First Listen/More Miles

Miles Davis: The Cellar Door Sessions (1970) (prerelease--Columbia/Legacy) These are the complete sessions used to construct about 2/3 of Live/Evil, the band where Keith Jarrett took over sole electric piano and organ duties, Jack DeJohnette rocked the drum chair, Airto made jungle percussion noises, and Gary Bartz played the voluble, high-end sax parts handled previously by Steve Grossman, Wayne Shorter, and John Coltrane in earlier Miles Davis bands. There's a great article about this band (along with Miles' other electric bands from the '70s) here.

Like the earlier full-archive The Complete Jack Johnson Sessions, this one shows that Teo Macero's edits for Live/Evil tightened up the pieces a lot. At first listen, the complete recordings sound like a Miles live set, with very long, almost ambient stretches (see also: Panagea, Agartha, Dark Magus) interspersed with high-energy rockish vamps played with a lot more harmonic (but not so much more rhythmic) imagination. I'm listening to the side where John McLaughlin sits in, and he sounds a lot more focused in the edited version on Live/Evil.

So let's say Teo did a really great remix, and then Bill Laswell did another one, and the wonder of music like this (from 1970!) is there are so many scattered small genius parts that however you extract, loop, and mix them, you end up with completely different, interesting compositions.

Oh--and Keith Jarrett and Jack DeJohnette play together all the time now in that wonderful trio with Gary Peacock. That's a lot of history!