Miles Davis at Newport, 1955-1975: A Legendary Album but Also a Frustrating One

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2022 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Right now I’m listening to the fourth and last CD in the four-disc boxed set Miles Davis at Newport, 1955-1975, which turned out to be a disappointment. I ordered it from Amazon.com largely to get the legendary July 17, 1955 jam session at Newport – only the second year the festival occurred and Miles’ heroic comeback after dealing with heroin addiction and his “hit-bottom” moment when he was arrested for armed robbery in New York City in 1953. I told that story to my husband Charles yesterday morning and he was startled to realize that Miles was actually guilty – he wasn’t just some random Black guy being harassed by a racist cop. Miles’ own recollection of that incident was that when he was being handcuffed, he was thinking to himself, “I came from a respectable middle-class Black family in East St. Louis, My parents raised me to be better than this.” As soon as he served whatever legal jeopardy the incident had put him in – it was just one of the crazy things long-term addicts use to get the money for their next fix – he determined to kick the habit. Newport Festival promoter George Wein (pronounced “ween,” by the way) gave him a half-hour slot and put him in front of a pick-up band, albeit an illustrious one – Zoot Sims on tenor sax, Gerry Mulligan (also a recovering heroin addict) on baritone sax, Thelonious Monk on piano, Percy Heath on bass and Connie Kay ono drums. The set was introduced by Mulligan and Duke Ellignton, who for some reason said, "It looks like these gentlemen live in the realm that Buck Rogers is trying to reach."

For years I had been under the impression that Miles played Richard Carpenter’s song “Walkin’” on the date; he didn’t – at least not in the part that survuves. Instead he played two Monk songs, “Hackensack” (named after the famous recording studio Rudy Van Gelder set up in his parents’ basement – I love the irony that Rudy was recording some of the greatest jazz albums ever made while his parents were above him trying to sleep) and “‘Round Midnight,” plus Charlie Parker’s “Now’s the Time” (on which Miles played a nervous, barely competent solo on Parker’s original record in 1945; the difference between his playingthere and the monumental self-assurance he shows here is dramatic). One of the odd things about this recording is that you can hear Monk playing behind Davis, throwing out thiose loud, percussive, dissonant chords that were his trademark (I love the story about how Monk was approached on the bandstand after he’d finished a nightclub set and told by another musician, obviously “in his cups,” to “show me some of them weird chords,” “What do you mean, ‘weird’?: Monk replied. “They’re perfectly logical chords!”) It’s a bit surprising that Monk directly accompanies Miles through most of this set – in their previous meeting, a studio recording session in December 1954,It’s a bit surprising that Monk directly accompanies Miles through most of this set because in their previous meeting, a studio recording session in December 1954, the two of them had nearly come to blows during the “Modern Jazz Giants” recording session (which was basically Miles with three-fourths of the Modern Jazz Quartet but Monk replacing John Lewis on piano) over Miles’ discontent with the way Monk was accompanying him. In fact, there were reports that Miles and Monk had come to blows – though both men denied it – and it’s unclear just who would have won if they’d had a fistfight: Monk was a considerably larger man than Miles but Miles had trained as a boxer during his childhood and who Golden Gloves contests (and he regularly worked out in gyms for years afterwards).In a 1957 interview in Jazz Review Miles said, “I love the way Monk plays and writes, but I can’t stand him behind me. He doesn’t give you any support.”

The main reason I wanted the Miles Davis Newport boxed set was for that 1955 session and the equally legendary 1958 gig he played at Newport with the band with which he recorded his legendary album Kind of Blue: John Coltrane, tenor sax; Julian “Cannonball” Adderley, alto sax’ Bill Evans, piano; Paul Chambers, bass; and Jimmy Cobb, drums. Alas, I needn’t have bothered: the 1955 date is available on YouTube (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1UxxXnfgmmU&t=1s) and the 1958 date was originally issued in part on a 1964 LP, Miles and Monk at Newport, with side one from the 1958 Miles Newport performance and side two from a session Monk played separately in 1963 (with Charles “Pee Wee” Russell, best known as a Dixieland clarinetist but also quite good at modern jazz; though they played different instruments I’ve long thought Russell had the sort of career Bix Beiderbecke would have if he’d survived and got off alcohol, guesting on two songs, “Nutty” and “Blue Monk”). I had the CD reissue of Miles and Monk at Newport, whuch contained the complete performances by both, and therefore didn’t need the duplication of that performance here.

The three additional discs are more problematic, with disc three almost totally unlistenable; Disc two featured Miles at the 1966 and 1967 Newport festivals with the group that came to be known as the “Second Great Quintet” (the first great quintet was the one Miles led in the mid-1950’s with John Coltrane on tenor sax, Red Garland on piano, Paul Chambers on bass and “Philly” Joe Jones on drums; the second great quintet played from 1964 to 1968 and featured Wayne Shorter on tenor sax, Herbie Hancock on piano, Ron Carter on bass and Tony Williams on drums – Williams was only 17 when Miles hired him for this band and as a result, when they played nightclubs they were only allowed to serve soft drinks because Willaims was undrage and therefore couldn’t legally be in an environment that sold alcohol). In John Litweiier’s book The Freedom Principle: Jazz Since 1958 he discussed this Miles Davis band and its first album, E.S.P., which contained a piece called “Agitation” that, though he didn’t play it at Newport, sums up the relentless energy of this band.

Discs three and four represent the Miles Davis bands I actually heard live in 1970 at the Fillmore West, when I was 16 and 17 and I loved this music. The band Miles brought to the Fillmore in early 1970 featured Steve Grossman on soprano sax, Chick Corea on electric piano, Dave Holland on electric bass and Jack DeJohnette on drums – though Grossman was for some reason not in the lineup that played at Newport in July 1969 – and the later band, which played the Newpoirt in New York festival in 1971 after George Wein was forced to move the festival due to riots and other security concerns, featured Gary Bartz on soprano and also saxes (I remember when I saw this band thinking that Bartz looked like a Black version of Woody Allen, complete with glasses), Keith Jarrett on electric piano and electric organ, Michael Henderson on electric bass and Leon “Ndugu” Chancler on drums, with Don Alias and “Mtume” (James Forman Heath, son of jazz saxophonist Jimmy Heath) on percussion. The set with Bartz takes up all of disc four; disc three contains three tracks from 1969 with the Corea-Holland-De Johnette unit and songs from 1973 and 1975 with Pete Cosey and Reggie Lucas, electric guitars (Cosey was the notorious musician who did such an excellent job wrecking Muddy Waters’ 1968 album Electric Mud, in which producers Leonard and Phil Chess had the idea that since the electrified blues of Waters and Howlin’ Wolf had played such a major part in the development of blues-rock, psychedeolc rock and heavy metal, it would make sense to update the raw blues sound of these artists by adding relentlessly loud fuzz-toned guitars and other noises; it’s a testament to Muddy Waters’ artistic integrity that he made it through his old songs given new twists on the Electric Mud sessions, but I’d still much rather hear the original versions), Dave Liebman on soprano and tenor saxes and flute (replaced by Sam Morrison in 1975), Al Folster on drums and Henderson and Mtume returning on bass and percussion, respectively.

Hearing the music on disc three of the Miles at Newport box I’m astonished to think I ever liked this stuff – it’s so relentlessly ugly and loud, and the instruments are so overly processed with electronic gimcracks it’s often hard to tell just which instruments are making which sounds. The one track on disc three I actually liked is called “Ife” (which I presume is pronounced “ee-fay”), which Litweiler ridiculed in his book because on the studio version Miles played his trumpet through a wah-wah pedal. “This device was originally intended to allow guitars to simulate plunger-muted trumpets!” Litweiler sniffed. But the combination of a slower tempo and Liebman’s hauntingly beautiful flute playing makes “Ife” a welcome respite from the relentless blasting of the rest of the disc. CD four is considerably better, largely due to Gary Bartz (whim I was so taken with after I heard the band perform live I went out and bought two of his own albums, Another World and Juju Street Songs, the latter of which contained a haunting song called “Black Maybe,” written by Stevie Wonder but not recorded by him because he was saving it for an album by his then-wife Syreeta Wright) and also Jarrett’s keyboard work (even though when this band broke up and Jarrett became a solo artist, he mostly returned to a standard concert-grand piano and would often play extended concerts on the instrument).

Another problem with Miles’ records in the early 1970’s is that when he played live he wouldn’t stop between songs. Instead every piece segued into every other piece and the result was a performance that could last an hour or more without any audible breaks until the very end. At the same time, Miles started approaching making studio records as if he were shooting a film; just as movies are made in discrete scenes which are then cut and spliced together in an editing room, so MIles began recording his studio albums in snippets which he and his long-time producer, Teo Macero, would then assemble into a more or less coherent and unified whole. The problem with recording that way is that when you’re making a film, or producing a record of a classical piece, you have a script or a score that specifies in what order the pieces are supposed to follow each other. When you’re recording largely improvised jazz that way, it’s anyone’s guess just how the pieces are supposed to link up and interact with each other. Litweiler criticized one of Miles’ most powerful albums of this period, A Tribute to Jack Johnson (itself a movie soundtrack for a documentary on the legendary Black heavyweight champion of the early 20th century and the white boxing world’s search for the “Great White Hope” that would defeat Johnson and redeem the fight game for white supremacy), as “almost a random pattern of splices.” It’s odd indeed to come back to music I found exalting and profound when it was new – at Miles’ first Fillmore appearance he was opening for the Grateful Dead, but I found Miles’ performance so overwhelming I literally walked out on the Dead – and hear it as largely unlistenable today, but there it was. A lot of Miles’ later rock-oriented music just sounds loud and ugly now, while the Miles Davis of the 1950’s seems timeless and eternally valid artistically.