Miles Davis reviewed in The Nation

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It's a 4-page story, but I only posted the first page ... the rest is at:

http://www.thenation.com/doc.mhtml?i=20040322&s=morton

Raw Material

Miles Davis

by Brian Morton

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ince Miles Davis died on September 28, 1991, the merchandising machine has been in overdrive, pushing repackaged classics (Kind of Blue, Sketches of Spain), niche compilations and concert anthologies (Mellow Miles, Heard Around the World), and posthumous remixes aimed, as Miles himself often did, at a new constituency beyond the jazz audience. His two principal labels, Columbia and Warner Bros., have collated his work with saxophonist John Coltrane and arranger Gil Evans. More sumptuous is the boxed set of his appearances at the Montreux Jazz Festival between 1973 and 1991, twenty CDs and well over twenty hours of music. The Miles Davis estate has had the trumpeter's famously lithe silhouette, familiar from re-issues of Sketches of Spain, registered as a logo. Even the art market was briefly flooded with Miles's psychedelic doodles, the legacy of a time when he seemed to prefer sketching backstage to playing trumpet on it. It is an astonishing afterlife, though one that perhaps says more about the music industry than about the protean artist it celebrates.

True fans are always archeologists, and boxed sets are the potsherds of genius. But they're also often long on chaff, a triumph of commercial packaging over musical insight, and some of the recent Miles Davis boxed sets have left one wondering, Do we really need to hear every note Miles played in the studio? The much-trumpeted Complete Bitches Brew Sessions was actually no such thing, but a bland collage of complete and unedited takes that offered little insight into how Davis and his team worked. The earlier Complete In a Silent Way Sessions boxed set was more fruitful, but left most listeners feeling that the original album edit was as close to perfect as anyone might wish.

The two most recent Miles boxed sets are exceptions to the rule. Nothing short of revelatory, they alter our understanding of two of the most overlooked recordings--indeed, moments--of Miles's career. The Complete Jack Johnson Sessions, a work of electric jazz recorded in 1970, shows how an apparently minor soundtrack project led to one of Miles's most dramatic stylistic and demographic shifts, a phase in his career when his and his audience's understanding of "jazz" was robustly challenged. The straight-ahead jazz on In Person Friday and Saturday Nights at the Blackhawk, Complete, a generously augmented version of two live LPs taped at the San Francisco club in 1961, seems, at first, a more routine affair. Yet it arguably contains even more significant revelations.