Miles Davis

Recorded at the Antibes Jazz Festival in July 1963, this is the first major live document of the new rhythm section: Herbie Hancock, Ron Carter, and Tony Williams. George Coleman holds the tenor chair, playing with a warm, fluent authority that suits the repertoire. The opening "Autumn Leaves" runs for nearly fifteen minutes and never loses focus for a second.

What made this rhythm section revolutionary was Tony Williams. He was seventeen years old at these sessions, and he played with a ferocity and freedom that had never been heard in a jazz rhythm section before. He doesn't just keep time; he pushes against it, prods the soloists, and occasionally threatens to pull the whole thing apart. Somehow it never falls apart. Miles and Herbie Hancock hold the center while Williams tests every edge.

Coleman's tenor is warm and assured, his phrasing rooted in the hard bop tradition but responsive enough to follow the rhythm section wherever it leads. He does not have Wayne Shorter's compositional vision, which is part of why Miles kept looking for a different saxophonist, but as a player he is excellent, and the quintet with Coleman is a genuinely compelling band. In Europe is a document of a group that knew it had found something, even if the final piece had not yet arrived.

Recorded the same night as Four' & More at Lincoln Center, this album takes the slow and the tender material from that concert. George Coleman is on tenor here rather than Wayne Shorter, and the difference in temperament is striking: Coleman plays with a warmer, more conventional hard bop vocabulary, which makes the rhythm section's restlessness feel even more startling by contrast. Tony Williams rattles cymbals and snare against ballad tempos in ways that should feel wrong but feel exactly right.

The title track is the masterpiece. Miles takes the melody at a dragging, searching pace, with long rests between phrases. He plays into silence rather than through it. There's a moment midway through his solo where the rest of the band drops almost completely away and he hangs a single note in the air for what feels like forever. The crowd, which had been fairly restless, goes completely quiet. That's the power of this particular performance.

Herbie Hancock's comping throughout this album is some of his most sensitive work on record: he finds voicings that support without guiding, that color without committing. Coleman's solo on the title track is respectable and heartfelt, but Miles's is the reason this recording gets returned to. It is one of the great jazz ballad performances, full stop.

The first studio album by the second great quintet in its definitive lineup, and the opening statement of a new kind of jazz. The title track sets the tone immediately: the theme is brief and slightly abstract, the solos don't follow any prescribed order, and the rhythm section moves with a collective intelligence that has no precedent. Wayne Shorter wrote six of the seven compositions, and they are unlike anything else being written at the time: tonally ambiguous, rhythmically slippery, full of space that begs to be occupied in unexpected ways.

What this band developed in 1965 is sometimes called "time, no changes," a kind of playing where the underlying harmonic structure is suggested rather than stated, and where the rhythm section doesn't have to lock into any fixed pulse. Herbie Hancock described it as everyone playing in the tempo rather than on the tempo. You hear it clearly on "Agitation," where the group seems to accelerate and slow down as a single organism without anyone actually changing the beat.

Tony Williams is astonishing throughout. He plays against the soloists, feeds them rhythmic cues, and occasionally pulls the texture to almost nothing before flooding back in. Ron Carter anchors everything without ever becoming predictable. Shorter's playing is at its most searching here: angular, probing, completely unlike the bebop vocabulary that most tenor saxophonists of the era were working in. E.S.P. is the record that codified a new jazz language.

The companion to My Funny Valentine, taken from the same Lincoln Center concert in February 1964. Where that album had the ballads and the tenderness, this one has the up-tempo material, and it is ferocious. The group opens with "Walkin'" at a pace that seems almost reckless, and they sustain that intensity through the entire set. Tony Williams sounds like he's barely containing himself.

George Coleman is at his best here. Given room to run on fast tempos, his hard bop fluency becomes an asset rather than a conservatism. He plays long, burning lines on "Seven Steps to Heaven" with a conviction that makes the absence of Wayne Shorter feel less like a gap and more just like a different kind of band. Herbie Hancock, meanwhile, is building toward something that won't fully emerge until the next year's studio albums.

What this concert document captures better than any studio record is the physical energy of this band live. Miles played his most interactive, call-and-response trumpet in live settings, and the rhythm section responded in kind. The two LPs drawn from this single night remain among the best evidence that Miles Davis's band of 1964 was doing something that had no real parallel anywhere else in jazz.

The second great quintet at its peak. By 1966 this group had been playing together for nearly two years and the collective understanding had deepened into something almost telepathic. Miles Smiles is the record that shows this most clearly: the interaction between the five musicians is so intuitive and so reflexive that you start to lose track of who is leading and who is following. The answer, on this record, is that nobody is fully in charge and everybody is.

Shorter's compositions remain the band's primary material, and "Orbits" is one of his best: a jagged, barely-there theme that gives the rhythm section enormous latitude, followed by solos that seem to grow directly from the melodic fragments rather than from any underlying chord structure. Miles plays it with an authority that makes the angularity feel inevitable. His trumpet has never sounded more spare or more confident than it does on these mid-sixties Columbia sessions.

The rhythm section on Miles Smiles is simply incomparable. Tony Williams and Ron Carter had developed a way of playing together that moved the pulse without ever pinning it down; Herbie Hancock was finding harmonic territory that was neither tonal nor atonal but something stranger and more interesting. This is the sound that younger musicians spent the next decade trying to figure out how to play.

The most introspective and least celebrated of the second quintet's studio albums, recorded at the same May 1967 sessions that produced Nefertiti. Sorcerer is quieter and more diffuse than its companion, built around slower tempos and more open textures. It doesn't announce itself the way E.S.P. or Miles Smiles do. But return to it a few times and you start to hear how deeply it rewards patience.

Shorter's "Masqualero" is the center of the record: a nearly static theme that floats over a rocking bass figure, with Miles and Shorter weaving around each other in a way that feels less like jazz improvisation and more like a kind of collective meditation. Tony Williams plays brushes through much of it, which is unusual for him and gives the whole thing a hushed, suspended quality. You keep waiting for an explosion that never quite comes.

There is one non-Shorter composition, Herbie Hancock's "The Sorcerer," which provides a jaunty contrast to the album's general mood of controlled mystery. But the tone of Sorcerer is mostly set by the slower, more abstract pieces. It occupies a specific mood in the quintet's studio catalog that no other record covers, which makes it worth having even if it isn't where you'd start.

The title track is one of the strangest and most beautiful things the quintet recorded. Shorter wrote a circular, hypnotic melody and then the group did something no one expected: Miles and Shorter play the theme repeatedly, cycling through it again and again without variation, while Tony Williams and the rhythm section improvise freely underneath. The melody becomes the fixed point; the support structure becomes the improvised element. It inverts the entire logic of jazz.

The effect is genuinely hypnotic. By the third or fourth time through the theme you stop waiting for a solo and start hearing it as a kind of endless loop, with Williams's drumming shifting and evolving beneath it. It's one of the most distinctive performances on any Miles Davis record. The rest of the album doesn't quite reach that height, but the standard cuts like "Hand Jive" and "Riot" are outstanding second-quintet fare.

This was one of the last studio recordings before Herbie Hancock, Ron Carter, and Tony Williams all moved on to their own projects and the electric era began. Listening now, with that knowledge, Nefertiti has a valedictory quality. The quintet is playing at its most inventive right at the moment of its dissolution. That makes it bittersweet in a way the group's earlier records are not.

The first transitional record, the moment when electricity entered the quintet's sound. Herbie Hancock plays electric piano on several tracks rather than acoustic, and the difference is subtle but significant: the timbre changes, the harmonic voicings start to open up differently, and something in the overall texture shifts. This isn't yet the electric music Miles would make the following year. It's more like the quintet dipping a toe in the water.

The opening "Stuff" is the most striking piece: a groove-based piece built on a repeating two-chord pattern, with Miles and Shorter playing over it in a way that anticipates the floating, static-harmony approach of In a Silent Way. George Benson appears on one track, playing a cleaner, more funk-adjacent style than the angular rock influences that would come later. The two aesthetic modes exist uneasily alongside each other, and that tension is part of what makes the album interesting.

Miles in the Sky is not the most essential record in this stretch of Davis's career, but it's historically fascinating: you can hear the direction shifting in real time. The acoustic quintet that made E.S.P. and Nefertiti is still here, recognizable, but it's beginning to look over its shoulder at something that hasn't arrived yet.

The transition record, recorded in two distinct sessions three months apart. The June sessions feature Herbie Hancock and Ron Carter; the September sessions feature Chick Corea and Dave Holland, two of the musicians who would form the core of the electric band. The difference in feel between the two sets of recordings is subtle but detectable if you listen for it: the September material has a slightly looser, more open quality, as if Corea and Holland were less deferential to Miles's established aesthetic than their predecessors.

The album's opening title track is as beautiful as anything Miles recorded in the sixties: a gentle, rocking groove with a theme that floats above it without ever quite landing on anything. Shorter plays soprano saxophone on several tracks for the first time in the group's studio work, and the higher, more penetrating timbre changes the music's character significantly. It points toward the textures that In a Silent Way would explore in depth.

By the end of Filles de Kilimanjaro the second great quintet is already half dissolved. What replaces it will be completely different. But this record catches the moment of transformation and makes it beautiful rather than abrupt. It is the most elegiac thing in Miles Davis's discography, and also one of his most formally perfect recordings.