Stacking the live ensembles of his early electric period with heavy hitters like Jack DeJohnette, Dave Holland, Wayne Shorter, Chick Corea, Airto Moreira, Keith Jarrett and Gary Bartz allowed Miles Davis to interpret material from In a Silent Way, Bitches Brew and Tribute to Jack Johnson with relative ease and remarkable results. See official live LPs Black Beauty, At Fillmore, Volume 2 of the Bootleg Series or take your pick from the wealth of gray market soundboards, radio broadcasts and audience tapes. These are musicians who understood the assignment.
When the time came to bring material from 1972’s genre-defying On the Corner to the stage, Miles found himself in the difficult position of rebuilding his band from (nearly) the ground up, having gradually lost much of his supporting cast to more commercially successful pursuits like Weather Report, Return to Forever, Headhunters, Mahavishnu Orchestra, et al. Pulling together a sprawling ensemble that amended his traditional five-piece (electric piano, bass, drums and reeds) with electric sitar, tablas, a guitarist, organist and auxiliary percussion, Miles’ early performances from this new era were extraordinarily intense – tapes reveal the group chose to offset its own incongruity with with brute maximalism. The tapes also reveal, for perhaps the first time in his career, that Miles Davis was leading a band with no clear direction.
And so, despite his slow recovery from a cocaine-soaked car wreck in October that left him hobbled in a knee-length cast, the trumpeter pressed on with the experiment. In January of ‘73 he swapped in Dave Liebman on reeds and flute, dropped the sitar and tablas soon after, briefly assigned astral traveler Lonnie Liston Smith to the Yamaha combo organ, and debuted a relatively unknown second guitarist, Pete Cosey, at Seattle’s Paramount Theater on April 5th. The latter was an addition so critical that you can practically hear the band crystalize as Cosey takes his first documented solo. Through eight months of trial and error, the cast was assembled – Miles’ last great electric band had arrived.
While official releases from this ensemble are criminally scant, (Dark Magus from March of ‘74, Agharta and Pangaea from February of 75, and a couple of incomplete sets from ‘73 and ‘75 from the Bootleg Series Volume 4 are all that have escaped the vault), its two-year reign from the spring of 1973 into mid-’75 is the most well-documented period of Miles’ career. Circulating among the wealth of audience tapes, professionally-filmed festival gigs, radio broadcasts and soundboards is a small collection of recordings made on stage by the band members themselves. Captured with a personal cassette recorder and a couple of strategically placed mics (note the mic cable in the lower left foreground of the image below, from 5.25.1974 Rio de Janeiro), the tapes were likely intended for little more than the band’s post-show listening sessions, but there’s serious magic in all they reveal. Subtleties like the squeak of Miles’ wah pedal, boot heels pounding out tempos, verbal cues and shouts of ecstasy from the band as someone lays into a particularly filthy solo. Combine these audio verite moments with the unique mix courtesy of the on-stage mic placement and the tapes provide a surreal, almost three-dimensional listening experience. Infinitely better than a soundboard tape and more engaging than most professionally recorded official releases. Tapes that document a phenomenal band very literally in its element.
Collected here are five selections from that private stash of stage recordings, capturing the band at the Shaboo Inn in Willimantic, CT, London’s Rainbow Theater, and a pair of dates on its extraordinary tour of Brazil in the summer of ‘74. Beyond the blistering performances featured therein, the Brazil tapes are a notable document of guitarist Dominique Gaumont’s brief time with the band – a tenure that began on March 30, 1974 (as captured on sides 3 and 4 of the Dark Magus LP) and lasted through the fall. For my money, the June 1 performance is the superior document but grip all of the circulating on-stage tapes while you can. | j erwin
Miles Davis :: Recorded On Stage, 1973/1974
Turnaroundphrase (1974-1-26; Shaboo Inn, Willimantic, CT) ++ Calypso Frelimo (1973-7-10; Rainbow Theater, London) ++ For Dave (1974-5-25; Rio de Janeiro) ++ Ife > Right Off [excerpt] (1974-6-1; São Paulo)
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