MILES DAVIS
In Person: Friday & Saturday Night at the Blackhawk,
Complete (4 CD Box Set)
Sony
Legacy
Miles Davis’s Friday and Saturday night
performances at the Blackhawk in San Francisco in the spring
of 1961 are simply great jazz. Though the group he leads
here has not generally received much play because they were
a working band and didn’t record anything as groundbreaking
as Kind of Blue
or the succession of albums that began with the second great
quintet in 1964, the audiences at these sets were treated
to some top notch jazz.
The rhythm section here, comprised of pianist
Wynton Kelly, bassist Paul Chambers, and drummer Jimmy Cobb,
had played with Davis since Kind of Blue (though
Kelly only appears on one track on that album, replaced
for the most part by Bill Evans). They were a hard bop rhythm
section for the most part—steeped in the blues and
in gospel, hard-edged and a bit funky. That keeps things
sharp and fresh, even though the songs on these sets are
pretty much all standards or favorite Davis compositions
like “So What.” This was one of very few periods
in which Miles didn’t really appear to be moving toward
anything new. Though he continued to work with excellent
sidemen like Hank Mobley and George Coleman, he was not
composing new music, and the conception of the tunes he
played was not much different than it had been when he had
originally recorded them. The main thing that happened is
that the tempos quickened (sometimes enormously; check out
the version of “Walkin’” on Disc One of
the Saturday Night performance). In addition, none of his
sidemen were composers, as the musicians in his yet-to-be-assembled
second great quintet would be. Yet Miles himself was playing
very well on these dates, and the band is also in good form,
especially Mobley, who has generally been given short shrift,
falling as he does between John Coltrane and Wayne Shorter
in Miles’s succession of tenor players.
Interestingly, Miles didn’t seem to
find Mobley all that inspirational a bandmate. In
his autobiography, he says that “…the music
was starting to bore me because I didn’t like what
Hank Mobley was playing in the band…Playing with Hank
just wasn’t fun for me; he didn’t stimulate
my imagination. This was about the time I started playing
real short solos and then leaving the bandstand.”
It’s easy to see why Davis wasn’t particularly
excited about Mobley’s playing. The tenor man was
influenced by Lester Young, and often plays his own version
of the long, loping phrases that Young made famous, sometimes
seeming to lag behind the beat. Miles probably wasn’t
all that happy with the way things were going and made Mobley
the scapegoat for what was, compared to what came immediately
before and after, a somewhat lackluster period in his career.
But what was lackluster for Miles would have been perfection
for almost any other performer, and the sets on Friday
and Saturday Night at the Blackhawk provide a rare
opportunity to just hear Miles and company playing their
straight ahead best, without any radically new concept or
sound to sell.
Now available in two 2-CD sets or as a complete
4-disc box set, the remastered Blackhawk performances are
also restored to their correct order. On the original releases,
songs from different sets were reordered to create each
release—one culled from Friday night’s performances,
the other from Saturday’s. Here listeners can hear
the music just as it unfolded in front of the Blackhawk’s
audiences on both nights, and it helps to have a more complete
picture of the two evenings. A lot of the material on the
Friday night discs has been released before, but the new
material—“If I Were A Bell,” “Neo,”
and “I Thought About You,” are all well worth
hearing. The Saturday night performances yield a lot of
previously unissued material, including a fantastic “On
Green Dolphin Street” and “Walkin’”
taken at a breakneck tempo. “Autumn Leaves”
given a thorough exploration, including an introduction
that explores the song’s thematic material before
moving into a statement of the melody. “Two Bass Hit”
is also here, as is all of the previously unheard fourth
set: “I Thought About You,” “Someday My
Prince Will Come,” and “Softly As In A Morning
Sunrise.” Despite his displeasure with Mobley’s
performances, Miles gives a solid performance of his own.
If Mobley was uninspiring, Davis was still getting his inspiration
from somewhere. Though he plays in shorter bursts, his economical
statements are the absolute essence of each composition
boiled down as succinctly as possible. Miles had already
signaled on Kind of Blue that he wanted to move
toward material that utilized as few chord changes as possible,
and his playing here reflects that idea, eschewing the flurries
of notes favored by bebop and relying on simpler statements
colored by the blues for emphasis. His band here is very
much in the hard bop mode, and that creates tension between
the earthier style of the rhythm section and Mobley and
Miles’s more esoteric playing. Listen to the performances
of “Neo on both nights and you’ll hear echoes
of Kind of Blue as well as some hint of the kind
of sound Miles was looking for and would eventually find
with Hancock, Shorter, Carter, and Williams. Mobley is sometimes
lost on this type of number, as his playing tends to be
much more interesting given more harmonic structure rather
than less.
Still, it would be pointless and uncharitable
to dismiss Mobley’s work here simply because he didn’t
fit the picture that Miles was developing of where he wanted
his next group to go. He plays very well, and much of the
material is well suited to his Lester Young-influenced style.
In fact, he is a perfect foil for Davis, who responds to
the entire group’s laid back swing by playing in a
more aggressive manner, as if to compensate for the absence
of Coltrane. On Saturday night’s rendition of “On
Green Dolphin Street” Miles ends his solo with a very
hot flash or notes played in an agitated manner, providing
a burst that leads into Mobley’s solo. Mobley doesn’t
respond by playing with the same fire, instead uncorking
some gorgeous phrases that lead off in their own direction.
In a way, it is Davis who is the odd man out in his own
band—they seem to be of a single mind and purpose,
while Miles exerts a protean effort to move them in a different
direction.
So, do you need this complete version of Miles
and company’s 1961 performances at the Blackhawk?
My answer would be “yes” because like the complete
Plugged
Nickel box, this set of performances offers an opportunity
to hear one of the best working jazz groups of the time
playing outside the confines of the recording studio. But
whereas the Plugged Nickel recordings are not representative
of the second great quintet at its very best, In Person
at the Blackhawk is representative of Miles’s
transitional quintet at its best. That makes it a formidable
performance that needs to be heard, and in its new format,
complete and with immensely improved sound quality, it’s
a real bargain.
--Marshall Bowden--
Friday
& Saturday at the Blackhawk, Complete 4-disc box
set
|
In
Person: Friday Night at the Blackhawk 2-disc set
|
In
Person: Saturday Night at the Blackhawk 2-disc set
|
