Columbia/Legacy
Recordings, a division of Sony Music Entertainment, released Miles Davis &
John Coltrane - The Final Tour: The Bootleg Series, Vol. 6 on March 23, 2018.
Available in
4CD boxset and digital configurations, Miles Davis & John Coltrane - The
Final Tour: The Bootleg Series, Vol. 6 brings together, for the first time in
an authorized edition with state-of-the-art production, five mythic concert
performances as heard by lucky audiences during the epochal Spring 1960 Jazz At
The Philharmonic European Tour.
Showcasing
the musical chemistry shared by Miles and Trane, The Final Tour: The Bootleg
Series, Vol. 6 offers five of the best recorded shows from that pivotal 1960
tour (Coltrane's last as sideman): two shows from Paris’s L’Olympia Theater on
Monday, March 21; two shows from the next night at Stockholm’s Konserthuset;
and one from Copenhagen’s Tivolis Koncertsal three days later, on March 24.
The box set
was produced by the multi-Grammy winning team of producers Steve Berkowitz,
Michael Cuscuna and Richard Seidel. And mastered by multi-Grammy winning Sony
Music engineer Mark Wilder. The set is authorized for official release by the
Miles Davis Estate, the John Coltrane Estate, and Columbia Records/Legacy
Recordings.
Miles Davis
and John Coltrane were each implementing their own jazz revolutions at the time
these recordings were made and the electrifying sonic frisson produced by the
sometimes-competing/sometimes-intertwining musical visions of the artists
perplexed contemporary jazz fans--many of whom were just getting acquainted
with the recently-released and now iconic Kind of Blue.
"Much
happened on that 1960 tour onstage and off, including powerful, emotionally
charged performances in which one can hear the swinging, divergent energy of a
band, and the unfiltered reactions of the European audiences: the crowd
responses are indeed an inherent part of these historic performances,"
writes Grammy Award®-winning music historian Ashley Kahn in his in-depth
revelatory liner notes penned especially for this collection. "The common
judgement on this music is that it represents a great jazz ensemble audibly
straining to hold itself together...An equally convincing interpretation of the
1960 situation is that Miles and his quintet were redefining what a great band
could sound like, and how much music it could contain—at one time, in one
concert, even in one tune. It’s not that the bandmembers were so much apart,
but rather that each were more themselves within the same unit—that divergence
could co-exist and make music together."
The repertoire performed in this collection is a
veritable Miles Davis “Greatest Hits” including “ ‘Round Midnight”, “Bye Bye
Blackbird”, “On Green Dolphin Street”, “Walkin’ “, “All Of You” and “Oleo”, all
of which he had made his own and had been performing for some time. As well as
more recent additions to the repertoire which were composed by Davis – “So
What” and “All Blues” -- both from Kind
Of Blue.
The Final
Tour is essential listening, an invitation to travel through time to experience
the enduring beauty and magic of Miles and Trane at the peak of their
collective powers. The ensemble includes Miles Davis (trumpet), John Coltrane
(tenor sax), Wynton Kelly (piano), Paul Chambers (bass), Jimmy Cobb (drums),
all of whom had been performing together since the Kind Of Blue album.
The Final
Tour closes with a rare contemporaneous audio interview with John Coltrane
(conducted by Swedish deejay Carl-Erik Lindgren). "Do you feel
angry?," asks Lindgren. "No, I don't," says Coltrane. "I
was talking to a fellow the other day, and I told him, the reason I play so
many sounds, maybe it sounds angry, I'm trying so many things at one time. I
haven't sorted them out.”
.
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