I thought List members might like to see today's UK Guardian Review. It's
OCR'd off newsprint so it may not be quite accurate I ahven't had time to
check.
Miles away from home
John Fordham
Miles Davis The Complete Miles Davis in Montreux (Warner)
***** £161
Miles Davis's first response, almost 30 years ago, to a request to play the
Montreux Jazz Festival was: 'Your offer is an insult to my colour and
talent." It is a tribute to the event's enthusiastic promoter, Claude Nobs,
that a long friendship and 20 discs-worth of music eventually came of it.
This box-set exhaustively documents Davis's regular appearances at
Montreux, from 1973 to his last visit with a stripped down, version of his
own band and a Quincy Jones-led orchestra in 1991. It traces the evolution
of an improvising genius's musical vocabulary over three decades, and by
winding up on the one high profile show Davis devoted to revisiting the past
(1991's reprise of the classic Gil Evans big-band scores) it even casts an
illuminating light on earlier Davis-linked jazz revolutions. It is also a
personal, emotional and human story, of talent subjected to relentless self
examination and testing by unpredictable collaborations, sporadically
undermined by physical and psychological fragility, triumphantly rekindled
by sheer force of will and maybe a deeper love for music than for anyone or
anything else, and finally opening up to nostalgia- This evolution is also a
unique barometer of what was going on in the wider musical world, from
modal, chord based and free-jazz to chart music and dance, to the uses of
electronics.
Individual tracks (there are 124) matter less in isolation than the
development of Davis bands, often dismissed by critics at the time as
indistinguishable funk vehicles. Variation between performances is also
fascinating because the set features some afternoon and evening performances
of very similar programmes on the same day. The 1973 music is dominated by
Davis's guitarlike wah-wah on the trumpet, the bold, pitch-warping blues
guitar of Pete Cosey, and a linear, chordless sound at times oddly
suggestive of a prototype drum 'n' bass. The audience sometimes booed at the
time. But a powerful force is also the wonderful saxophonist Dave Liebman -
who used to say he had no idea what he was doing, he just started playing
against the general hubbub when Miles looked in his direction. With
hindsight he sounds like an uncannily perfect substitute for Wayne Shorter.
BY 1994, Davis himself is less electronic and more playful, and
chords have reappeared - with Star People and Time After Time revealing in
several versions how different he could sound, from brittle and nervy to
bold and clear two years later; guests such as George Duke and David Sanborn
appear in 1986 (Sanborn particularly heated and soulful); a more directly
funky band emerges once, Ricky Wellman and Marilyn Mazur are on percussion
and Kenny Garrett is on saxes; and the band distils itself toward pure
rhythm again with the emerging idea of a lead and second bass, and two
keyboards. The orchestral gig with a Quincy Jones organised band exploring
the old Gil Evans scores from Miles Ahead, Porgy and Bess and Sketches of
Spain is the only part of the set to have been previously released - and
somehow a fitfully certain Miles Davis, his assured young trumpet shadow
Wallace Roney, and saxophonist Garrett seem to join their various
reflections into a seamlessly single solo in improvised tribute to the
original spirit. A remarkable document, and a beautiful possession too
including plenty of great photography and some of Davis's original drawings.
Richard Gardner
