Miles Davis: The Bootleg Series, Vol. 7

[Gheorghe]

I´m not sure if I will buy this one. 
I liked John Scofield more before he joined Miles. I saw him with the Dave Liebman band of the late 70´s and before that he had recorded with Mingus, but in the Davis Group he somehow played more behind the beat, it was not as wild and fresh like Mike Stern was before in 1981,82. And though I saw every Miles Davis Show in the 80´s in Viena, now looking backward I can´t listen to the stuff after Al Foster was replaced by Vincent Wilburn and the increasing use of "programming". 

[tranemonk]

okay so let me see if I understand this... Vol. 6 was a 4CD set that had been published numerous times in several different sets and Vol. 7 is a 3cd set that no one wanted to release in 40 years. Did I miss anything? What am I not getting?

[JSngry]

13 minutes ago, tranemonk said:

 What am I not getting?

This set, it sounds like?

[Late]

So ... it's perhaps likely that this particular set is being issued because Miles' nephew is on it?

Maybe the 1972-1974 bootlegs will be issued ... for Miles' 100th in 2026! 

[JSngry]

"perhaps likely",is a deliciously meaningless meaningfulness 

[T.D.]

58 minutes ago, JSngry said:

"perhaps likely",is a deliciously meaningless meaningfulness 

Agreed.

But we can try to quantify it...To the National Weather Service, for instance, "likely" means 60% or 70% probability and "chance" means 30%, 40% or 50% (they go in steps of 10%).

So "perhaps likely" might be 40% times 65%, or 26% probability.  For what that's worth. 

[Dub Modal]

On 6/17/2022 at 10:01 AM, Harbour said:

This got posted to YouTube yesterday by Columbia, I assume it’s a taster from the new series? Not doing that much for me, not sure a fairly anaemic cover of the Tina classic is gonna get anyone too excited!

 

First time listening to this and wow, not in a good way. Y’all are totally right on this being subpar. Playing We Want Miles now to wash that track away 

[GregK]

On 6/21/2022 at 3:25 PM, tranemonk said:

okay so let me see if I understand this... Vol. 6 was a 4CD set that had been published numerous times in several different sets and Vol. 7 is a 3cd set that no one wanted to release in 40 years. Did I miss anything? What am I not getting?

nailed it

[Eric]

I bought the Montreal vinyl on Record Store Day, spun it and thought "not bad" then promptly forgot about it.

I then bought the box, which includes the Montreal set as Disc 3.  

The studio stuff is not bad, a few tunes are pretty interesting and the equal if not better than the material on the studio albums.

But I am telling you folks, after listening more extensively through the convenience of digital (yes, there is that), I have to say that the Montreal set is a damn fine record.  As I told my son, not sure if this is funk, jazz, rock or the blues.  Really just Miles doing his thing.  He sounds pretty good on mostly open trumpet (yes) and Scofield rocks the house.  Bill Evans is pretty nice too.  In many respects (not all), this is something of a commercialized extension of what he was doing in the mid 1970s.  Something of.  And the band is freaking tight, this blows away the contemporaneous studio album, Star People, which to my ears is the best of the (studio) batch.

Worth checking out.  Sony needs to release this as a single CD.

[JSngry]

7 minutes ago, Eric said:

And the band is freaking tight, this blows away the contemporaneous studio album, Star People, which to my ears is the best of the (studio) batch.

Not going to say that Miles never had bands that weren't tight, but when he did, it got fixed!

The studio albums, those were as much Teo as the were Miles, and I listen to them as such. Got no problem with that either.

And I don't think I will have a problem if the do live collections from later years either, because those were REALLY tight bands, like, pop band tight bands.

Still, the Electric Jungle band set needs to be done and to be done right. That's a whole nother type of tight! 

[felser]

I'll wait for a cheap used one of this at some point.  Sounds like something I would listen to once then file away.   If they ever do the Electric Jungle Band, THAT will be an immediate pre-order.

[Chuck Nessa]

I guess I have stopped. Didn't buy 6 'cause I'd had it for years and just don't feel the need for 7.

Just checked and I have 139 Miles cds.

Edited September 29, 2022 by Chuck Nessa

[jlhoots]

I was initially not interested, then was interested, now I'm not sure.

[CJ Shearn]

On 6/21/2022 at 8:11 PM, Late said:

So ... it's perhaps likely that this particular set is being issued because Miles' nephew is on it?

Maybe the 1972-1974 bootlegs will be issued ... for Miles' 100th in 2026! 

 Nope. Not issued because Vince is on it. I know for a fact because  in Lenny White's Lenny's Loft Zoom, V has talked about the process of issuing Miles.   Vince is an acquaintance of mine, we've talked about all sorts of things on the phone a few times and he's nothing like the way he has been presented in the industry by some folks who had negative experiences with him or folks on the board. Can't disclose more than that here out of respect.

Edited December 22, 2022 by CJ Shearn

[medjuck]

I was listening to some new (fine) Charles Lloyd on Spotify and when the record was over, Spotify, as is their wont, began to play supposedly similar things,  including an interesting mournful muted trombone-keyboard duet that I realized was JJ Johnson and Miles from this set.  I really liked it in this context.  I also liked hearing Miles and JJ playing some funky blues though I would gladly give it all up to hear the apparently unrecorded sextet with JJ from the '60s.  

Despite a couple of clinkers (What's Love Got to do With It)  I was surprised how much I like this set. I heard Miles at the Hollywood Bowl in 1983 and didn't get it. (He was double billed with the Gil Evans band and I foolishly thought he might sit in.) Listening to the Montreal concert makes me realize that it often takes me a few hearings/viewings  to catch up to where  the artists I like are going e.g.   Jean-Luc Godard, Coltrane, even  Gil.  (Though I've never  had a problem with Dylan's many mutations.) 

[Milestones]

I am pretty interested in this one.  I saw Miles live for the first and only time in 1984, and I think this set mostly deals with time period--and there is quite a bit of live stuff.  I very much enjoyed the Miles concert.  Here he was playing with quality musicians, most of them fairly young at the time: Bill Evans (sax), Scofield, Al Foster.

The amount of unreleased Miles being released since his death has been staggering, but it's hard to not bite on it with an artist of his stature.

 

 

[jlhoots]

1 hour ago, medjuck said:

I was listening to some new (fine) Charles Lloyd on Spotify and when the record was over, Spotify, as is their wont, began to play supposedly similar things,  including an interesting mournful muted trombone-keyboard duet that I realized was JJ Johnson and Miles from this set.  I really liked it in this context.  I also liked hearing Miles and JJ playing some funky blues though I would gladly give it all up to hear the apparently unrecorded sextet with JJ from the '60s.  

Despite a couple of clinkers (What's Love Got to do With It)  I was surprised how much I like this set. I heard Miles at the Hollywood Bowl in 1983 and didn't get it. (He was double billed with the Gil Evans band and I foolishly thought he might sit in.) Listening to the Montreal concert makes me realize that it often takes me a few hearings/viewings  to catch up to where  the artists I like are going e.g.   Jean-Luc Godard, Coltrane, even  Gil.  (Though I've never  had a problem with Dylan's many mutations.) 

Trying to pull me back in.

 

[felser]

I have a (low) price point where I would get it, would like to hear the live disc.

[Gheorghe]

17 hours ago, Milestones said:

I am pretty interested in this one.  I saw Miles live for the first and only time in 1984, and I think this set mostly deals with time period--and there is quite a bit of live stuff.  I very much enjoyed the Miles concert.  Here he was playing with quality musicians, most of them fairly young at the time: Bill Evans (sax), Scofield, Al Foster.

The amount of unreleased Miles being released since his death has been staggering, but it's hard to not bite on it with an artist of his stature.

 

 

Yes, quality musicians . Well all the musicians he played with were great, but for a strictly jazz lover like me the period with saxophonist Bill Evan, with Mike Stern or John Scofield and above all Al Foster was much more interesting than later the musicians, who didn´t really have links to so called "jazz", and when the Miles Concerts became more kind of "shows" of a parody of himself. 
While others said, that Miles in 1981 didn´t have strong chops, I find that that whole stuff on "We Want Miles" sounds much stronger than later all those endless versions of "Time after Time" and "Human Nature". 
One exception was the show I saw in 1989. With a really virtuoso keyboardist Kei Akagi with deep jazz roots and the more "jazzy" repertory from "Amandla" it was much more interesting than what I had heard fom 1985-88, and I think I saw Miles each year until his death and had seen him shortly  before his 6 years hiatus when I was only a teenager....

[Guy Berger]

Probably won’t be picking it up any time soon, but did listen to it on Spotify and enjoyed it for what it was. The live concert is easily the best part of the set.

[Mark13]

Initially, this seemed a definite pass. I felt there is/was more than enough 80s Miles in my collection. But then I came across a shiny copy with a gleaming hype-sticker in my local record-store and gave in to the temptation, telling myself (all the way to the counter) that I needed this anyway.

This has happened before, and more often than not I have regretted purchases of this nature, but this is not so awful (actually). If 'Star People', 'Decoy' and 'You're Under Arrest' are not your cup of tea, you can safely avoid this on basis of the studio-material, but it's not that these outtakes are inferior to what's on those albums. @jlhoots has already mentioned the J.J. Johnson-Miles-duet as an unexpected impressionistic surprise, but the 'new' lengthy 'Santana' holds up pretty well too, as do the reworkings of 'Hopscotch', a track that had been performed live for some time. Also I prefer the full-versions of 'Time After Time' and 'Katia' presented here to the ones on 'You're Under Arrest'.

I was not too sure about the live set since I have the fairly extensive Complete Miles Davis at Montreux, but the earliest 80s-material on that set is from the summer of 1984 and this features the group in a different (and slightly less keyboard-heavy) incarnation. It's an energetic performance anyway.

 

 

Edited November 6, 2022 by Mark13

[Eric]

Wow - continue to re-visit the live set.  Not a huge fan of the studio material from this era, but this thing smokes.  The group is very tight and must have been a blast to see live.  Not at all poppy or "locked in the 80s".  Definitely genre-hopping, kind of this very taut, very in your face funk/blues/jazz/rock mix.  Not nearly as dense as his mid-70s bands, but I see much more of a linear connection to those bands than the contemporaneous studio bands convey.

[unitstructures]

Miles and Friends - In a Silent Way

Miles in 91... Looking for more along these lines.

[Gheorghe]

18 hours ago, unitstructures said:

Miles and Friends - In a Silent Way

Miles in 91... Looking for more along these lines.

I think that my wife ordered this obscure CD for me as a birthday present. That´s why I won´t listen to tracks now, so that I may have a surprise then. 
If I remember there are a lot of musicians from the old days with Jackie McLean, Steve Grossman and so on. Anyway it´s strange that Miles who always cursed out his musical past and dissed former musical partners changed his mind. 
Anyway, also the "post late 80´s bands" sounded more interesting than what happened from 1984-1988. 
I think in 89/90 he had a great keyboard player from Japonia, it was Kei Akagi and he was more a pianist than a keyboarder, I mean he played like a pianist and did not only push all them buttons to make "musica from the conserva" . 
That band of young guys and new Miles at least returned to more "jazz" and I think they even cut out them stupid "Time after Times" and "Human Natures".....

[JSngry]

Just now getting around to opening this one. Disc 1 is pretty cool actually, lots of Miles on both trumpet and keys, lots of blues with Miles playing altered changes, J.J.!!! Nothing (except for the opening cut) obviously intended as anything other than jamming.

On to the rest tomorrow. But so far, so good. Miles playing chords is like Wynton Kelly coming back to life after woodshedding everything that he missed that he could have used.