No Blues
A week ago I wrote about a pair of concert performances by the Miles Davis Quintet that were filmed during its 1967 tour with the Newport Jazz Festival in Europe. The tour essentially closed the book on Miles’s career as the leader of cutting edge jazz groups playing exclusively acoustic instruments. In his autobiography, Miles, Davis assessed that what he and Herbie Hancock, Wayne Shorter, Ron Carter, and Tony Williams “had been doing was just getting too abstracted,” and he was increasingly intrigued by “what electronic instrumental voicing could do in my music.” The trumpeter named James Brown, B.B. King, and Muddy Waters (of the latter, he said, “I knew I had to get some of what he was doing up in my music”) as new inspirations in bringing him “back to that sound from where I had come.”
Shortly after his return from Europe in December 1967, Miles recorded two tunes with the quintet and guitarist Joe Beck, “Circle in the Round” and “Water in the Pond.” In January and May 1968, George Benson recorded with the quintet, which by then included Miles experimenting with an electric trumpet and Hancock making his first, tentative use of an electric piano. One of the tracks with Benson, “Paraphernalia,” was released on Miles in the Sky later that year. Davis’s latest innovation, jazz-rock fusion, was underway.
Three years earlier, in December 1964, nearer to the inception of the quintet, Davis & Co. appeared on the Steve Allen Show where it played a blues that was more in keeping with what Miles had been playing since the forties. In other words, blues more complex in nature than what he heard, and was drawn to, in Muddy’s blues. “You know, the sound of the $1.50 drums and the harmonica and the two-chord blues.” “No Blues” was a themeless blues that Miles had introduced in 1961. Miles indicates frustration with something in the mix, but the playing is focused and tight, and the footage is an outstanding addition to the documentation of one of the most influential bands in modern music.