Miles Davis
"The Cellar Door Sessions, 1970" (Sony Legacy)
Except to the few jazz experts who have looked at it aerially and mapped it out, Miles Davis's first electric period, from 1969 to 1975, feels like a dark labyrinth, or a frustration dream. He worked hard, and created a body of recorded work that was caustic, unrecognizable, spooky. In spots, the passageways become tiny and dark; waves of musicians, hired for an hour or a month or a year, fade in and out, all subsumed by rhythm. The sound balloons, growing dense and disjunctive and bluntly repetitive, and then winnows down to an ominous rustle.
But "The Cellar Door Sessions, 1970," a new six-CD box set full of live Miles Davis music, represents a stretch when Davis was making organic, linear music. It is six musicians in a working band, making sense of a new paradigm on a nightclub stage in Washington, from a Wednesday to a Saturday. Along with Davis on trumpet, they are the keyboardist Keith Jarrett, the saxophonist Gary Bartz, the bassist Michael Henderson, the drummer Jack DeJohnette and the percussionist Airto Moreira. By the end of the week, joined by the guitarist John McLaughlin, the band grows to seven.
About 80 minutes of this music was used on the 1971 album "Live-Evil," and the rest appears here for the first time. The performances follow the principles of jazz as we all know it, with rigorous collective improvisation building up arcs of tension. But the sounds and the rhythms connote another discipline altogether: electric funk, shocked and altered through wah-wah and distortion pedals.
One of the assumptions that Davis was stepping on - with help from his producer, Teo Macero - was that there needed to be a stratified difference between performance and studio recordings. Columbia, his label, was already in the practice of recording many of his gigs. But the trumpeter and the producer didn't want to just make live albums: they became wickedly creative with the editing razor, making collages with completely different songs from live tapes and even studio jams. Some of the final products could be wrenching, discontinuous, provocative. But they were only emphasizing the provocations already there.
By the time of "Cellar Door," Davis was scraping off the outer levels of the sound that made him famous, masking and distorting his instrument. It wasn't just that he wouldn't play "Bye Bye Blackbird" anymore; suddenly he wasn't making the trumpet sound like a trumpet. At times, on "Cellar Door," the electric guitar sounds like a keyboard, which sounds like a trumpet, which sounds like a percussion instrument - specifically, the cuíca, the Brazilian friction drum that whines and sighs as it changes pitch. As much as Davis alters himself, you hear his phrases, and even his tone, at the core of that changed sound. It's still him.
In everyday terms, this box set is too much music. One of these discs alone, perhaps the second or the sixth, can be nearly overwhelming; each demands concentration. But for now that's beside the point. It's filling a hole in general knowledge, and it establishes better than before that there was, in fact, a third great Miles Davis group beyond the quintets of the 1950's and 60's.
Through each complete live set, the members of the band are listening rigorously to one other and Davis is working to build something coherent for his audience. In "Honky Tonk," he pulls that coherence across a slow, tense ooze; in "Directions" and "What I Say," the band plays fast and athletically, with Mr. DeJohnette coming on the second and fourth beat, and Mr. Henderson leaving space between short, wriggling bass figures. Jimi Hendrix had died three months before these shows, and sometimes Davis seems to be trying to keep pace with the sound of Hendrix's Band of Gypsies. (Several bass lines refer directly to a few Hendrix songs that were not even a year old.)
Mr. Bartz keeps the music earthy, with blues-tonality phrases. Mr. McLaughlin, with his bright, slashing fusillades, shows up on the two final discs, and "Live-Evil" tilted toward his presence. Yet he wasn't strictly necessary. The central force in the band, beneath Davis's imposing gestures, is Mr. Jarrett, battling with two Fender keyboards: an electric piano and an organ.
As Mr. Jarrett writes in the box set's liner notes, he abominated both instruments, but asked to play one or the other, he decided to play them simultaneously, and through effects pedals, to sound as unkeyboardlike as he could. His performances are stunning: he pulls the music taut, elaborates in long, aggressive sweeps on the short written motives and the harmonies, tirelessly explores the instruments' porridgey noises, making notes splat and shriek and tinkle. He doesn't let up. He has four discrete solo improvisations on the set, but you can drop in nearly anywhere and see for yourself: he's thinking orchestrally, making a great deal happen at once.
BEN RATLIFF nytimes.com
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