Miles Davis Live at the Plugged Nickel

[JSngry]

Somebody define "noodling* in an objective, quantifiable way. Please.

[Steve Reynolds]

I’ve brought many friends to live shows. Mostly very abstract avant-garde music. Most like or even loved it. All have different backgrounds in listening. One is a huge Dead listener (like me). Others are into Tool, popular music or are into straight jazz, modern punk or post punk. None had ever heard any of the music I go see live as most of it is beneath the underground and seemingly incomprehensible. Much more “out” than the great mid 60’s Miles quintet. 

key is that they go in with little pre-conceived ideas about what it or or try to understand it. With an open mind most anyone will find something to like with genius master musicians improvising in a small intimate room. 

Mat Maneri, Hamid Drake, Gerry Hemingway, David Torn, Ches Smith, Nate Wooley, Brandon Lopez, Nels Cline, Randy Peterson, Darius Jones, Mary Halvorson, Tomeka Reid, Michael Foster, Tyshawn Sorey, Chuck Roth, Tom Rainey or Tony Malaby playing in front of an unsuspecting listener?

Almost all can’t believe nobody knows these musicians after the shows. They know it’s “out” but they don’t hear it the way serious straight ahead jazz listeners hear it. A few struggled with the purely improvised stuff but most get into the actual playing. 

My wife liked it. Sometimes the screaming altissimo stuff might get her a bit nervous, but she LOVED the drummers. 

[gvopedz]

58 minutes ago, Kevin Bresnahan said:

 I worked in the high tech industry for decades with some pretty brilliant people. Over the years, I tried getting a lot of them to listen to Jazz - often by playing it in the lab on a boombox to get it heard - and a lot of them came over and said that they didn't like it because it sounded like noodling. 

Getting coworkers to enjoy jazz may require a bit more strategy.  I once had a coworker who often listened to recordings of classical music performed on a piano.  So I brought in a Bill Evans CD, and she liked the jazz that Bill Evans performed.

[Stompin at the Savoy]

I was wondering why this set has been out of print for 30 years.  I mean Miles Davis - they are reissuing him over and over all over the place!  And yet this sat for 30 years.  I was listening to it yesterday and it occurred to me that that this set is somewhat challenging for a novice jazz listener.  Most of the studio stuff is fairly short tunes with theme statement, solos, theme statement, coda.  But this set is sort of for the advanced class.  Sometimes the melody doesn't appear till way into the tune and in a mutated form, the solos are abstract and experimental - without some background it could be hard to grok.  I was very impressed with this when I got it back in the nineties but I have listened to it less than other miles.   I think everybody should hear it at some point but it maybe is not the best set to play to a jazz newbie.

1 hour ago, Steve Reynolds said:

I’ve brought many friends to live shows. Mostly very abstract avant-garde music. Most like or even loved it. All have different backgrounds in listening. One is a huge Dead listener (like me). Others are into Tool, popular music or are into straight jazz, modern punk or post punk. None had ever heard any of the music I go see live as most of it is beneath the underground and seemingly incomprehensible. Much more “out” than the great mid 60’s Miles quintet. 

key is that they go in with little pre-conceived ideas about what it or or try to understand it. With an open mind most anyone will find something to like with genius master musicians improvising in a small intimate room. 

Mat Maneri, Hamid Drake, Gerry Hemingway, David Torn, Ches Smith, Nate Wooley, Brandon Lopez, Nels Cline, Randy Peterson, Darius Jones, Mary Halvorson, Tomeka Reid, Michael Foster, Tyshawn Sorey, Chuck Roth, Tom Rainey or Tony Malaby playing in front of an unsuspecting listener?

Almost all can’t believe nobody knows these musicians after the shows. They know it’s “out” but they don’t hear it the way serious straight ahead jazz listeners hear it. A few struggled with the purely improvised stuff but most get into the actual playing. 

My wife liked it. Sometimes the screaming altissimo stuff might get her a bit nervous, but she LOVED the drummers. 

Yes, I have had better luck bringing newbies to a live jazz performance than playing a record for them.  You are there, watching them play, picking up cues from the audience - it's exciting.

[Kevin Bresnahan]

1 hour ago, gvopedz said:

Getting coworkers to enjoy jazz may require a bit more strategy.  I once had a coworker who often listened to recordings of classical music performed on a piano.  So I brought in a Bill Evans CD, and she liked the jazz that Bill Evans performed.

I got some of them really digging Herbie's "Head Hunters". I could crank that and they would all seem to dig it.

For some reason, straight ahead stuff just didn't work for most of them.

My wife enjoys Jazz pianists. She's less enthused with reeds & trumpet players.

[jazzbo]

Well I would not myself say that this set has been completely invisible for thirty years. Japan reissued their version of it on gold cd after the US set went out of print, and another company released more than half of it as an LP set; individual and 2 cd versions have been reissued separately and as part of the "Complete Columbia Album" box set. Much of the music has been bouncing around.

I too would not recommend this to a jazz novice. . . but I also don't think it's that inaccessible to someone who is on a jazz journey.

[Kevin Bresnahan]

15 hours ago, bertrand said:

Why are you always picking fights with me? I'm not making this up.

I'm done with this Board. Bye everyone.

@bertrand I don't think we're picking fights. I know we're definitely not trying to piss you off.  

I have to say... I don't recall the complete Plugged Nickel set having an issue with one of the CDs either and a deep-dive Google search comes up blank. I even searched the Internet wayback machine. I would think that if this happened as you are recalling, someone, somewhere should have either a set with a defective disc or a set with the corrected CD-R disc but I am having no luck finding any for sale.

Does anyone here have a set with a CD-R or a defective disc?

I would not be happy if a box set with a defective disc was replaced with a CD-R. Long term CD-R reliability is all over the place, with some people losing large batches and others seeing no degradation. It may even be coming down to how they were burned at this point and not the blank media used.

[Stompin at the Savoy]

I remember that business about the defective disk.  30 years ago so I am not positive it was the plugged nickel set but there definitely was a set with one cd defective, they sent replacements and eventually fixed the unsold boxes or something like that. Then when you bought it you were hoping this particular copy had the updated cd.

[Kevin Bresnahan]

15 minutes ago, jazzbo said:

Well I would not myself say that this set has been completely invisible for thirty years. Japan reissued their version of it on gold cd after the US set went out of print, and another company released more than half of it as an LP set; individual and 2 cd versions have been reissued separately and as part of the "Complete Columbia Album" box set. Much of the music has been bouncing around.

I too would not recommend this to a jazz novice. . . but I also don't think it's that inaccessible to someone who is on a jazz journey.

I thought the gold 7 CD Japanese box set was issued shortly before the US 8 CD version? Discogs says that the gold set came out in Feebruary 1995 and the US set just says 1995. I seem to remember getting ready to order the (expensive) Japanese set right when they announced the US release. I think you & I chatted a bit about this as you had the Japanese set. 

2 hours ago, JSngry said:

Somebody define "noodling* in an objective, quantifiable way. Please.

 

[jazzbo]

Well I continue to be confused. The listing that I bought this from said that it was released in 2012. I bought it in 2013 from someone who said he had just picked it up and compared it to the original Japanese set, sounded the same and so put it up for sale. I got a great deal. Everywhere I look though shows it was issued in 1995. Maybe other copies were found and re-released in 2012.

We could not have conversed about this particular set as I didn't own it til 2013--we my have conversed about the original Japanese set which I ALMOST got--I had it pre-ordered through Tower Records Austin, but Tower decided to stiff the Austin store and never sent them any of their promised copies. So I was SOL til the US release, and was really excited to get the gold cd Japanese set, which really sounds good.

 

Edited 3 hours ago by jazzbo

[Kevin Bresnahan]

I'm spinning disc 2b of this set right now. I agree that the drums and especially the bass are a bit recessed. The clapping is very loud, which leads me to believe that the microphones were placed in front of the audience, which would be a probable reason for the horns being more prominent as they are usually at the front of the stage

I always appreciated these discs more for Wayne's playing rather than Miles' playing. If you can believe the stories, you can almost hear Miles trying to play these tunes straight and the rest of the guys saying, "Screw that".

I just don't find myself playing this often enough to buy this set on vinyl. I think I'm still good with this old CD set.

[Patrick]

Slight, unimportant nitpick: is this topic better placed under “Reissues”?

[jazzbo]

I play this material often enough. . . I DO enjoy Miles here, and there's lots of Herbie to like as well. An interesting point in time for the Quintet.

[Kevin Bresnahan]

9 minutes ago, Patrick said:

Slight, unimportant nitpick: is this topic better placed under “Reissues”?

Good point... all set

[JSngry]

3 hours ago, Stompin at the Savoy said:

I was wondering why this set has been out of print for 30 years.  I mean Miles Davis - they are reissuing him over and over all over the place!  And yet this sat for 30 years.  I was listening to it yesterday and it occurred to me that that this set is somewhat challenging for a novice jazz listener.  Most of the studio stuff is fairly short tunes with theme statement, solos, theme statement, coda.  But this set is sort of for the advanced class.  Sometimes the melody doesn't appear till way into the tune and in a mutated form, the solos are abstract and experimental - without some background it could be hard to grok.  I was very impressed with this when I got it back in the nineties but I have listened to it less than other miles.   I think everybody should hear it at some point but it maybe is not the best set to play to a jazz newbie.

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.

3 hours ago, Kevin Bresnahan said:

 

 

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 

[felser]

13 hours ago, jazzbo said:

 record labels don't always do logical things. 

You could fill a whole sub-forum with duscussion on that...