1970 was a busy year for Miles Davis. It opened with shows in New York, Washington and elsewhere, with recording sessions squeezed in during gaps. In March, he was arrested while driving his Ferrari. And in April, Columbia released Bitches Brew, his double-LP that all but kick-started jazz’s fusion era, seamlessly mixing a rock and funk influence to his electric, amplified jazz. He’d created something almost entirely without precedent; it would end up selling more copies than anything he’d released to that point.
Of course, by April, Miles Davis was onto something completely different: a soundtrack to a movie about legendary boxer Jack Johnson. Here, his music took a more muscular, swaggering tone: it opened with Jack DeJohnette’s crashing cymbals, Dave Holland’s thumping bass and John McLaughlin’s slashing guitar. Even after Miles shows up a couple of minutes into it, it doesn’t sound like any jazz record before it. It’s better than most of them, too.
And that was only one moment in early 1970. On the road, his band kept changing: when Wayne Shorter left to form Weather Report, Steve Grossman stepped in to replace him on sax. Organist Keith Jarrett was soon aboard, too, expanding the group to seven.
Over four nights in June, Miles Davis and his septet rolled into the Fillmore East in New York, a Columbia recording crew in tow. It was a pivotal moment for Miles’ music. Within a year, keyboardist Chick Corea, Holland and Grossman would be gone. Miles’ music would keep evolving, deepening the groove, adding layers of guitar and percussion and going further and further into the stratosphere. In 1975, Miles stopped making music completely. He’d eventually come back, but never come back down this path.
Back in the 70’s, these shows were released as a double LP, each side an edited-down montage from each show: Wednesday Miles, Thursday Miles, etc. But earlier this year, Columbia and Legacy released all four shows as Volume Three of the Miles Davis Bootleg Series. As the liners promise, it’s got nearly two hours of previously unreleased music, all of it great.
Don’t let the name fool you: this isn’t a scratchy, lo-fi recording. Each show was professionally recorded and newly remixed last year. One can hear the whole all of the sets and with a good pair of headphones, even pick out the individual players. There’s even some bonus material from an earlier show at the Fillmore West, too, which helps fill in the picture. Each disc is great, showing Miles Davis and his band at full power.
While on each of the four shows you can hear the band going further and further, taking the music to new levels, things really stand out when compared to his music from even a year before, when a similar lineup played the same material a little slower, a little more conservatively and with a hell of a lot less volume.
Take “Directions;” here, DeJohnette’s playing is straight ahead rock and as Miles goes on trumpet runs, he’s matched by Jarrett’s sharp organ and Airto Moreira’s percussion flourishes. And after solos by Miles and Grossman (note how Miles keeps things reined in, playing the song’s theme to end Grossman’s solo!), the band cuts the tempo in half and sharpens the groove when Corea and Jarrett start improving off each other.
Holland’s electric bass is another key difference. His funky, loud playing gives the music a new edge. It’s a completely different beast than the Bitches Brew-era band featured on Volume Two. Indeed, this was a band unlike anyone in jazz at the time: with their ferocious energy, they blew away whomever they played with. The first time Miles Davis played the Fillmore East he opened for Steve Miller, but by the second night it was the other way around.
Each of the four nights has basically the same set list, but this was typical of Miles’ bands at the time. They open with “Directions”, go into “The Mask” and “It’s About That Time” and wrap up with “Bitches Brew”. Granted, they stretch each song out for over ten minutes, never playing it the same way through twice. And on the last two nights, Davis reached back into his songbook for brief renditions of the standard “I Fall In Love Too Easily” and “Sanctuary.”
But the band had a few surprises up their sleeves, too. On the second night, Davis played a rare encore, performing a ferocious version of “Spanish Key.” And on the last night, the band closed with “Willie Nelson,” first recorded during the Jack Johnson Sessions and soon to become a staple in his sets. A handful of performances from an earlier performance in San Francisco round out two of the discs, too: “Paraphernalia,” “Footprints,” and “Miles Runs the Voodoo Down.”
It’s a transitional period: three of the songs date back to his last acoustic jazz albums, three had just been released on Bitches Brew and In A Silent Way and the rest would’ve been new to those listening at the Fillmore. “Directions,” for example, wasn’t officially released for nearly a decade after these shows. And as his band changed, Miles Davis dropped older songs. When he played at The Cellar Door seven months later, he’d dropped over half of this material.
Miles’ music from the 1970’s has a reputation of being dense and hard to explain. It’s certainly true of later albums like Dark Magus. It makes this set all the more essential, showing him and his band right at the moment when jazz and rock were mixing and building off of each other, when anything seemed possible. He’d taken the propulsion and energy from rock, the deep grooves and bounce from funk and soul and added them to his brand of tight, improvisational jazz. It only makes sense that these killer performances are from the very place that let him share a bill with rock groups.
Like anything Miles Davis recorded around this time, The Bootleg Series Volume 3 is a fantastic listen. These four shows are better individual performances than the ones released as Black Beauty: Live At the Fillmore West and Live At the Fillmore East: It’s About That Time and sound better, to boot. Add an informative set of notes, a bunch of photos of this band at work and even a poster of period reviews from these shows and you’ve got the best box set of the year. Recommended.