Continuing my Miles Davis upgrade. I got
Kind of Blue,
Sketches of Spain remasters for £2-3, these are very popular albums so CDs are regularly available. The 1969-75 live albums much less so.
During my travels I have found and am enjoying this grey market release, although let's be honest this is pretty much a bootleg that has found its way into some legit outlets:
Miles Davis
The ArchivesA bundling together of three 'live broadcast' sets from, respectively 1969, 1975, and 1990, these CDs are on different labels Go Faster, Iconography, and Leftfield Media. There is no label information on the box in which they have been bundled under the
Archives title.
Each of these well-recorded discs could be added to remasters of specific live releases from the MIles catalogue, as I will detail. I suspect only one is taken from an actual broadcast, the other two were 'liberated' tapes made in the process of creating the relevant album.
First up is a live recording from Fillmore East in April 1970, recorded apparently the night before the
Black Beauty album was recorded, with Corea, DeJohnette, Steve Grossman, and Airto on percussion.
I love the
Black Beauty album, so to have this extra material is wonderful - similar setlist but not exact, and the performances are markedly different. Very useful for figuring out what was pre-determined for each title, and how much was improvised (a good deal, it turns out).
Next up is the jem of the package for me.
Tokyo 1973 alleges to be from Miles's summer tour of Japan of that year, but in fact it is a recording of the same early 1975 tour that was the source of
Agharta and
Pangaea.
Amazing recordings - if only a boxed set of remasters of those two albums with this show could find its way onto the shelves, or more 1975 live recordings come out as part of the Miles Official
Bootleg series.
I know
Agharta well - it was my first MIles LP, bought in 1979. I listened to this with a friend who also knows the album, we agreed there are more horns in the mix and what seems to be more energy, supporting the assertion made that as the tour progressed, Miles's dependence on medication to deal with the pain he was suffering from joints and stomach ulcers affected the performances that were issued.
There remains mystery over the actual date of the recording. Other editions of the Tokyo show do not have the same titles, and the date stated on the CD is 1973. But is seems obvious this is the same band as the 1975 recorded albums.
A fine addition to those albums.
The final CD is the lesser of the set, but still enjoyable. Radio announcer interventions indicate it was genuinely taped off the radio, or sourced from an archive of the broadcast.
This is the live show from Miles's appearance at the 1990 Chicago Jazz Festival. The set is one show, and supplements the official compilation live CD
Live Around The World, which has selections from 1988-91.
This performance mirrors much of that album, but has long versions of Star People and The Senate, Me And You which the official release lacks.
This was the period in which I had several chances to see Miles play and declined. I wondered at the time if I would later regret this. Not really - in a way I wish I had gone just to be in the presence of the legend.
But while this recording is pleasant enough, I will probably play it and its official counterpart almost never. Simply because there is now a wealth of more rewarding recordings out there, including now the other two discs in this set.
