TT 560 (a): Miles Davis and John Coltrane in Europe, 1960
a pinnacle
Miles Davis played under Charlie Parker, and then John Coltrane played under Miles Davis. This stepwise progression helps define the most essential parameters of modern jazz.
Bird’s music is not always appreciated by civilians. It’s the best, but connoisseurs and musicians get the message more clearly than everyday listeners.
Miles was the one to figure out how to make music for anybody using Bird’s principles, and many of Davis’s most listenable albums feature Coltrane: Kind of Blue, obviously, a gift that keeps on giving, but also Milestones, ‘Round About Midnight, all those Prestige albums with the quintet, and various other delights, including the canonical first 1958 recordings of repertoire jazz musicians have played daily ever since, “On Green Dolphin Street” and “Stella By Starlight.”
In 1960 Trane left Miles and started his own quick ascent into the avant stratosphere; Miles’s own ‘60s music would also take on esoteric concerns.
The timeline moved quickly:
In 1945 Charlie Parker tracked “Now’s the Time” with an important Miles Davis trumpet solo.
In 1955 Miles Davis recorded his first music with John Coltrane as second horn.
In 1965 Davis recorded E.S.P. with Wayne Shorter while Coltrane released A Love Supreme.
(Those last two LPs were taped within a month of each other: A Love Supreme December 1964, E.S.P. January 1965.)
In March 1960 Miles Davis talked Coltrane into doing one last job with his band, a tour of Europe with Wynton Kelly, Paul Chambers, and Jimmy Cobb. When I was young I had the Stockholm and Paris gigs as off-brand bootlegs; today those two nights plus Copenhagen are collected on the official The Final Tour: The Bootleg Series, Vol. 6. Further concerts from the tour exist on YouTube and other places.
Considered as a set, the March 1960 performances boast some of longest tracks heard from a conventional jazz quintet. The solo order is fairly consistent: Miles, Trane, Wynton Kelly; Miles plays long, and then Coltrane plays longer.
Some people think Miles sounds great on this tour. He is definitely in good form in general, but I personally think he is playing too long. My speculation is that Miles is forced into offering extra choruses because he knows what is about to happen.
The whole band knows, and the whole band is afraid:
After Miles stops playing, Coltrane is next.
By this point, Coltrane was wearing full regalia. He had it all together, from bebop to the songbook to the blues, and was ready to launch into more exploratory terrain. The band of Davis, Kelly, Chambers, and Cobb was merely state-of-the-art. Coltrane was past state-of-the-art and into the next phase.
On this European tour Trane frequently begins his solo by continuing with whatever idea Miles finished with. To me this scans as humble offering, a way of congratulating his boss: “Sounds good, Miles!”
After that brief name check, Trane enters into a new trance state of otherworldly virtuosity. Nobody played more saxophone anywhere, ever, than Trane on this 1960 Miles tour. Even his own music as a leader to follow isn’t quite like this, for he will have a band of innovative equals and the larger responsibility of delivering the John Coltrane message. On this 1960 Miles tour Trane is still a hired gun—and he isn’t trying to keep the gig, either.
While it is always a bit hard to listen to Wynton Kelly follow Trane in these performances, Kelly’s unhappy position offers a possible puzzle piece when assessing the larger history.
At times I am critical of the first post-Coltrane generation for not learning enough bebop, especially people like Keith Jarrett, David Liebman and Richie Beirach. The subtleties of clave-plus- voice leading elude them; they replace all the hard-won bebop know-how of Charlie Parker and Bud Powell with motivic development and scale theory. When I listen to Wynton Kelly follow Trane on the 1960 tour, though, I kind of get it. Wynton Kelly understood bebop: Wynton Kelly also sounds like a cocktail pianist after the molten lava of John Coltrane. It would be easy enough for a teenager in the early ‘60s to think Coltrane was the only light one needed to follow.
On the future gigs with Hank Mobley in place of Trane, Live at the Blackhawk, it all settles down into something that brings out the best in both Miles Davis and Wynton Kelly.
This past September I was listening intently to the live 1960 Miles/Trane music in a rental car, driving way north on an empty highway, somewhere south of Rochester, NY.
Trane was so inspiring!
However, I didn’t try to explain anything about Coltrane to the state trooper who pulled me over for going 80 MPH in a 65 MPH zone. As far as these things go, the trooper was very nice, and began his set speech in a friendly, even cheerful, manner. But when he got to how I could plead guilty or not-guilty in the local courthouse I quickly interrupted him and said, “Oh, I’m definitely guilty.”
The trooper reacted to my confession by making a sound that was something between a laugh and a choke, almost a quack, like a slightly offended little duck. A valuable conceptual audio composition might have been constructed from this source material if only I had captured his unexpected sonic emission on tape. Anyway, the official dun finally came in the mail last week, my second traffic ticket (the first was in 1990). The fine was $400! Jeez. Thanks a lot, Trane!
Miles Davis trio includes
a) Miles Davis and John Coltrane in Europe, 1960
b) Wynton Kelly at the Left Bank
c) Miles and Bill Evans, “Green Dolphin St.” and “Stella by Starlight”
love these recordings, agree with you about the imbalance between the soloists. The Oleo solo I wrote about a little - great example of Coltrane doing his fully digested Giant Steps substitutions over rhythm changes. Also love how monomaniacal he is. Each solo becomes about one thing.
The better Miles from this period I always thought was Live at Carnegie, Live at the Blackhawk, and the studio stuff like Love for Sale. Also worth seeking out are the various bootlegs of the sextet from 1958-59, some with Bill Evans, Cafe Bohemia and the one where they do Bags Groove, not sure where that was recorded. I had these on a bootleg italian CD called "Four-play".
Had an equally expensive pull over a couple of years back driving between Chicago and Madison while listening to the Blanton Webster years compendium. Which reminds me of a related case of piano players trying to follow epic tenor rants -- see, the immortal Ellington's meek poking after Paul Golsalves 27 shout chorus.