|
| |
Miles Davis
The Cellar Door Sessions 1970
(Columbia/Legacy)
The Music Box's #2 specialty package for 2005
First Appeared in The Music Box, October 2005, Volume 12, #10
Written by John Metzger
When Miles Davis abandoned his second great quintet in the late ’60s, he
began to explore the uncharted waters of jazz-fusion by incorporating a myriad
of funk-rock rhythms, ostinato bass lines, and amplified instrumentation into
his work. Yet, for all the acclaim that albums like Bitches’ Brew and
In a Silent Way have received — and rightfully so — they were merely the
culmination of the first part of a journey that had commenced on Miles in the
Sky and Filles de Kilimanjaro. In 1970, he began pushing his music
even further during the sessions that resulted in the magnificent A Tribute
to Jack Johnson, an album that fully grafted the jazz world’s
improvisational virtuosity onto rock ’n‘ roll’s raging intensity, but even here,
he still clung, however tenuously, to a traditional jazz-oriented framework.
As the year progressed, the make-up of Davis’ touring band began to mutate,
but by fall, it had coalesced around pianist Keith Jarrett, drummer Jack
DeJohnette, saxophonist Gary Bartz, percussionist Airto, and bass player Michael
Henderson. In fact, Davis not only had jettisoned most of the players who had
helped him to create his early forays into fusion, but he also had discarded
most of its music; only a skeletal snippet from Wayne Shorter’s Sanctuary
and a looser interpretation of It’s About that Time were retained with
any regularity. Indeed, this was a entirely different band, and it served an
entirely different purpose. The addition of Henderson — who had earned his
reputation by working with both the Motown label as well as with Stevie Wonder —
marked a shift from acoustic to electric bass in Davis’ ensembles, and as a
result, the underlying force that drove his material had changed substantially.
In essence, it signaled the dawning of a new, more aggressive era.
At the time, Davis’ artistic inclinations had veered toward capturing music
that was made "in the moment," and so, instead of heading into a studio, he took
his outfit to Washington D.C.’s Cellar Door for a 10-show, four-night run in
December. It was the recordings from these concerts that formed the basis for Live-Evil. Understandably, Teo Macero severely edited the material, and
while the final product worked quite well as a two-LP package, it wasn’t truly
representative of the band that Davis had assembled. However, the newly issued,
six-CD collection The Cellar Door Sessions 1970, which features six of
the concerts that were performed at the intimate venue, does provide a more
comprehensive portrait of the group, and it, therefore, is an easy matter to see
why some consider this ensemble to be as groundbreaking and as invincible as
either of his most-respected quintets.
If there is a flaw to be found within the material that is presented on The Cellar Door Sessions 1970, it’s that occasionally Davis’ outfit didn’t
always mesh perfectly. Sometimes, Henderson and DeJohnette would head in
opposing directions; other times, Davis appeared to be so infatuated with the
effect of his wah-wah pedal that he allowed his playing to become a distraction
from the brute force wielded by his band. Nevertheless, such blemishes are bound
to appear on any concert recording that is drawn from the messy world of
improvisation en masse, especially when it features an aural snapshot of a group
whose leader thrived upon keeping his collaborators uncomfortably off-balance.
The bottom line is that the music contained on the package is as
earth-shattering as it is insightful.
Although The Cellar Door Sessions 1970 contains 28 tracks, Davis and
his ensemble performed only seven songs — Directions, Yesternow,
What I Say, Inamorata, Honky Tonk, It’s About that Time,
and Sanctuary — and as one show bleeds into the next, one can hear the
transformation that occurred when, with each subsequent iteration, the
compositions were violently torn asunder and reinvented. No longer did Davis and
his ensemble operate simply as a platform for individual soloists. Instead, the
group became a single, living, breathing entity that mutated each melody’s
fractured essence into an elongated adventure. Jarrett — who in Davis’ previous
outfits had been constrained by the presence of Chick Corea and, to a lesser
degree, John McLaughlin — now had more room to maneuver, and in utilizing a pair
of keyboards, often simultaneously, he vigorously bent the material to his will,
fueling Davis’ moody musings via his churning keyboard accompaniments and
mercurial, blues-inflected motifs. Augmented by Airto’s otherworldly shadings,
Jarrett, along with DeJohnette and Henderson, propelled the music along its path
by keeping it in a constant state of motion. It was over this molten terrain
that Bartz furiously unleashed his brash and brassy wails while Davis gleefully
stabbed and sliced through the thick air with the delicious puissance of his
swift, sharp uppercuts — occasionally pausing, however briefly, to signal a
change in ambience merely by altering the timbre of his horn.
Of course, the concerts featured on The Cellar Door Sessions 1970
culminated when the band was reunited with guitarist John McLaughlin during the
final night of its engagement. It wasn’t that the group without McLaughlin
didn’t venture into the unknown or brew a broiling primordial stew; one listen
to the thrashing funk of What I Say from the opening show or the frenetic
machinations of Joe Zawinul’s Directions that began the late set from
Friday evening is enough to dispel any argument to the contrary. However, with
McLaughlin on board, its heavy, ominous overtones turned darker and more
foreboding. Sitting amidst the turbulence concocted by the ensemble, Davis
pitted the guitar-like emissions from his trumpet against McLaughlin’s own
jagged incursions. Taken in full, the onslaught unleashed by the outfit
throughout The Cellar Door Sessions 1970 not only extended into live
performance Davis’ accomplishments on A Tribute to Jack Johnson, but it
also hinted at the directions that his music would take in the years to come. 
The Cellar Door Sessions 1970 is available
from Amazon.com. To order, Click Here!
For Canadian orders, please
Click Here!
For UK orders, please
Click Here!
Ratings
1 Star: Pitiful
2 Stars: Listenable
3 Stars: Respectable
4 Stars: Excellent
5 Stars: Can't Live Without It!!
Copyright © 2005
The Music Box
|
