Miles Cellar Door Update

[J.A.W.]

It's amazing how any post by Clem generates five more trying to figure out what he is talking about.

If everyone spoke English around here, it sure would save a lot of bandwidth.

Bertrand.

How arrogant can one get...

[J.A.W.]

If everyone spoke English around here, it sure would save a lot of bandwidth.

it would save even more bandwidth if everyone spoke Dutch. Much less blahblah, more to the point, and much less native speakers who think that every shitty little nuance is caught by the entire world and everyone beyond.

We desperately need more talk-like-a-pirate days.

Go stick your finger in a dike and save the world.

I'm busy, typing with one finger here now. What's your contribution?

[Chuck Nessa]

If everyone spoke English around here, it sure would save a lot of bandwidth.

it would save even more bandwidth if everyone spoke Dutch. Much less blahblah, more to the point, and much less native speakers who think that every shitty little nuance is caught by the entire world and everyone beyond.

We desperately need more talk-like-a-pirate days.

Go stick your finger in a dike and save the world.

I'm busy, typing with one finger here now. What's your contribution?

Unless something happened, you have another 8 fingers. Details about the tasks they perform would be appreciated.

[bertrand]

Post edited for clarification, for those who thought I was some sort of American imperialist.

Quite frankly, I'd be happy to post in French from now on.

Bertrand.

[bertrand]

Oh, and the meaning of my second sentence as originally posted was perfectly clear from my first sentence, assuming you had read it.

Bertrand.

[bertrand]

I don't know why English has become the language used universally for people from different countries to communicate; perhaps a linguist could shed some light. It's certainly nothing I have imposed.

Should we perhaps switch to Latin? I'd be all for it. It would keep out some idiots.

Bertrand.

[JSngry]

Yo hablo caca del torro!

[Aggie87]

Unless something happened, you have another 8 fingers. Details about the tasks they perform would be appreciated.

Using my rudimentary math skills (I did go to Texas A&M after all), 1 + 8 = 9.

If you're counting thumbs, them couw maybe really IS an pirate, and lost a digit to his parrot or something?

Conversely, not counting thumbs, perhaps he's an alien or something?

[king ubu]

Playing disc 1 now! Finally got it!

All ten fingers typing, none hiding in tedious or other places...

[Tony Pusey]

And a copy finally made it to Malmö, so for me the search for this particular Grail is over...

[md655321]

I don't know why English has become the language used universally for people from different countries to communicate; perhaps a linguist could shed some light.

At the risk of getting this thread ghettoized, isn't the answer obvious.

[jazzbo]

Revisited a few of these sets last night.

Such an awesome box set. Great sound!

[Rosco]

Stilll another week until the British release date...

[mikeweil]

Mine is sitting on the shelf at the Frankfurt Saturn Hansa jazz department ..... gotta pick it up soon!

[king ubu]

Mine is sitting on the shelf at the Frankfurt Saturn Hansa jazz department ..... gotta pick it up soon!

Got it now? Any first impressions?

[Alfred]

Mine is sitting on the shelf at the Frankfurt Saturn Hansa jazz department ..... gotta pick it up soon!

amazon.de has it for € 64,95. Maybe Saturn is more expensive...

Edited February 17, 2006 by Alfred

[mikeweil]

I paid € 69,90, but I don't mind. I knew the set would be great - I long hoped to hear this music in its unabridged form, as the tracks as released on Live-Evil were a pivotal experience to me at the beginnimng of my "musical career". For me, it's indispensable, and the commentaries of all the band members are a very nice read.

[Rosco]

WOOOOHOOOOOOO!!!!!

UK release date is finally here! (just five and a half months late... )

Just got back from buying it... CD 1 just gone into the player!

[jazzbo]

Congrats on having it at last!

[mikeweil]

Mike, is that the Saturn located on the Zeil

or is there another one elsewhere?

The one I go to is located at Berger Strasse 125-129 - 10 minutes east with the subway from the other one. The guy who runs the CD department is a big jazz fan, I know him for what must be 20 years ..... much better stock there.

[Rosco]

WOOOOHOOOOOOO!!!!!

UK release date is finally here! (just five and a half months late... )

Just got back from buying it... CD 1 just gone into the player!

...and disc 6 just finished!

[medjuck]

Am I the onoy one who rally likes the texture of the box? (Is that too weird?)

[Free For All]

Am I the onoy one who rally likes the texture of the box? (Is that too weird?)

No, and yes.

[BFrank]

Interesting take on this set and 'completist' box sets in general in the British paper "The Guardian"

+++

Kind of overkill

Miles Davis wouldn't have wanted his out-takes made public, so why all the box sets?

By John L Walters

Friday February 10, 2006

Guardian

When they were little, my daughters assumed that I owned the complete works of Miles Davis. After all, my collection - vinyl and CDs - sprawled over large areas of shelf space. In addition to several versions of classics such as Kind of Blue, Aura, In a Silent Way and Sketches of Spain there were live albums and videos, semi-bootlegs on dodgy Italian labels, curiosities such as The Man With the Horn (since given away) and oddities like Directions, a bits-and-pieces compilation released while Davis was out of action in the late 1970s.

The Miles section took up more shelf acreage than the Beatles and Stravinsky put together, yet it wasn't that he was my favourite jazz artist, or that these were my favourite albums. It was just that CBS (aka Columbia or Sony, now Sony BMG, which owns the Miles catalogue from the mid-1950s to the mid-1980s) was very good at putting out recordings that I felt I had to have.

Through concerts, albums and investments, Miles has always been one of the biggest earners in jazz. In 1971, he claimed to be earning nearly $400,000 a year. By the 1980s it was $1m a year. Whatever the state of jazz, Miles always sells.

So throughout the 1990s, Sony issued more and more "new" Miles albums. He remains a cash cow: Kind of Blue, his most famous and enduring album sold more than 12m copies worldwide, most of them in the past decade or so. Sales of Bitches Brew and Sketches of Spain exceed the million mark. Despite the fact that jazz's biggest superstar had left the company (and, in 1991, the planet) the company has managed to maintain a steady stream of releases ever since.

This is why the Miles Davis section of my music library continues to expand with a steady flow of exquisitely packaged multi-CD sets with the word "complete" in the title. There was Miles Davis/Gil Evans: The Complete Columbia Studio Recordings. The Complete Miles Davis Quintet Sessions. And so on, each bearing an elaborate engraved metal spine that makes the set look like a miniature tome from the British Library.

They're expensive, too, I handed £50 over the counter for a discounted Miles/Gil box (my original copy of Miles Ahead set me back £1.50 in a charity shop).

Miles Ahead is one of those "desert island" discs I've studied and enjoyed and shared with friends dozens, perhaps hundreds of times, yet I've only listened to the Miles/Gil six-CD set a handful of times in full. Somehow, life seems too short to go back for another listen to the seventh overdubbed solo Miles played on Springsville (he nailed it by take 10).

So the imminent release of yet another multi-CD Miles boxed set, The Cellar Door Sessions 1970, provokes a new set of mixed feelings: anxiety about having time to listen; excitement at the thought of uncovering a treasure trove of unreleased gems. But is it really worth it?

"It's more than the music," says Sony BMG's Adam Sieff. "Miles is such an important guy. What we wanted to do was something that had a beauty all its own, an object of desire. People will have the original classic album for the car, while the box sits on the shelf at home." Sieff confirms that the boxes have had significant sales - in the hundreds of thousands. Their best-seller to date has been the 3-CD set The Complete In a Silent Way Sessions.

I remind him of the forthright comments from Miles's producer Teo Macero about these "bullshit" reissues. On many occasions, Macero has asserted that Miles would never have agreed to the unreleased material being heard.

"Well, there are two schools of thought," says Sieff. "But when you're not constrained by vinyl, the box set allows you to include all this extra stuff. It may not all be of the same high standard, but historically, there's a damned good reason for all this to be released, and I get great pleasure from it."

And he admits that Sony BMG is not short of even more repertoire to release. "Every time Miles farted they had the tape machine running."

There's something intimate, even creepy, about listening to the vast quantity of recordings on these boxes; many of the tracks are out-takes - never intended for the market. And they seem to have become more obsessive, more microscopic. While The Complete Miles Davis Quintet covers three years (1965-68), The Complete Jack Johnson spans just 16 weeks. Now we have the Cellar Door recordings, taken from just four consecutive nights, December 16 to 19 1970, at the Washington DC club. Sooner or later, someone's going to find a tape of 24 hours in the life of Miles Davis and put it out as an 18-CD set.

Maybe it's churlish to make fun of record companies for exploiting what they've got. At least the Miles boxes are thoughtfully done, with extensive (though often badly edited) notes and information, and first-hand testimony from the musicians. The comments from Brazilian percussionist Airto Moreira and pianist Keith Jarrett on this new box are particularly illuminating. And one advantage that the Cellar Door Sessions has over, say, The Complete In a Silent Way Sessions, is that each CD is a complete live performance you can enjoy in one go.

When Miles played the Cellar Door he drew on a small repertoire of seven tunes: Directions, Yesternow, What I Say, Inamorata, Honky Tonk, It's About That Time and Sanctuary. If you have the 1971 album Live-Evil, this material will seem very familiar, since Miles and his producer Teo Macero chopped up their favourite bits to go on this very powerful and visceral double album. So when I tell trumpeter Byron Wallen about The Cellar Door Sessions, he says: "Oh my god, I'm going to have to buy it! Live-Evil is one of my favourite Miles albums."

He argues that the quality of the music is less important than what the musician represents. "For me Miles is more a conceptualist than a trumpet player, though you hear Miles long before you hear about Lee Morgan or Clifford Brown. He's important for the social way he took the music, demanding respect for the music and for himself as a black man - that's very important."

Adam Holzman, the ex-Miles sideman who co-produced the Cellar Door box, makes some big claims in his liner notes: "With the release of The Cellar Door, history might need to be revised; this music lays the foundation for what would later become the most enduring aspects of electric jazz and contemporary music."

Yet to write history, you have to make choices. And Miles and his team chose the right tracks for Live-Evil.

"When you go into the archives it's always a dangerous thing," says trumpeter Abram Wilson, "because those artists have moved on. Some artists, like Soweto Kinch, are uncomfortable hearing things that are just a few years old for that reason. But when you're hearing these boxed sets, you're not necessarily listening to them to worship the artist, you're listening to understand the process."

Every artist has to make choices - you can't put every take on the DVD, every alternate chapter at the back of the book, every take on the CD. "Completism" is a curse rather than a blessing, whether in rock (all those dreary BBC sessions), classical music (perhaps the worst offenders) or jazz. The Cellar Door package is interesting, because Miles is never dull. Yet its existence - carefully packaged, annotated and over-marketed - in early 2006 says more about the record industry majors than jazz history. They don't have a new Miles, so they keep on selling us the old one.

In Mike Dibb's film biography of Miles Davis, musician after musician tells us how maddening and iconoclastic and creative Miles was to work with. What finely tuned instincts he had. Guitarist John McLaughlin laughs: "Miles would find a way to clear the garbage out of the way and get to the essentials." I can't help thinking that Miles would have viewed most of these alternative takes and jam sessions as "garbage", though he'd probably use the same term as Macero: "Bullshit."

Wilson is right in saying that we listen to these extras to understand the process. Wallen, who bought the Plugged Nickel box, points out that many of the performances on that live set are substandard; Miles was unwell for many of the dates, but was on good form for the album that was released at the time. "The question is," says Wallen, "would Miles be happy with the idea of releasing it in this way? In terms of the way people listen to music, who's got the time?"

Big Lounge vocalist and trombonist Ashley Slater (formerly a Loose Tube and Norman Cook's other half in Freak Power) thinks about it all for a short while. "I know very little about Miles, except that he's my favourite jazz musician," says Slater bluntly. "Because he knew when to stop."

· The Cellar Door Sessions 1970 is released on Sony BMG on February 20.

[JohnS]

Just arrived today, at long last. A nice slightly belated birthday present. Playing will have to wait until tomorrow. Thank you Sony, thank you Amazon.uk