“‘We played a lot of half-empty clubs in 1969,’ Miles Davis wrote in his autobiography. The jazz market was dwindling, and so even as he was making some of his most revelatory music, Miles Davis was not a major draw. Often, his hot new quintet - keyboardist Chick Corea, bassist Dave Holland, drummer Jack DeJohnette and mainstay saxophonist Wayne Shorter - was playing places like the Blue Coronet in Brooklyn or Shelly’s Manne-Hole in Los Angeles. But what a difference a year can make.
“In a way, Davis and Newport Jazz Festival impresario George Wein were in similar places in 1969. Both were facing declining sales and wanted to move with the time. And both came to the same conclusion: explore the possibilities of rock music. They met with very different results.
“Even at 43, in an era when the mantra was ‘Don’t trust anyone over 30,’ Davis retained a formidable cool. But jazz had not. ‘Rock was happening.’ For a restless artist like Miles Davis, being ‘a happening’ may well have been a larger part of rock’s allure than the music itself.
“In order to resuscitate waning ticket sales, Wein decided to take the blasphemous step of booking rock bands for the 1969 Newport Jazz Festival. Besides iconic jazzers like Buddy Rich, Art Blakey and Dave Brubeck, the bill included Led Zeppelin, Jethro Tull, and Sly & the Family Stone, among others. In ‘66, Davis had rented a boat and docked it in Newport Harbor so he wouldn’t have to hang out backstage. He just walked off the boat, played his set, then got back aboard and split back to New York. But in ‘69, Davis stayed on site the whole weekend. ‘He watched every group and he watched the response of everyone in the audience, who got the most applause, what music they were playing,’ Wein recalls. ‘He wanted to be part of that world because that’s where it was happening.’
“The Miles Davis Quintet played Saturday afternoon, July 5th, on a bill with Gary Burton, John Mayall, Frank Zappa and the Mothers, Tal Farlow, Red Norvo, the Newport All-Stars and Ruby Braff. It was about three weeks before the release of ‘In a Silent Way’.
“Every Miles Davis show was unique. But some were more unique than others. The Shorter-Corea-Holland-DeJohnette lineup is called ‘The Lost Quintet’ because they never recorded in the studio as a fivesome. But the band that played Newport that day could be called the Really Lost Quartet - Shorter got stuck in traffic and missed the gig.
“Before he even played a note, Davis’ clothes signaled what side of the cultural divide he was on - he’d forsaken his trademark sharp Brooks Brothers suits and was now sporting gigantic bug-eye shades and a blue denim suit that laced up the legs. ‘Miles was very consumed with being outrageous all his life,’ says Wein. ‘He wanted to walk into a room and have everybody look at him.’
“Their set was brief but dense with incident. The cool, elegant sound of Davis’ first electric albums, ‘Miles in the Sky’, ‘Filles de Kilimanjaro’ and ‘In a Silent Way’, so unlike the cataclysmic social climate of the late ‘60s, belied live performances that didn’t just reflect the tenor of the times, but their accelerated pace and din. ‘My group is loud,’ Davis noted. ‘That’s just the times we live in.’
“‘Miles Runs the Voodoo Down’ only found its languid Nawlins strut in the studio; this version burns hotter and faster. You can feel the rush of excitement from the younger players, who had been playing with the maestro for less than a year, but the feeling is clearly mutual. Davis starts with a fairly restrained solo, lays out for maybe ten bars, then plays another solo in a different mood as the band erupts around him - it’s almost as if, lacking Shorter, Davis is simulating the effect of a second soloist.
“The ‘Bitches Brew’ sessions took place six weeks later, so not all the music on the album was totally improvised - the band had been playing ‘Voodoo’, ‘Sanctuary’ and ‘Spanish Key’ before they recorded them, something Davis rarely did after 1963. During ‘Voodoo’, Corea quotes from ‘John McLaughlin’, originally a section of ‘Bitches Brew’ - so it too was kicking around before recording.
“Davis was in top shape - vegetarian, drug-free and on a boxer’s workout regimen; it shows in his float-like-a-butterfly-sting-like-a-bee playing. Corea is on fire, digging into the overtones of the electric keyboard, indelibly personalizing what many had considered an impersonal instrument. DeJohnette is absolutely rolicking and yet rarely ignoring the backbeat, and although Holland is all but drowned out, he was holding down the fort. They bring ‘Voodoo’ to the brink and back, never letting up until Davis steps in, takes it down and builds it up again over febrile riffing. Davis cues them with the tune’s theme and it’s into ‘Sanctuary’.
“‘Sanctuary’ gets a bit deflated - the climactic riff becomes an unadorned melody line rather than the expansive Davis-Shorter fanfare. Davis played a pensive lick that recalls his intro, signaling DeJohnette into a double-time beat that launches ‘It’s About that Time’ from ‘In a Silent Way’. There’s a lull, as if they’re catching their breath, then boom, DeJohnette uncorks a fast snare roll, Davis spews a dizzying flurry of notes, and it’s like the band got shot out of a cannon. Corea eventually calms things down and Davis picks up the mood, Corea occasionally hinting at the tune’s theme, but DeJohnette lights a fire under things very quickly, Davis is playing punchy, rhythmic licks, then tootles out traditional set-ender ‘The Theme’ while things are still airborne.
“A lot of the audience hadn’t yet heard the electric Miles Davis in concert. But note the big applause. People dug it. Of course they did - the set, as Davis would say, was a motherfucker.
“Wein doesn’t recall the show. ‘It was so hectic, I didn’t know what the hell was going on,’ he says. ‘I was concerned with not having a riot.’ He’s serious - on two days, hordes of rock-crazed hippie kids crashed the festival fences and bedlam ensued. Wein had argued that jazz and rock had common ground - the blues and improvisation - but the deeply divided audiences told otherwise. George Wein never again invited so many rock bands to Newport. ‘I definitely sold out that year, no question about it,’ he admits. ‘Because my festival was dying. But after that, I said let it die, we’ll keep struggling.’
“Some people felt Miles Davis had sold out too. But in fact he’d gained a new lease on musical life and was on the brink of attaining one of his greatest triumphs.
“Shorter left in early 1970, eventually replaced by former McCoy Tyner and Max Roach sideman Gary Bartz, who’d recorded some hip late ‘60s albums under his own name. Davis also added Brazilian percussionist Airto and another keyboardist, Keith Jarrett, who’d played with DeJohnette for jazz-rock pioneer Charles Lloyd. The septet played mostly rock venues that summer, opening for the Grateful Dead, Santana and Neil Young. They learned what worked for the rock crowd and they were right.
“Situated on an island off the southern coast of England, Isle of Wight ‘70 was one of the biggest rock festivals ever, attendance estimated as high as 600,00. Headliners included The Who, The Doors and Jimi Hendrix. The atmosphere was often contentious: a hippie with delusions of grandeur interrupted Joni Mitchell’s set and tried to declare a free festival. But no one dared interrupt Miles Davis. ‘He’s a pretty cool cat, Miles,’ note Murray Lerner, director of the Isle of Wight documentary ‘Message to Love’. ‘What was there to attack?’
“They began playing just as the sun began to go down on that hot August day. They followed Tiny Tim, whose silly but wildly well received performance was an ideal set-up: people were ready for something heavy.
“They took the stage, the only jazz band of the festival, all big hair and bell bottoms, and opened with a longtime set-starter ‘Directions’, a Joe Zawinul composition that was an outtake from a November 1968 session. They vamp for several minutes, as if synchronizing their musical watches; once they’re locked in, Davis cues the tune’s angular theme, complete with world-tilting bass line by Holland. His switch to electric bass guitar is key: its sonic gut-punch means you can now hear everything Holland plays - and just as importantly, so could the band. That and the two electric keyboards underscore the notion that, galvanic as it was, the Newport ‘69 band was stranded between two worlds; Isle of Wight ‘70 is full-blown electric Miles.
“Jazz was originally body music - funky, not just cerebral - and Davis wanted to reclaim, as he wrote in his autobiography, ‘that roadhouse, honky-tonk, funky thing that people used to dance to on Friday and Saturday nights.’ By the Isle of Wight, ‘The funkiness and the sort of primal stuff that he wanted,’ said Jarrett in Lerner’s documentary ‘Miles Electric’, ‘was finally coming out.’ This was Miles Davis you could dance to.
“At Newport, it was as few as three people playing at once; now it’s usually six. ‘Bitches Brew’ exemplified the same economy of line as Zen painting, the metaphor used by pianist Bill Evans in his famous ‘Kind of Blue’ liner notes. But Davis wasn’t doing Zen painting anymore; now the canvas was dense with brushstrokes. Wisely, they all throttle back the density and tempo a little. Corea (in the right speaker) plays much less densely than at Newport, spinning out guitar-like chords and motifs, even imitating feedback and wah-wah effect with an effects box he kept on his keyboard. Meanwhile Jarrett (in the left speaker) pounds out hard-grooving bolts of pure energy. Brilliantly, Davis placed Corea and Jarrett on opposite sides of the stage so they couldn’t hear each other. By design, they often clash. But they’re superlative musicians, so they clash gloriously.
“‘Bitches Brew’ opens like some interstellar villain’s theme song but then Holland thrums out a lick, Corea responds and the groove is on. It morphs constantly: there’s a King Crimson-like interlude, and under Bartz’s beguiling solo, it gets so funky, it almost sounds like the Meters, leading to a breakdown that summons up extraterrestrial Dixieland. Sometimes they exult in pure sound, like that wind-blows electronic scree from Corea’s keyboard - a master musician truly at play. Like Corea, Davis had also come to embrace noise - Airto rarely plays time and instead basically plays sound effects, as in the way he use the whimpering sound of the cuica to bounce off Davis, like a hip-hop ‘hype man’ echoing and egging on the frontman.
“Davis’ lyricism, poise and skill in the midst of roiling clamor is what makes him not just cool but inspirational. But the whole band is heroic - part of the music’s incredible excitement stems from the fact that they’re basically jamming out on one chord the entire time, drawing on endless creativity and technique to remain utterly riveting the entire time. The listening, the intense focus, is audible.
“The band reaches a mind-blowing peak near the end of ‘It’s About Time’, Corea and Jarrett locked in a ferocious pas de deux. But Davis almost cruelly kills the momentum. What’s he up to? The music starts building and actually tops the previous peak, absolutely spine-tingling. They cool down with a quick ‘Sanctuary’ then crank it up on last time for ‘Spanish Key’. After a long absence, Bartz takes his final solo, screaming through his mouthpiece and then answering on the sax, Davis solos, the band vamping with almost unbearable tension - until he cues the tune’s theme and everything explodes into daylight. As ever, Davis cuts in with ‘The Theme’ while the party’s still rocking and leaves the stage. Jarrett strikes an ominous yet beautiful chord identical to one he played at the top of ‘Bitches Brew’ as the band’s final crescendo lapses into applause.
“A year before, Miles Davis had been playing small clubs. Now, four months after ‘Bitches Brew’, he’s got what was one of the best-selling albums in jazz history and instead of playing his new electric music before audiences of aging, disapproving jazz traditionalists, he’s blowing the minds of hundreds of thousands of young people. As Murray Lerner says, ‘It was a big, revolutionary moment when a person like that could play in front of such a large rock audience.’ At the Isle of Wight, Miles Davis had gone farther than any jazz musician had ever gone before - or since.” (Michael Azerrad, December 2010. From the liner notes.)
Performers: Miles Davis (tp), Gary Bartz (s/a-sx), Chick Corea (e-pi), Keith Jarrett (og), Dave Holland (bs), Jack DeJohnette (dr), Airto Moreira (pc)
1. Miles Runs The Voodoo Down
2. Sanctuary
3. It's About That Time (Theme)
4. Directions
5. Bitches Brew
6. It's About That Time
7. Sanctuary
8. Spanish Key
9. The Theme
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