davis’ work, covers the period 1963-64, when Davis was searching for this new direction. The set shows how, slowly over the time period covered here, the group coalesced into the second great quintet, with several detours along the way.

Miles came across his second great quintet by a process of trial and error during 1963-64. Following the recording of Sketches of Spain, his last highly successful work with Gil Evans, he had been treading water, leading groups with a variety of excellent musicians but lacking musical direction. Following the demise of his previous rhythm section consisting of Wynton Kelly, Paul Chambers, and Jimmy Cobb, Davis hired alto saxophonist Frank Strozier, who recommended pianist Harold Mabern and tenor sax player George Coleman. Mabern and Strozier stayed only briefly, helping Davis satisfy contractual obligations by filling in at a number of live gigs. Coleman stayed on and Davis soon added bassist Ron Carter, pianist Victor Feldman, and drummer Frank Butler. That’s the group that leads off this box set, with Disc 1 providing the group’s sessions for the Seven Steps to Heaven LP in their entirety. When the album was released it contained tracks from this session as well as some from sessions done in New York a month later, with Feldman and Butler replaced by Herbie Hancock and Tony Williams. The first half of Disc 2 presents the entire New York sessions done for the Seven Steps album as well, so now listeners can, for the first time, hear everything laid down by both combos.

The L.A. group is more laid back, with the overall sound often evoking the dreamy feel of Kind of Blue. For example, listen to their takes on Feldman’s composition “Joshua.” The opening track of Disc 1 is the unreleased version from the L.A. sessions, and it presents a group that provides an atmospheric backdrop for Davis’ lyrical playing. The New York version, released on the Seven Steps album is much more aggressive, though still pretty. Williams and Hancock, in particular, distinguish themselves as able to not only support Davis, but to push him towards edgier, more insistent playing. In this context, Coleman, while perfectly able, sounds less interesting overall than on the L.A. sessions. It’s not that he can’t keep up with the rhythm section, but he cannot up the ante. Much the same could be said of the two versions of “Seven Steps to Heaven” included on Disc 1. The tempo is slower, and the drumming, especially, is much more laid back, done with brushes. These takes present the work of a completely competent band, but not one that was up to the standards of innovation that Davis had set with recordings like Kind of Blue and Sketches of Spain. That’s demonstrated pretty clearly by Davis’ version of “Basin Street Blues” which, though it was included on the final album, is definitely a sign that the trumpeter was short on new ideas at the time. The fact that he chose not to attempt the same number with the revitalized rhythm section he put together upon his return to New York shows that he knew he was heading in a new direction that was much more progressive than the place he found himself in early in 1963.

Davis was pleased with Victor Feldman as a pianist, and even offered him a permanent spot in the group, but Feldman didn’t want to leave his lucrative studio work on the west coast. So, on returning to New York, the trumpeter quickly found a new pianist and a drummer who seemed to fit his idea of what he wanted to do with his new group, and so Herbie Hancock and Tony Williams were added to the rhythm section.

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