When they were little, my daughters assumed I owned the complete works of Miles Davis. In addition to several versions of classics, such as Kind of Blue, Aura, In a Silent Way and Sketches of Spain, there were live albums and videos, semi-bootlegs on dodgy Italian labels, curiosities such as The Man With the Horn (since given away) and oddities such as Directions, a bits-and-pieces compilation released while Davis was out of action in the late 1970s.
The Miles section took up more shelf acreage than The Beatles and Stravinsky put together, yet it wasn’t that he was my favourite jazz artist, or that these were my favourite albums. CBS (Columbia or Sony, now Sony BMG, which owns the Miles catalogue from the mid-1950s to the mid-1980s) was just good at putting out recordings I felt I had to have.
Through concerts, albums and investments, Miles has always been one of the biggest earners in jazz. In 1971, he claimed to be earning nearly $400 000 a year. By the 1980s, it was $1million a year. Whatever the state of jazz, Miles always sells.
So, throughout the 1990s, Sony issued more and more ”new” Miles albums. He remains a cash cow: Kind of Blue, his most famous and enduring album, sold more than 12million copies worldwide, most of them in the past decade or so. Sales of Bitches Brew and Sketches of Spain exceed the million mark. Despite the fact that jazz’s biggest superstar had left the company (and, in 1991, the planet), it has managed to maintain a steady stream of releases ever since.
This is why the Miles Davis section of my music library continues to expand with a steady flow of exquisitely packaged multi-CD sets with the word ”complete” in the title. There was Miles Davis/Gil Evans: The Complete Columbia Studio Recordings, The Complete Miles Davis Quintet Sessions, and so on, each bearing an elaborate, engraved metal spine that makes the set look like a miniature tome from the British Library.
Miles Ahead is one of those ”desert island” discs I’ve studied and enjoyed and shared with friends dozens, perhaps hundreds of times, yet I’ve only listened to the Miles/Gil six-CD set in full a handful of times. Somehow, life seems too short to go back for another listen to the seventh overdubbed solo Miles played on Springsville (he nailed it by take 10).
The imminent release of yet another multi-CD Miles boxed set, The Cellar Door Sessions 1970, provokes a new set of mixed feelings: anxiety about having time to listen; excitement at the thought of uncovering a treasure trove of unreleased gems. But is it really worth it?
”It’s more than the music,” says Sony BMG’s Adam Sieff. ”We wanted to do something that had a beauty all its own, an object of desire. People will have the original album for the car, the box sits on the shelf at home.” Sieff confirms that the boxes have had significant sales in the hundreds of thousands. Their bestseller to date has been the three-CD set The Complete In a Silent Way Sessions.
I remind him of the comments from Miles’s producer Teo Macero about these ”bullshit” reissues. On many occasions, Macero has asserted that Miles would never have agreed to the unreleased material being heard. ”The box set allows you to include all this extra stuff. It may not all be of the same high standard but, historically, there’s a good reason for all this to be released,” says Sieff.
He admits Sony BMG is not short of repertoire to release. ”Every time Miles farted, they had the tape machine running.” There’s something intimate, even creepy, about listening to the vast quantity of recordings on these boxes. Many of the tracks are out-takes never intended for the market. And they seem to have become more obsessive, more microscopic. While The Complete Miles Davis Quintet covers three years (1965 to 1968), The Complete Jack Johnson spans just 16 weeks. Now we have the Cellar Door recordings, taken from four consecutive nights — December 16 to 19 1970 — at the Washington DC club.
Maybe it’s churlish to make fun of record companies for exploiting what they’ve got. At least the Miles boxes are thoughtfully done, with extensive (though often badly edited) notes and information, and first-hand testimony from the musicians. The comments from Brazilian percussionist Airto Moreira and pianist Keith Jarrett on this new box are particularly illuminating. And one advantage that The Cellar Door Sessions has over, say, The Complete In a Silent Way Sessions, is that each disc is a complete live performance you can enjoy in one go.
When Miles played the Cellar Door, he drew on a small repertoire of seven tunes: Directions, Yesternow, What I Say, Inamorata, Honky Tonk, It’s About That Time and Sanctuary. If you have the 1971 album Live-Evil, this material will seem very familiar, since Miles and his producer chopped up their favourite bits to go on this very powerful and visceral double album. So when I tell trumpeter Byron Wallen about The Cellar Door Sessions, he says: ”Oh my god, I’m going to have to buy it! Live-Evil is one of my favourite Miles albums.”
He argues that the quality of the music is less important than what the musician represents. ”Miles is more a conceptualist than a trumpet player. He’s important for the social way he took the music, demanding respect for the music and for himself as a black man — that’s very important.”
Adam Holzman, the ex-Miles sideman who co-produced The Cellar Door box, makes some big claims in his liner notes: ”With the release of The Cellar Door, history might need to be revised. This music lays the foundation for what would later become the most enduring aspects of electric jazz and contemporary music.” Yet to write history, you have to make choices. And Miles and his team chose the right tracks for Live-Evil.
”When you go into the archives, it’s always a dangerous thing,” says trumpeter Abram Wilson, ”because those artists have moved on. Some artists, such as Soweto Kinch, are uncomfortable hearing things that are just a few years old for that reason. But when you’re hearing these boxed sets, you’re not necessarily listening to them to worship the artist, you’re listening to understand the process.”
Every artist has to make choices. You can’t put every take on the DVD, every alternate chapter at the back of the book, every take on the CD. ”Completism” is a curse rather than a blessing, whether in rock (all those dreary BBC sessions), classical music (perhaps the worst offenders) or jazz. The Cellar Door package is interesting, because Miles is never dull. Yet, its existence — carefully packaged, annotated and over-marketed — says more about the record industry majors than jazz history. They don’t have a new Miles, so they keep on selling us the old one.
In Mike Dibb’s film biography of Miles Davis, musician after musician tells us how maddening and iconoclastic and creative Miles was to work with. What finely tuned instincts he had.
Guitarist John McLaughlin laughs: ”Miles would find a way to clear the garbage out of the way and get to the essentials.” I can’t help thinking that Miles would have viewed most of these alternative takes and jam sessions as ”garbage”, though he’d probably use the same term as Macero: ”Bullshit.”
Wilson is right in saying that we listen to these extras to understand the process. Wallen, who bought The Plugged Nickel box, points out that many of the performances on that live set are substandard. Miles was unwell for many of the dates, but was on good form for the album that was released at the time. ”The question is,” says Wallen, ”would Miles be happy with the idea of releasing it in this way? In terms of the way people listen to music, who’s got the time?”
Big Lounge vocalist and trombonist Ashley Slater (formerly a Loose Tube and Norman Cook’s other half in Freak Power) thinks about it all for a short while. ”I know very little about Miles, except that he’s my favourite jazz musician,” says Slater bluntly. ”Because he knew when to stop.” — Â