Miles Davis 1970: The Bootleg Series Vol.
3" to be released March 25, 2014. Miles Davis' historic four-night stand at
promoter Bill Graham's legendary Fillmore East in New York City, June 17-20,
1970, is presented in its entire full-length unedited form for the first time
as MILES AT THE FILLMORE – Miles Davis 1970: The Bootleg Series Vol. 3. The
four-CD box set will be available everywhere on March 25th through
Columbia/Legacy.
At one
of the most crucial moments in jazz and rock history, two months after the
release of Miles' groundbreaking double-LP Bitches Brew in April 1970, he was
beginning to discover – and be discovered by – the burgeoning rock audience
that came of age in the late 1960s.
Miles, inducted into the Rock And Roll Hall Of Fame in 2006, the only
jazz artist and only solely instrumental artist ever inducted, had started
listening to the funk of James Brown, Sly & the Family Stone, the Chambers
Brothers, and Jimi Hendrix, not to mention the Beatles. Bitches Brew was a
turning point for jazz and rock. Bill
Graham had a long history of presenting jazz artists at the Fillmores (Charles
Lloyd, John Handy, and Roland Kirk among them) but it was Miles who carried
rock audiences to a new plateau.
In
October 1970, Columbia Records released the 2-LP set Miles Davis At Fillmore,
which consisted of performances culled from the four nights of shows at the
Fillmore East (where Miles opened for fellow Columbia artist Laura Nyro). At that time the shows were edited to fit the
LP format. The full unedited shows are
now presented for the first time yielding 100-plus minutes of previously
unreleased music.
The
three additional bonus tracks add another 35 minutes of music, released here
for the first time, recorded in April 1970, at the Fillmore West in San
Francisco (where Graham put Miles and band on a bill with the Grateful Dead and
Stone The Crows). MILES AT THE FILLMORE
– Miles Davis 1970: The Bootleg Series Vol. 3 now contains 135 minutes of
previously unreleased music.
The
extensively researched 36-page booklet that accompanies the box set contains a
number of specially written pieces.
These provide a context for Miles' musical transformations in the
turbulence of the Fillmore rock epoch, as the psychedelic era of the late-1960s
segued into the politically-charged intersection of the anti-war movement,
Black Power, and the rise of funk:
•An
eloquent and authoritative 2,200-word first-hand account by Carlos Santana (as
told to author Ashley Kahn), examining Miles' complex place in the pantheon of
jazz, funk and rock, and his intriguing relationship with Bill Graham during
the near two-year span that Miles played shows at the Fillmores;
•An
introductory Producers' Note written by reissue producers Richard Seidel and
Michael Cuscuna, providing a concise overview of Miles' Fillmore period and the
project itself, its correlation with the original Columbia double-LP,
especially the additional 100 minutes of unreleased music from the shows, and
35 minutes of unreleased music on the bonus tracks;
•An
illuminating 2,500-word chronologic essay by Cuscuna, who was also a first-hand
witness (as a disc jockey on New York's influential WPLJ-FM) to Miles'
development at the time, further underscoring progressive underground FM radio
and the late-'60s rock generation's discovery of Miles at this crucial turn of
his career.
With the
release of his groundbreaking double-LP Bitches Brew on Columbia just two
months earlier in April 1970, Miles was front-page news around the world. He was leading a quintet lineup that included
Chick Corea on electric piano, bassist Dave Holland, and drummer Jack
DeJohnette (all of whom had been at the core of the Bitches Brew sessions
recorded in August 1969), plus two members who had played on studio sessions
since November, 1969 and then joined the touring band in February and April of
1970 respectively – tenor and soprano saxophonist Steve Grossman, and
percussionist, flutist and vocalist Airto Moreira.
At the
Fillmore East, they were joined by none other than Keith Jarrett on organ and
tambourine, during the historic three month period when both Jarrett and Corea
manned the keyboards for Miles. Jarrett
had just played on some key Miles studio sessions in the weeks before the
Fillmore East shows, and would continue to be a member of the band until late
1971, also performing on Miles' remaining two Fillmore stints – at Fillmore
West in October 1970, and May 1971.
The
four-CD box set devotes one disc to each of the four nights that Miles and his
group performed at the Fillmore East. As
issued on the original Columbia double-LP in 1970 (Miles Davis At Fillmore,
currently available on double-CD as C2K 65139) the music, whose original set
lengths ranged from 46 minutes to nearly one hour, was edited by producer Teo
Macero to accommodate a seamless sampling of music from each night on each of
the four LP sides. Furthermore, no song
titles were listed, and the LP sides were simply labeled "Wednesday
Miles," "Thursday Miles," "Friday Miles," and
"Saturday Miles." To
paraphrase a review of the double-LP in Variety at the time, "the only
label that can be placed on this program is that it's Miles Davis music."
In a
rare, in-depth 1970 interview for rock magazine Zygote, it was reported that
Miles, while listening to the concert playback, was "so excited about the
music that he wanted every set, every note made available to the
public..." Back in April, Rolling
Stone critic Vince Aletti praised Miles' [March] debut at the Fillmore East:
"He came out looking and sounding tight and steely-hard, knees bent and
horn raised, like a heavy spring under tension."
For
2014's MILES AT THE FILLMORE – Miles Davis 1970: The Bootleg Series Vol. 3, the
producers returned to the original remote live recording tapes, produced by
Macero and engineered by Stan Tonkel. On
each of the four nights, Miles and his group shook the rafters with high-volume
performances of four staples (and the half-minute closer, "The
Theme"):
•"Directions"
(which he first recorded in the studio in November 1968, and played every night
from 1969 to '71, but was not issued on
record until 1980);
•"The
Mask" (described by Santana, "[it] made you feel like you were in an
Alfred Hitchcock movie and something's about to happen and you can't get out of
the way," it was a new tune that Miles recorded two weeks before these
Fillmore East shows, at the tail end of the four-month long Jack Johnson
sessions);
•"It's
About That Time" (from the In A Silent Way album of early 1969); and
•"Bitches
Brew" (lean and muscular versions in the 10 to 14-minute range, that did
not sacrifice any of the
funk power of the original 27-minute album version,
probably the first Miles record purchased by most of the Fillmore rock fans).
As Miles
and the Fillmore East audiences warmed up to each other, and the sets grew to
nearly an hour in length, additional tunes were heard. On the second night, Miles played an encore
(an extremely rare occurrence), "Spanish Key" from Bitches Brew. On
both the third and fourth nights, Miles followed up "It's
About That
Time" with the same two songs: the World War II evergreen "I Fall In
Love Too Easily" (associated with Frank Sinatra, recorded by Miles on
1963's Seven Steps To Heaven) and the Wayne Shorter composition
"Sanctuary" (from Bitches Brew).
On the fourth night, Miles added "Willie Nelson," which he had
recorded in February at the start of the Jack Johnson sessions.
For the
bonus tracks, the producers judiciously chose three songs from the April 1970
Fillmore West shows that were in the band's repertoire, but were not performed
at the Fillmore East in June. On disc
one, "Wayne Shorter's 'Paraphernalia' and 'Footprints'," the
producers note, "are from the earlier acoustic repertoire and Miles was to
soon stop performing them." (In
fact, "Paraphernalia" dates from 1968's Miles In the Sky, and
"Footprints" dates from 1966's Miles Smiles.) On disc three, a 13-minute live version of
the Jimi Hendrix-influenced "Miles Runs The Voodoo Down" rivals the
14-minute original on Bitches Brew.
MILES AT
THE FILLMORE – Miles Davis 1970: The Bootleg Series Vol. 3 is the third entry
in the Miles Davis Bootleg Series of previously unreleased (or only bootlegged)
live performances. Each volume is
produced for release by multiple Grammy Award® winners Richard Seidel and
Michael Cuscuna, and co-produced by multiple Grammy Award® winner Steve Berkowitz. MILES AT THE FILLMORE was mixed by Grammy
Award® winner Dave Darlington. Executive
Producers for the Miles Davis Estate are Erin Davis, Cheryl Davis and Vince
Wilburn, Jr. Restorations are mastered
by multiple Grammy Award® winner Mark Wilder at Battery Studios in New York
City with Maria Triana. The first two titles in the series comprised:
•Miles
Davis Quintet - Live In Europe 1967: The
Bootleg Series Vol. 1 (released September 2011), a 3-CD + DVD package spanning
five northern European festival performances over nine days in October-November
1967, by Miles' "second great Quintet" that included Wayne Shorter
(tenor sax), Herbie Hancock (piano), Ron Carter (bass), and Tony Williams
(drums), the most acclaimed historic jazz box set of 2011, recipient of a
"5-star" review from Down Beat magazine, voted Historical Album of
the Year in the Down Beat Readers and Critics Poll, #1 reissue in both the
Critics and Readers polls of JazzTimes magazine, and voted Best Historical or
Boxed Set by the Jazz Journalists Association; and
•Miles
Davis Quintet – Live In Europe 1969: The Bootleg Series Vol. 2 (released
January 2013), a 3-CD + DVD package capturing Miles' short-lived "third
great quintet" with Wayne Shorter (tenor and soprano saxophone), Chick
Corea (piano and electric piano), Dave Holland (acoustic bass and electric
bass), and Jack DeJohnette (drums), in performances at the Antibes Jazz
Festival in France, then Stockholm and Berlin, also voted Historical Album of
the Year in the Down Beat Readers and Critics Poll, and #1 reissue in both the
Critics and Readers polls of JazzTimes magazine.
"The
sound of Miles at the Fillmore," Carlos Santana told Ashley Kahn of those
seriously tripped-out times, "was the sound of the Black Panthers. It was the sound of Vietnam. It was the sound of the protesting and the
beatings and the shootings. It was the
sound of the hippies and fighting in the streets and consciousness revolution…
You can hear that anger and darkness and the craziness of everything that was
still in the air from the '60s when this music was made. The '60s were over and they also weren't, you
know?
"If
ever there was a time when a rock audience was willing to open their ears and
hear some great modern jazz like the kind Miles was creating, it was at the
Fillmore… [Bill Graham] created that environment consciously and honestly and
brutally, and got a new generation to hear the beauty in this music. That was the deal: if you want to hear Steve
Miller or Neil Young or Santana, you've got to hear Miles Davis."
MILES AT
THE FILLMORE – Miles Davis 1970: The Bootleg Series Vol. 3
Disc One
(Fillmore East, Wednesday, June 17, 1970) – Selections: 1. Introduction by Bill
Graham * 2. Directions * 3. The Mask * 4. It's About That Time * 5. Bitches Brew
* 6. The Theme * Bonus tracks (Fillmore West, April 11, 1970): 7. Paraphernalia
* 8. Footprints.
Disc Two
(Fillmore East, Thursday, June 18, 1970) – Selections: 1. Directions * 2. The
Mask * 3. It's About That Time * 4. Bitches Brew * 5. The Theme * 6. Spanish
Key (Encore) * 7. The Theme.
Disc
Three (Fillmore East, Friday, June 19, 1970) – Selections: 1. Directions * 2.
The Mask * 3. It's About That Time * 4. I Fall In Love Too Easily * 5.
Sanctuary * 6. Bitches Brew * 7. The Theme * Bonus track (Fillmore West, April
11, 1970): 8. Miles Runs The Voodoo Down.
Disc
Four (Fillmore East, Saturday, June 20, 1970) – Selections: 1. Directions * 2.
The Mask * 3. It's About That Time * 4. I Fall In Love Too Easily * 5.
Sanctuary * 6. Bitches Brew * 7. Willie Nelson * 8. The Theme.
All
selections are previously unissued.
Note:
All Fillmore East selections originally issued in edited form on the double-LP,
Miles Davis: At Fillmore (Columbia 30038, released October 28, 1970).
