The live music of this time as a whole occupies a weird space in Miles' recorded chronology. He had spent the first part of the 1960s releasing one live album after another. The repertoire had been set.
So ..Miles gets not just a new band, but a new band that writes new material. That understandably took precedence. Who wanted to hear yet another live album with yet another version of "All Blues"? Besides, Miles was not in top form, his chops were down And once Butches Brew happened, Definitely who wanted to hear that old shit, regardless of how atomized it actually was?
And then Mike's "retired". America was busy doing fusion and such, as was a lot of the world. But Japan,hey, Japan saw the value in this music and put it out, And from there it became a sort of cult classic.
So what finally broke it into America to begin The Second Great Quintet?
Perversely enough, Wynton, whose earliest records were ALL about a formalized study of this ban, this music, and quite a bit of the Plugged Nickel records.
So in a way, this music was old and new at the same time. It's still standards though But it is also a more thorough delineation of the rhythm section than the studio albums. And Wayne is just NUTS!!1
And a weird thing happened during this vacuum -there began this fossilization of what "real jazz" should sound like, and for standards this was not that.
And then there's the Lost Quintet, who picked up where the Plugged Nickel band left of and carried it over to the other side. But that's another story...
All these Columbia records are helpful, but to hear the natural evolutions of the music, the bootlegs do that. The Bootleg series is helpful up to a point.
That's funny, but...a major local newspapers "pop music critic" did a column about "the most overrated musicians of all time". The two I still remember two are Otis Redding and Charlie Parker, of whom it was said that if he sounds like he's just making it up as he goes along, that's because he is.
So ..yeah