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.

Three electric pianos playing simultaneously. A guitarist who had never recorded with Miles before. A single repeated theme that frames two long improvised sections like a pair of parentheses. Producer Teo Macero editing the tapes heavily in post. In a Silent Way arrived in 1969 as something genuinely unprecedented, and it still sounds like nothing else in jazz even today. It is the most beautiful record in Miles Davis's catalog, and possibly the most influential.

The music barely moves. The textures shimmer and shift, but nothing drives forward the way jazz is supposed to drive. There are no solos in the conventional sense: the musicians move in and out of the texture, surface and submerge, play around a central theme that never really develops but just exists, glowing. Shorter's soprano saxophone on the title piece sounds like it's coming through a wall from another room. Miles's trumpet is spare, unhurried, and devastating.

Joe Zawinul wrote both compositions that appear here. "In a Silent Way" was substantially stripped down by Miles from Zawinul's original arrangement: Miles edited out the chords, leaving just the melody floating over the sustained electric textures. The decision to loop the opening theme and return to it at the end was Macero's, not Miles's. Both decisions were correct. This record required exactly the kind of collaborative reimagining it received.

There's a version of first listening to this album that requires patience. If you come to it expecting jazz as you know it, or even as Miles had been playing it up through the late sixties, you are going to be disoriented. The opening title track is twenty-six minutes long. There are two electric pianos playing simultaneously. John McLaughlin is on electric guitar and he plays like he's trying to rewire something. And through all of it, Miles's trumpet sounds like it's coming from another room, processed and distant, cutting through the mix only when it wants to.

Producer Teo Macero edited the tapes the way a rock producer would, cutting and looping sections, layering performances that were never intended to line up. The result feels less like a jazz session and more like a weather system: dense and shifting and impossible to fully map. Wayne Shorter's soprano saxophone surfaces and disappears through the mix like something half-glimpsed. Zawinul and Corea layer electric piano lines that overlap without ever resolving into anything comfortable.

"Spanish Key" is the track that tends to land hardest on first listen: a locked groove with McLaughlin threading sharp lines through the polyrhythmic churn underneath. "Miles Runs the Voodoo Down" is the one that feels most like rock without actually being rock. Neither one sounds like anything that existed before this record. Bitches Brew is not always an easy listen. But it is probably the most ambitious thing Miles ever did, and the ambition pays off.

The electric record that functions as pure rock and roll. Assembled by Teo Macero from sessions recorded across several months in 1970, A Tribute to Jack Johnson is built around a single locked groove on side one: "Right Off" runs for over twenty-six minutes, anchored by Michael Henderson's deep electric bass vamp and John McLaughlin's jagged, endlessly inventive guitar. Miles plays over all of it with his most aggressive and extroverted trumpet in years.

Henderson was the key hire in this period. He came from Stevie Wonder's band and had no jazz background, which was exactly what Miles wanted: someone who played the kind of simple, deep funk groove that you could stack other things on top of. The "jazz musicians don't know how to groove" critique that was circulating in early-seventies music culture clearly got to Miles, and this record is his answer to it. "Right Off" grooves as hard as anything Sly Stone was recording at the time.

Side two, "Yesternow," is slower and more brooding, with a spoken narration about Jack Johnson added by Macero in post-production. The contrast between the two sides gives the album a narrative arc that most of the electric records lack. Jack Johnson is probably the most accessible entry point into the electric period for listeners who love the quintet records but feel lost in the more abstract electric textures.

A double album combining studio tracks with live recordings from the Cellar Door in Washington, D.C. in December 1970. The Cellar Door concerts were among the rawest and most intense performances of Miles's electric period, and even heavily edited by Macero the live material crackles with physical energy. Keith Jarrett had replaced Chick Corea on electric piano and organ, and his more rhapsodic, slightly chaotic approach gives the band a different center of gravity.

Gary Bartz on saxophone is the other new element, and he fits the post-Bitches Brew aesthetic better than Wayne Shorter had: where Shorter was cerebral and precise, Bartz is looser, more emotionally direct, closer to rhythm and blues in his phrasing. The combination of Bartz, Jarrett, McLaughlin, and Henderson gives the Cellar Door band a tougher, more aggressive sound than the Bitches Brew ensemble.

The studio tracks that separate the live material are more experimental and abstract, with Macero's editing working harder and the textures becoming more dissonant. The result is a sprawling record that rewards attention but doesn't always reward casual listening. Live-Evil is the electric record for listeners who want the music pushed as far as possible from accessibility.

Miles described this record as his attempt to make music for young Black audiences who had moved on from jazz to funk and soul. He hired a large ensemble and stripped the music to something closer to rhythm and groove than improvisation. The result polarized critics when it came out in 1972 and remains divisive today. Jazz listeners who wanted the second quintet found it noisy and tuneless. Funk listeners found the rhythms too abstract and unresolved. Miles didn't care about either reaction.

What On the Corner actually is, listened to on its own terms, is a texture record: forty minutes of layered percussion, cycling bass vamps, and fragments of horn playing that float over the top without soloing in any conventional sense. Macero's editing creates a kind of permanent transition state where nothing ever quite arrives. The Indian influence from Paul Buckmaster's arrangements gives it a quality that feels more like early minimalism than jazz or funk.

The record has been reappraised substantially since the nineties, particularly among hip-hop producers who recognized the sample-ready cyclical rhythms before most jazz critics did. On the Corner is a difficult listen and a fascinating historical document, but more than that it is a genuinely original aesthetic statement that had no real precedent and produced no real imitators. Nothing else sounds quite like it.

Recorded at Philharmonic Hall in New York in September 1972, this double album documents the band that immediately followed the On the Corner sessions. Carlos Garnett holds the saxophone chair, and his soulful, direct approach gives the music a different kind of intensity than Gary Bartz or Wayne Shorter had provided. Khalil Balakrishna on electric sitar and Badal Roy on tabla add the Indian rhythmic textures that Miles had introduced on the On the Corner studio dates. The rhythm section has coalesced around Al Foster and Michael Henderson into something more recognizably funk-influenced.

The material here is long, sprawling, and built around percussion-heavy grooves that accumulate gradually rather than arriving. Cedric Lawson on electric piano and synthesizer provides a shifting harmonic backdrop, and Miles himself plays less trumpet and more organ on this record than on any previous release, which surprised listeners at the time and still sounds unusual.

In Concert is a specialized pleasure: you have to be in the right frame of mind for it and willing to let its rhythmic cycles work on you at length. But if you engage with the electric period at all beyond Bitches Brew and Jack Johnson, this record rewards the deeper dive.

A double album of outtakes and extended sessions from the fertile 1969 to 1972 period, assembled by Macero from material that hadn't made it onto Bitches Brew, Jack Johnson, or Live-Evil. Given that those records were already exceptional, the leftover quality of Big Fun might seem like a warning sign. But the material here is consistently strong, and "Go Ahead John" from the 1970 McLaughlin sessions is one of the most ferociously exciting things Miles recorded in the electric period.

The album works because the sessions it draws from were so productive. A different producer might have left all of this in the vault, but Macero had the ear to recognize that extended, unedited takes from these bands had their own value. The version of "Ife" runs for nearly half an hour and demonstrates how the electric band could sustain a groove at extreme length without losing intensity.

For collectors and dedicated listeners, Big Fun is essential. For everyone else, it's a worthwhile fourth or fifth listen into the electric catalog, after you've spent real time with In a Silent Way, Bitches Brew, and Jack Johnson. The context matters; this record makes more sense once you know what it was left over from.

"He Loved Him Madly," the Duke Ellington tribute that opens this double album, is thirty-two minutes of near silence: drifting organ tones, sparse trumpet, and a collective holding of breath that makes In a Silent Way sound busy by comparison. Miles played it as a memorial after Ellington's death in May 1974, and the music has the quality of a vigil rather than a performance. It is one of the most emotionally affecting things he ever recorded.

The rest of the album is more varied: "Rated X" is a dense, dark organ-and-percussion piece that sounds genuinely threatening; "Calypso Frelimo" runs for over thirty minutes and shows the late electric band at its most rhythmically intricate. The personnel shift from track to track, as the material was drawn from sessions across four years, but Macero's sequencing gives the double album a coherence that his other compilations sometimes lack.

Get Up with It is the most underrated record in Miles Davis's catalog. It was released at a moment when he was about to go on hiatus, and it was largely overshadowed by Agharta and Pangaea, which came out the following year. But "He Loved Him Madly" alone makes it required listening, and the rest holds up alongside the best of the electric period.

The matinee concert from Osaka, February 1, 1975. Miles was in chronic pain from hip surgery and playing through it; this was among the last concerts before his six-year retirement. What the band produced that afternoon was ninety minutes of the most savage and beautiful electric music anyone had made. Pete Cosey plays electric guitar with a raw ferocity that makes every rock guitarist of the era sound polite. Michael Henderson holds the bass grooves like someone whose life depends on it.

Agharta is built around long, uninterrupted performances that build through cycles of intensity without ever releasing into anything conventional. The matinee crowd at Festival Hall gets a seventy-minute set that moves from near-quiet to overwhelming and back in patterns that feel almost structural. Miles's trumpet is processed, sometimes barely recognizable as trumpet, surfacing through the electric density like signals from somewhere far away.

The companion piece Pangaea, from the evening concert the same day, is equally extraordinary. Together they document the final and most extreme articulation of everything Miles had been building toward since Filles de Kilimanjaro. If you've ever wondered how far jazz could go from its origins without ceasing to be jazz, these two records are the answer.

The evening concert from the same day as Agharta. Both records were released the following year, and the choice of which one to recommend first is genuinely difficult; they are companion pieces that cover the same band in the same venue within hours of each other. Pangaea is generally considered slightly darker and more extreme than its matinee counterpart. Miles plays more organ and less trumpet, and Pete Cosey's guitar is if anything more reckless.

The two pieces that fill the double album, "Gondwana" and "Zimbabwe," are named after geological and geographical concepts: Gondwana, the ancient supercontinent; Zimbabwe, a country in the process of becoming. The naming reflects Miles's interest in a certain kind of scale and historical weight that he wanted the music to carry. Whether the music delivers on that ambition is something you have to hear for yourself.

After Osaka, Miles Davis effectively retired for six years. He didn't perform again until 1981. Pangaea, heard with that knowledge, has the quality of an ending: a last statement so complete and so extreme that the only reasonable response was to stop. Whether it's better or worse than Agharta is not a useful question. It's the other half of one of the greatest live recordings in jazz history.

A late vault release of outtakes from the 1967 and 1968 quintet sessions, issued in 1976 while Miles was in retirement. The material predates the electric period: these are acoustic recordings from the same period that produced Nefertiti and Miles in the Sky, and they have the spare, abstract quality of the best second-quintet work. The title track is a Wayne Shorter composition of particular beauty, built on a gentle rocking figure that seems to float rather than swing.

Hearing this record after spending time with Agharta and Pangaea is a kind of temporal dislocation. The acoustic quintet with its restrained post-bop language sounds almost conservative by comparison, which is strange given that it was the most forward-looking small group in jazz when these sessions were made. Context is everything.

The two pianists across the sessions, Herbie Hancock and Chick Corea, are both identifiable and quite different: Hancock brings more harmonic density and a kind of orchestral thinking to the voicings, while Corea is lighter and more questing. Both serve the music perfectly. Water Babies is an ideal record for listeners who love the second quintet and want more of that specific language before it dissolved into electricity.