That is correct. Taken from Miles's autobiography and Wayne Shorter's biography "Footprints", it seems that Coltrane spoke to Shorter in 1959 and got him interested in the idea of becoming his successor. Coltrane had not yet announced that he wanted to quit the band, therefore Miles knew nothing about it. Unknowingly, an excited Wayne called up Miles and told him he's available, to which Miles promptly told him to f*** off. It was quite time later that Miles called Wayne back, but in the meantime he had become the Jazz Messengers' musical director.
According to Miles's autobiography, Dolphy was recommended by Tony Williams, but Miles didn't like his playing so he never approached him, despite Giddins' notes that Gabe Walters quoted.
Not to add fuel to the fire, but many, many Miles fans (myself included) feel that the Tokyo date with Rivers is much stronger than the Berlin date with Shorter. Shorter often sounds hesitant and unsure of himself. Understandable since he just joined the quintet. The band was still a ways away from its apex -- which to me was Miles Smiles.
"Miles in Berlin" was recorded by the SFB (Sender Freies Berlin, translated as "Radio Free Berlin") for later broadcasting. I would avoid any reissue that has even a hint of stereo separation, it's all fake. This was a mono recording, indeed.
Which one do you like the best? The Japanese 32DP 519 that I have is the rechanneled stereo, which of course sounds bad in stereo and just as bad with the channels summed to mono.
You're welcome to your opinion, but in my years of internet discussion of Miles and jazz I haven't encountered any of the other "many, many" fans who think that.
And you're certainly welcome to your view of what constitutes "the world at large", but I'm talking about the many jazz fans I've encountered in real life (read: not the internet).
That was my understanding as well. I was surprised to read Giddins' notes to the contrary. I imagine this issue generated much rumor and speculation. And Miles has a little bit of an unreliable narrator problem, doesn't he? There are many opportunities in one's autobiography to misremember or to skew the truth to a heightened or corrected version of the events of one's own life.
Your comment and views are certainly very welcome in this thread. I encourage people to disagree — this is Miles Davis were are talking about, after all! Would like to hear more on your views of the Sam Rivers date. From an objective point of view, Sam Rivers was just as new to the quintet as Shorter was a few months later. What makes the band on the Sam Rivers recording gel more?
Thanks! Sam Rivers at that point in his career was somewhat older/more experienced than Wayne, and he was more open to experimentation. Rivers also had a deep connection with the driver of that bus, whose opinion was probably most responsible for Coleman being ousted from the band. Of course, Wayne had been playing with the Messengers for a number of years by 1964, but it was all in the hard bop style. Not a lot of variance from date to date or gig to gig. Let me let you in on a little secret, btw. Wayne Shorter happens to be my favorite tenor saxophonist. He is one of 5 reasons why I believe that the 2nd great quintet was the greatest little jazz band in the land -- no offense to 1st great quintet or Coltrane classic quartet fans.
The Legacy remaster is true mono and sounds great to me -- although the mini-LP version is also pretty desirable, provided you don't care about the bonus track. Sonically, it's difficult to distinguish them, but the mini-LP might just be a little more dynamic and a flatter presentation of the master. But really, you can't go wrong getting the Legacy remaster, in my opinion. Mark Wilder did a brilliant job restoring these recordings.
Thanks! I'll try and grab one today. Miles Davis In Europe (32DP 517) is also rechanneled stereo, if I see a Wilder version of that I'll give it a listen as well.
After the recent discussion I started listening to Heard 'Round The World (the 80's twofer of Tokyo and Berlin) and found that yes, the print through is there on "My Funny Valentine" on that release too.
I have the following versions of Miles in Berlin: CSCS 5147, CDCBS 62976, SICP 825, and the Seven Steps box set. Of those, only SICP 825 and the Seven Steps box set are mono, which is preferable to me. SICP is a little bit smoother than the box set, but the levels are also higher (without being clipped).
That book has several factual errors, and Quincy Troupe even lifted portions from Jack Chambers' 'Milestones' biography. However, Miles said in a Downbeat listening test that he thought Dolphy's playing sounded like someone was standing on his foot.
I re-read that passage in the autobiography and the fact is mentioned that the Downbeat blindfold interview was held before Eric Dolphy's death, but unfortunately published right after, which made Miles seem like an a**hole, even though he was just being honest (as always).
Here is a photo of the Philharmonic Hall in Berlin, where Miles In Berlin was recorded. Having been built in 1963, it was still probably smelling of paint when Miles had his engagement there in September 1964. It must have been exciting having him. Here is a view from inside the hall. It hasn't changed much over the years, so it must've looked the same on the day Miles played there. Miles's appearance was the high point of what was the very first Berlin Jazzfest (still called “Berliner Jazztage” in 1964). The festival was organised with the help of George Wein, the founder of the Newport Jazz Festival.
Miles's actual quote about Dolphy seems to have been "The next time I see him I'm going to step on his foot." Jack Chambers quoted it as "He plays like somebody was standing on his foot," presumably by mistake. This was reprinted in the autobiography and subsequently quoted in other places.
I think this is a good place, leading into E.S.P., to include what Miles said about this band at this moment in time. Having read his autobiography helped me to understand the music better. Here, from his autobiography: I knew that Wayne Shorter, Herbie Hancock, Ron Carter and Tony Williams were great musicians, and that they would work as a group, as a musical unit. To have a great band requires sacrifice and compromise from everyone; without it, nothing happens. I thought they could do it and they did. You get the right guys to play the right things at the right time and you got a motherf***er; you got everything you need. If I was the inspiration and wisdom and the link for this band, Tony was the fire, the creative spark; Wayne was the idea person, the conceptualizer of a whole lot of musical ideas we did; and Ron and Herbie were the anchors. I was just the leader who put us all together. Those were all young guys and although they were learning from me, I was learning from them too, about the new thing, the free thing. Because to be and stay a great musician you’ve got to always be open to what’s new, what’s happening at the moment. You have to be able to absorb it if you’re going to continue to grow and communicate your music. And creativity and genius in any kind of artistic expression don’t know noting about age; either you got it or you don’t, and being old is not going to help you get it. I understood that we had to do something different. I knew that I was playing with some great young musicians that had their fingers on a different pulse. At first Wayne had been known as a free-form player, but playing with Art Blakey for those years and being the band’s musical director had brought him back in somewhat. He wanted to play freer than he could in Art’s band, but he didn’t want to be all the way out, either. Wayne has always been someone who experimented with form instead of someone who did it without form. That’s why I thought he was perfect for where I wanted to see the music I played go. Wayne also brought in a kind of curiosity about working with musical rules. If they didn’t work, then he broke them, but with a musical sense; he understood that freedom in music was the ability to know the rules in order to bend them to your satisfaction and taste. Wayne was always out there on his own plane, orbiting around his own planet. Everybody else in the band was walking down here on earth. He couldn’t do in Art Blakey’s band what he did in mine; he just seemed to bloom as a composer when he was in my band. That’s why I say he was the intellectual musical catalyst for the band in his arrangement of his musical compositions that we recorded. I was learning something new every night with that group. One reason was that Tony Williams was such a progressive drummer. He would listen to a record and memorize the whole record, all the solos, the whole thing. He was the only guy in my band who ever told me, “Man, why don’t you practice!” I was missing notes and sh!t trying to keep up with his young a$$. So he started me to practicing again because I had stopped and didn’t even know it. But man, I can tell you this: there ain’t but one Tony Williams when it comes to playing the drums. There was nobody like him before or since. He’s just a motherf***er. Tony played on top of the beat, just a fraction above, and gave everything a little edge because it had a little edge. Tony played polyrhythms all the time. He was a cross between Art Blakey and Philly Joe Jones, Roy Haynes and Max Roach. Those were his idols, and he had a little bit of all their sh!t. But his sh!t was definitely his own. Ron was less musical than Tony in the sense that he played what he heard. He didn’t know musical forms like Tony and Herbie Hancock did, but then he had that zip that Wayne and Herbie needed. Tony and Herbie always had eye contact, but they couldn’t have made it as a unit without Ron. It would take Ron four or five days to really get into something, but when he got it, man, you’d better watch out. Because that motherf***er would be laying it down, and you’d better get up and play your a$$ off or you were going to be left behind and look real bad. And everybody’s ego was too big for that. Tony would lead the tempo, and Herbie was like a sponge. Anything you played was cool with him; he just soaked up everything. One time I told him that his chords were too thick and he said, “Man, I don’t know what to play some of the time.” “Then Herbie, don’t play nothing if you don’t know what to play. You know, just let it go; you don’t have to be playing all the time!” He was like someone who will drink and drink until the whole bottle is gone just because it’s there. Herbie was like that at first; he would just play and play and play because he could and because he never did run out of ideas and he loved to play. Man, that motherf***er used to be playing so much piano that I would walk by after I had played and fake like I was going to cut both of his hands off. One of the first things you’ve got to have in a great band is confidence in the other guys, that they can do whatever it is that has to be done, whatever you say you’re going to play. I had faith in Tony and Herbie and Ron to play whatever we wanted to play, whatever was decided at that moment. That comes from not playing all the time, so the music is fresh. And they liked each other on and off the bandstand, and that always helps a lot. It was like Ron was putting up with Herbie and Tony until he got his chops together and then he would find out what Herbie and Tony were doing. Like Ron would start playing major sevenths in the bass and he and Herbie would lock that up and Tony would dig it and you know Wayne and I dug it, too. Wayne would be sitting up there looking like an angel, but when he picked up his horn he was a motherf***ing monster. After a while they had seeped into each other’s heads, and Tony and Herbie and Ron locked it up. When we went out to the Hollywood Bowl to play it was bad from the beginning and just got better. There isn’t any beginning to when a band really starts sounding great, when you get used to playing with one another. It just happens by osmosis. There will be five people in a band and it might just seep into two at first. And then the others hear that and they say, “What? What was that?” Then they do something off what the first two did. And then it’s inside everybody. I loved that band, man, because if we played a song for a whole year and you heard it at the beginning of the year, you wouldn’t recognize it at the end of the year. When I played with Tony, who is a little genius, I had to react in my playing to what he was playing. And this goes for the whole band. So the way we all played together changed what we were playing each and every night during that time. From Miles: The Autobiography, by Miles Davis with Quicny Toupe; Simon and Schuster; 1989. (Excerpts taken from Chapter 13, pp. 273-277)
