Like any credible person, I dig Miles Davis. But I particularly dig his quintet with saxophonist Wayne Shorter, pianist Herbie Hancock, bassist Ron Carter and drummer Tony Williams. "All-stars" is not nearly the word — these guys turned out to be a Mt. Rushmore of modern jazz. So it was really exciting to hear about Live in Europe '67, the DVD that's included in the soon-to-be-released 71-disc (!) The Miles Davis Complete Columbia Album Collection. After many years of listening to their music, I could finally see these guys play!
Live in Europe '67 is in black-and-white video but both concerts — October 31st in Stockholm and November 7th in Karlsruhe, Germany — are well shot and the remastered sound is very good. (There are no plans to release the DVD separately, so if you don't have a pal at Sony/Legacy or don't want to shell out the 300+ simoleons for the box, even though it's an excellent deal, you can also watch it all on Youtube, but picture and sound quality are both sorely lacking.) I've gotten kind of obsessed with it.
All kinds of revolution was in the air — this was just after the "Summer of Love" when Sgt. Pepper ruled the pop charts and psychedelia began radicalizing popular music. Out there in the world, racial unrest was raging even as Thurgood Marshall had been named the first African-American justice of the Supreme Court. To different degrees, African-Americans, gay people, young people and women were all experiencing a heady rush of both liberation and rage.
All of that was the volatile backdrop for changes within Davis’ quintet, which had formed in 1963. Up until ‘67, Davis had made the band play relatively genteel takes on the standards and Davis originals that his previous quintet had covered. But by the fall of '67, this line-up was well seasoned, they now had an extensive catalogue, virtually all of which they'd written themselves, and each of them had received rapturous critical acclaim. Carter, Hancock, Shorter and Williams had graduated to another plane of music-making and were tired of playing music the old way. It was time, as Mr. Burns from The Simpsons would say, to release the hounds.
Other than that, there's no ceremony about taking the stage. Davis doesn't acknowledge the audience or even the band; he just steps to the mike and begins playing the head of the first tune, even as Carter and Williams are still getting settled; nonetheless, everyone jumps right in and it's off to the races.
Both sets open with "Agitation," Carter and Williams playing at blazing speed, with Hancock playing desolate, Debussy-like chords that paradoxically seem to accelerate the music. Out of nowhere, Williams presses out a swelling snare roll and everyone shifts into a relaxed swinging rhythm. Dramatic shifts like that are the rule: At the Stockholm show, everyone stops as Hancock completely breaks the momentum with a very bleak, eerie solo on "Agitation." Carter craftily eases it into a swinging rhythm that Williams soon latches onto – it’s really brilliant. They don't do nearly the same thing days later in Karlsruhe, so how did they know to stop for Hancock’s solo in Stockholm? Put it this way: there’s a reason they called one of their albums ESP.
They pull this tempo/rhythm magic trick constantly, whether at the top of a solo or at some mysterious point within it, spontaneously changing direction en masse, like a school of fish. The band called that approach "time, no changes," which essentially means that the progressions were in the rhythms and not the chords. Instead, the band riffed off of a kind of communal tonal center, following the soloist; that requires phenomenal concentration, sensitivity and teamwork to pull off. Watching the musicians in this trance-like state — in particular, Shorter plays as if deep in prayer — is a great cue for how to get into this music.
This is a far cry from any of their previous live recordings. For one thing, Williams is explosive, chopping up the rhythms, dealing out thunder and lightning with a plangent bass drum and cymbals, his left stick dancing on the snare like a bead of water on a hot skillet. And while Davis still calls for older tunes like "Walkin'" or "'Round Midnight," the band deconstructs them at breakneck bebop-velocity tempos – way, way faster than the originals Davis recorded over a decade before with a much different band. It's more like "Sprintin'." It's as if they were in a hurry not to get to the end of the tune but to get to the next kind of music.
The cinematography is pretty straightforward but you can still catch interesting little moments, like Davis' odd tic of pressing his index finger to just in front of his right ear and shaking his head after he finishes a solo or when, in the midst of the Karlsruhe "I Fall in Love Too Easily," Davis seems transfixed by the huge, vivid shadow of Williams on the curtain, his arms flicking out at the flapping cymbals. Later in the set, during "Walkin'," Hancock sits with his hands resting on the keys, and you can see he’s as alert and engaged as he would be if he were playing; when Shorter walks away from the mike, Hancock seamlessly kicks into an uncanny imitation of what Shorter just played, with Davis observing from a distance, index finger resting pensively on his embouchured lips.
Part of what was revolutionary about this band was that the usual foreground/background dynamic is compressed or even inverted:: Hancock and Williams (and, more subtly, Carter) don't play behind the solo, they play with it. Liberated from comping or timekeeping, the rhythm section is incredibly expressive, which not only means that you can tune in to any of the players at any time and hear something really exciting, but that you can listen to the entire band through the prism of any instrument that’s playing at the time, a Cubist jazz. It all fits together, a sprawling, loose but ingeniously interlocking sound, something the frequent montage effects of the Karlsruhe footage seem to be emphasizing. Listen to the way Hancock plays spare chords to offset Williams' busy drumming, and never drifts much lower than the middle of the keyboard, allowing Carter to fill out the low end. Both Davis and Shorter play elliptically, allowing plenty of space for all the wild invention exploding behind them.
And that ties in to what was happening in at the time – the "new thing," i.e., free jazz. Davis' quintet certainly wasn't playing free jazz, but it wasn't bebop either. Some have called it "freebop," but that's a hideous term. Suffice it to say, it was one of those rare middle ways that are more fascinating than the extremes, pushing the envelope with style and precision, experimenting with form instead of dispensing with it. The approach influenced everything from the dense, prodigious jamming that would soon dominate heavy rock to late-'90s jungle techno.
I've had the DVD for a couple of years now. It's been commercially available for quite some time. So don't buy the box set unless you really need to.......
Posted by: Dan MacRae | November 03, 2009 at 05:39 AM