The greatness of great musicians is in more than their mere skill at performing; it’s in self-challenging creation and emotional exposure—a self-challenging that’s all the more audacious when it takes place in public, in the presence of an audience, rather than in the studio, where the failures can be erased or shoved into a drawer. Music is like sports; the improvising musician faces a special vulnerability in public, and one of the crucial improvisers of modern times, Miles Davis, rose to bolder heights in concert than he did in the studio. Many of his concert recordings have been official releases, but many more, and many of the best, have come out as bootlegs, which is why “The Bootleg Series,” Columbia/Legacy’s ongoing multi-disk issues of concert recordings by Davis, most of which were previously unreleased (at least, officially), is among the treasures of the recent jazz catalogue. (I wrote about Volume Three last year.) The fourth volume, “Miles Davis at Newport, 1955-1975,” which comes out next Friday, is the most revealing of them to date. That’s because it reflects crucial musical ideas and decisions in the twenty crucial years of Davis’s musical development, from the age of twenty-nine through forty-nine—and his personal evolution and musical revolution is itself one of the grandest artistic dramas of the dramatic time.
The four-disk set features eight gigs, five (1955, 1958, 1966, 1967, and 1969) performed in Newport itself, and three held elsewhere under the Newport aegis (1971, in Dietikon, Switzerland; 1973, in Berlin; and 1975, in New York). The earliest of them captures a major moment in Davis’s career: the 1955 performance, in an ad-hoc sextet featuring Thelonious Monk, finds Davis performing three numbers. Davis’s perfectly placed and balanced phrasing, with his spare and involuted tone, create a sort of highest-order mood music, a passionately contained romanticism reflecting the ominous elegance of vast power held in reserve. (Monk abstains from accompanying Davis on “Now’s the Time,” a vestige of tension between them that issued from the 1954 studio recording “Bags’ Groove.”) One of these three performances, of Monk’s “’Round Midnight,” won him a major recording contract (with Columbia) and allowed him to form his first steady quintet, featuring the saxophonist John Coltrane, who was only a few months younger than Davis but whose musical personality was still inchoate, even if his sound was already distinctive. (Monk himself wasn’t thrilled with Davis’s performance of the number; he eventually provided his own musical response.)
The 1958 concert (long available on its own) includes an updated edition of that band—a sextet including Coltrane, the alto saxophonist Cannonball Adderley, and the pianist Bill Evans. The 1958 concert finds Davis in a state of fine excitement; he opens with an uptempo blast from the bebop songbook, “Ah-Leu-Cha,” and follows with a solo on Monk’s “Straight, No Chaser,” one of his classics of tense lyricism, built on solid, jaunty phrases that are as singable as an aria. Yet the contrast with Coltrane’s solos is sharp: though Davis takes most of the first solos, one could be excused for thinking that Coltrane is the band’s lead soloist, because he plays at greatest length and also seems to be bursting through the musical boundaries of jazz with his dizzying succession of rapid-fire flurries and dissonant leaps.
Soon thereafter, Coltrane went out on his own, and his innovations were among the dominant forces of jazz in the nineteen-sixties. Davis faced a few years of unstable groupings and musical uncertainty—until he formed his second great quintet, filled with the much younger musicians Wayne Shorter (saxophone), Herbie Hancock (piano), Ron Carter (bass), and Tony Williams (drums). Shorter is eight years younger; Carter, eleven years younger; Hancock, thirteen years younger; and Tony Williams, born in 1945, was all of eighteen when he joined Davis’s group. This band is heard on the second disk, featuring concerts from 1966 and 1967, and they’re both wild rides. Davis’s splintered phrases and fierce shrieks are recognizably descended from his earlier style, but the very metal of his trumpet seemed hotter, the sound reflected the glint of the flame. Williams’s shimmery, polyrhythmic glide and Shorter’s oblique constructions pushed the music occasionally in the direction of free jazz—a tendency that’s all the more pronounced in the 1967 concert, where the major difference is Williams’s playing, which has swapped sheen for thunder, pulse for a seemingly omnidirectional wall of sound. Even the ballads (“Stella by Starlight” and “’Round Midnight”) kick quickly into uptempo broken-field runs.
Davis was more than a heroic soloist; he was a bandleader with a group sound in mind, no less than was Duke Ellington; Davis played his trumpet but he also “played” his band, and from the acoustic tumult of the second quintet, he took his sound to a new dimension, forming an electric-instrument-based group that proved to be as controversial in the realm of jazz as Bob Dylan’s plugging-in had been for his folk-centric fans. (Davis’s famed electric coming out, of course, is the album “Bitches Brew.”) For Davis, electric instruments, first of all, made lots of noise; they made crystalline piano fills sting, made bass lines rumble and throb, and their sheer volume embodied his sense of musical aggression, of snarl and fury that got into a listener’s face and felt as confrontational as the times.
The 1969 performance finds Davis in fierce form (it’s already available, too), backed by a trio (Chick Corea, Dave Holland, and Jack DeJohnette) that was both pliable and inventive. In 1970 (as in the recordings heard in Volume Three), Davis added Keith Jarrett on keyboard and made the group’s sound denser and rougher. In the 1971 Switzerland performance, Davis has just one keyboard at work, Jarrett’s, and despite some blazing riffs from Davis’s (electric) trumpet, he seems to be doing all the work himself; the band behind him is too spare, too recessive, and Davis’s exertions sound frustrated, the band’s extended solos meander. Davis seemed to be temporizing, awaiting his next big move; the 1973 Berlin concert displays it in fury.
The Berlin band features no keyboard player; instead, it’s got two electric guitarists, Pete Cosey, a slashingly wild soloist whose deliriously rapid lines sound as if they had been made on a piano keyboard, and Reggie Lucas, whose distortedly blues-based phrases have a sharp-edged, angular dissonance. Davis makes wider use of his electric trumpet (complete with wah-wah pedal) that meshes ideally with the howling strings, and the drummer, Al Foster, fills in the crashing and bashing of his cymbals with intricate bluster. Here, at last, Davis finds his real wall of sound, one that was as chromatic and dissonant as it was loud and thick; it’s as if the forward motion of the driving pulse were matched by the howling stasis of the group’s mighty mesh of electric energy. Davis’s solos snarl and rip, shriek and cackle, but for all their electro-funk ferocity they fit into the group, and often seem to melt into its overwhelming collective vortex. Davis sounds as if he’s conducting the group as much as he’s performing within it; he also has an electric organ on stage that he sometimes plays in ensemble passages to add to the colossally rugged textures. The forty-six-minute concert from Berlin in 1973, with its blend of razor’s-edge improvisations and its over-all sonic invention, is a major discovery; it’s one of the high points of Davis’s discography.
The single, seven-minute cut from New York, July 1, 1975, is a lovely lagniappe. Davis, playing with mostly the same group, rarefied its electric wildness to a sort of Beckettian blankness. Davis wasn’t in the best of health at the time; his concert in Central Park on September 5, 1975 (I had a ticket but couldn’t attend; long story), was his last until 1980. But by that point, he had already nearly single-handedly propelled jazz itself, along with his own musical imagination, into that future and beyond.
