Miles Davis - the "Lost Quintet"

There was a recent thread over at Head-Fi regarding peoples' favorite Miles Davis albums. "Kind of Blue" (of course!) and "In a Silent Way" (my personal favorite) both were mentioned a lot, but a few people named "Filles de Kilimanjaro" from 1968 because of how it was such a transitional record for Miles, bridging the gap between his acoustic jazz past and the impending move to electric jazz.

This got me to thinking about Miles' "Lost Quintet", its nickname owing to the fact that it never recorded as a quintet in the studio. Only Wayne Shorter remained from the "Second Great Quintet" of 1964-1968, with Chick Corea, Dave Holland and Jack DeJohnette comprising the remaining members. The quintet was Miles' live band from early 1969 through March of 1970 when Wayne Shorter left the band. And as one would expect from a lineup as stellar as this one, the music kicked ass, with an echo of more straight-ahead jazz remaining amid the electric maelstrom.

While there are no studio releases of music by this lineup, the band was widely recorded in concert and a number of unofficial releases exist. Several years ago a "Lost Quintet Tree" distributed about a dozen CDs of live shows, primarily taken from radio broadcasts over the course of 1969. Some of the recordings are excellent FM pulls and offer a glimpse into Miles' live music right at the time he turned music on its ear with "Bitches Brew".

Several of the shows have recently been upped on the Dime torrent site. The 11/9/69 Rotterdam show and the two sets from Paris six days earlier are probably the best sounding, with the two shows from Rome on 10/27 being pretty solid as well. Start with this great remastered version of the Rotterdam show, and then grab some others as well if you like what you hear. If you don't do bittorrent, then a little Googling should find some links to where you can download some of this killer music from the web.