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Favourite Miles Columbia Box set


  

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Was anybody else like me in being kinda, uh, "obsessive" about hounding their local stores when the various release dates shifted about, what, 3 times? "Are you SURE?" "Can you call your distributor?" "What's Sony's phone nember?" (yeah, I was calling THEM...).

I will be when i get the slightest hint of the LIVE EVIL box release date!

Me, too!!! :excited:

So far, the Coltrane box for overall beauty and cohesiveness, the 60's Quintet for adventurousness, the Evans set for painstaking tape research, the Plugged Nickel for unearthing of new material, the live box with Mobley for correcting the picture .... I love most of them :D

Edited by mikeweil
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BTW, the new Blackhawk box just gets better and better with each listening.

Couldn't agree more! The Blackhawk set has been at the top of my play list over the summer. I can find no weaknesses- Hank sounds just fine to me, the rhythm section swings like a madman and Miles sounds fantastic. A very "happy" performance and a nice contrast to all the other sets.

I wonder how the Jack Johnson set will fit into this hierarchy when it comes out- it seems like it's gonna be a mutha.

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Hmmmmm...... Maybe I guess I'll hafta reconsider getting the Blackhawk box (or maybe borrow yours for a spell?? - 'Free For All'???). I never much cared for the early 90's CD issues of "Friday Night" and "Saturday Night", and frankly - I found them kinda boring - as compared with the "Miles in Stockholm" discs with Trane (in March of 1960), and with Sonny Stitt (in October of 1960).

I thought that back in the early 90's, when I first hear then, and borrowed the single CD's from a friend about a year ago, and had the same reaction.

It wasn't so much whether Hank fit in of didn't fit in, but there was something generally lackluster about the whole thing.

Could the prior CD mastering have that much impact on the music itself??? I kinda doubt it, but I guess stranger thing have happened.

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That's what I mean when I refer to it as "happy"- it doesn't really have the dark, probing moodiness of later stuff. It's more like a walk in the park on a sunny day, IMHO.

Jim Sangrey mentioned how the 65-68 stuff made the first quintet sound tame by comparison. I think that's the problem with these major periods of Miles career- each new chapter tends to steal the spotlight from the previous chapter. Of course, had there never been a Coltrane quintet or Blackhawk quintet there might have been a completely different 65-68 quintet. I try to appreciate each of these sets on their own merit instead of comparing them to each other. It's like saying "who was better, Wayne or Trane?"- I don't think Wayne would have been the same kind of player had there never been a Coltrane. Each new branch on the big tree is fed by the branch it sprouts from, even though it might have a prettier flower.

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Was anybody else like me in being kinda, uh, "obsessive" about hounding their local stores when the various release dates shifted about, what, 3 times? "Are you SURE?" "Can you call your distributor?" "What's Sony's phone nember?" (yeah, I was calling THEM...).

For the Plugged Nickel box, I wanted the best sound I could get and waited for the Mosaic vinyl

version. It took days and days before the Mosaic box was delivered. But the sound of that

jewel is really astounding. That Plugged Nickel box was Mosaic at its very best.

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  • 7 months later...

I finally got around to getting the IASW box yesterday, and I gotta tell ya', it was a revelation. Nothing less than a revelation. There is such a logical progression to how the various material develops, and hearing it in context like this packs a punch that hearing it in the original issues (when applicable) doesn't.

And I nearly peed my britches when I heard the rough cut of "Sshh/Peaceful". I was listening at work, hadn't looked at the book, and didn't know what was what. I hear this little guitar bit that sounds REALLY famiiar, but then there's this whole STRUCTURE that was totally new to me, so I'm thinking it's something else that they pulled an excerpt out of for an insert, but then that GROOVE begins, and I realize what I'm hearing, and I nearly go apeshit.

A lot of the individual cuts fall into the category of "almost there" or "dig what they're TRYING to do" for me, but as a whole, as a story of the linear development of an album, how concepts get introduced, altered, added/discarded, all that, as a HISTORICAL DOCUMENT, I have to say that this is a truly amazing set, and one that begs to be listened to in its entirety for maximim impact. It literally tells a story, solves a mystery, introduces and develops individual characters (both players AND musical ideas) and is really like no other box set I've ever heard.

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I haven't even heard the Gil Evans box yet, but Plugged Nickel just blew me away more than the others. To hear an entire weekend of sets, with the widely varying versions of the same tunes, to hear Tony Williams treat time as if he's Einstein(It's all relative), Wayne Shorter's passionate playing, etc. is just amazing.

When it first came out I looked around and saw it selling for $119.99 at one place, and I thought that was too much. I then saw it a few days later for $99.99, and I was about to spring for it, but I got too busy to hit the store that had it. A few days later I popped into a store that had almost no jazz, just to peek around, and lo and behold, for $69.99- I bought it immediately!

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Gotta go with the Davis Evans collaboration. I could listen to this stuff for days on end and never tire of it. It's absolutely unique music. There was never anything quite like it before and there hasn't been anything quite like it since. The quintessential "motive meets opportunity" pairing. Even the lesser lights in the box shine like a new dime.

Up over and out.

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  • 1 month later...

. . . the Gil Evans set for me.  Fantastic music, and the new material really gives insight into its construction.

Having finally gotten this one, I can't say it's my "favorite", but I agree 1000% about how " the new material really gives insight into its construction." 1000%!

My favorite disc has to be #4, with all the rehearsal takes and such. You get to hear snippetts of Gil conducting a rehearsal, and what a revelation THAT is! I'd have thought him to be kind of a quiet guy in front of a band, but no - he's animated, funny but no-nonsense ("Alright, alright, you can play it in your head!" the kind of thing that can REALLY piss somebody off if delivered even SLIGHTLY wrong), and obviously in TOTAL charge (he may well have been the oldest man in the room, too). Maybe in his later years he got to be a kind of "just let it happen" bandleader, but here he sounds like the kind of guy who could whip a band into top shape as quickly as possible. which, given the difficulty of the music, is exactly what he did. If all bandleaders/conductors could "cut to the chase" as well as Gil does here (the tiniest, subtlest detail explained matter of factly -and perfectly - in 15 seconds or less!), the world would be a much safer, happier place, at least for musicians who play parts. Gil shows that although he was notorious for being a procrastinator and a kind of "lazy" guy, that not for nothing did he spend all those years in the pressure cooker of being a staff arranger for Thornhill and Skinnay Ennis and the Bob Hope show. You got to have some SERIOUS professionalism chops to hang in that kind of world, and Gil is FLAUNTING those chops here! Truly revelatory.

I love hearing all the ensemble flubs, the laughing at them (but always the kind of laughter that means "I'll get it right NEXT time, dammit"), Ernie Royal flubbing that high note, Miles REALLY fucking up, all of it. For years, I've admired MILES AHEAD more than loved it, because although it is incredibly beautiful, there's an austerity to it that too often told me to look but not touch. My problem, I know, but hearing the "work in progress" adds a VERY real "human" dimension to the album, and has forever changed how I hear the final result. Quite a feat for a piece of "product", I'd say....

MOST favorite moment - the end of the one session where George Avakian thanks everybody, and its time to pack up and go home. You can feel the good vibes in the air. Imagine what it was like to have played on those sessions - at the end of the day, you'd have busted your ass playing some insanely difficult music AND YOU MADE IT WORK. You'd almost HAVE to know that you were participating in history, and you'd almost have to be thoroughly pumped about it. That's the vibe I get all throughout this Disc 4, but especially when the boss comes on and sends everybody home. And Miles' little comment, "Hey George...." If you can't hear a larger-than-life smile in THAT....

I know that some people find this Disc 4 "too much", and I can see their point. But for me, it's an incredible document, and worth the cost of the whole set alone.

Well, that and "Falling Water". ;)

Edited by JSngry
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