Miles Davis Quintet — Live in Europe 1969

Author

By Andrew Hamlin

Publish Date

July 12, 2013

Smeary, I was going to say. But smeary implies an overall indifference to control. This stuff, collected from 1969 in Europe, demonstrates control on multiple levels — if it achieves smeariness, it does so if its own volition, and rightly juxtaposed into a protean master statement. Like Davis’s previous quintet, the one captured on the live set from 1967, this fivesome structures a set as a living thing, shorn of between-piece breaks and flagellating ever-agitated through the sea of possibility. Miles would get real quiet soon after this, but not for Europe.

Chick Corea stuck mostly to electric piano; when he lays out on the third disc after that piano blew up (giving out a few presciently-avant-garde distortion blobs), the others fold into each other to compensate. On acoustic piano, the flavor’s stimulatingly, and frustratingly, cooler, distant. His electric work rings out like a giant picking its teeth with a stepladder-sized metal comb; brazen, confident, insouciant.

And even more than ’67, this music quickly started running itself. Davis shows rare form technically; too soon, he’d make himself sparse. Wayne Shorter’s tenor and soprano sax work over phrases, long and short, like answers to physics problems. Dave Holland’s bass hip-checks Corea for a tasty match-licks duet. Drummer Jack DeJohnette favors his skins over his cymbals, unlike predecessor Tony Williams, sometimes kicking ass, sometimes getting knocked sideways. Smeary, so to speak: the locomotion of a strange animal. The tracks of new life.