Saturday, December 19, 1970 For first-time listeners to The Cellar Door Sessions 1970 (Columbia, 1970), the first four discs can be like a side trip to unfamiliar neighborhoods of a well-known place. The language is the same, the architecture familiar, but the details are new and delightfully alive. Arriving at discs five and six is […]
Friday, December 18, 1970 When The Cellar Door Sessions 1970 (Columbia, 2005) recordings were made, none of the members of Miles’ band had yet reached age thirty. The leader himself was only forty-four. But even at their younger ages, the intense physicality of the playing for three sets a night, Friday and Saturday, had to […]
Thursday, December 17, 1970 –What I Say. With “What I Say,” Miles Davis and his band answered the bell for Round two at the Cellar Door like a boxer bursting off his stool to land a volley of combinations before his opponent has even reached the center of the ring. It’s not quite shock and […]
Before diving in, a note on inspiration. This project is the child of a small-scale obsession. Last fall, I moved my collection of five thousand, six hundred and sixty-four CDs across town to a new home. I like to file them alphabetically by artist and then chronologically within each artist. Seventy-one of these are by […]
Fifty-five years ago this week, Miles Davis brought a new-ish band into Washington D.C.’s Cellar Door club for a four-night engagement. Columbia Records, perhaps hoping to catch lightning in a bottle, sent a crew and two eight-track tape machines to record the ten sets. Edited versions of material from the final night’s three sets found […]
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As nonsensical as it may seem in the abstract, sometimes ideological wars are a necessary step towards a renewed and invigorated community. This is certainly the case with the so-called “jazz wars” of the 1980s. After decades of further sonic expansion, one side came with a zealous desire to return the music to its roots. […]
Of the world’s roughly eleven thousand bird species, there is something particularly special about the dove family. Dating back to at least the Miocene epoch, twenty-three to twenty-five million years ago, across its history, the dove has developed a unique status as a symbolic creature. Many of these connections first emerged in the Biblical story […]
With our review of the second day of the 2024 Newport Jazz Festival – read day one here – we continue to draw parallels between the musical greats of the past and the artists with us today. This analysis is not intended to minimize the distinctive individualism of either the legends no longer with us, […]
In making sense of the story of jazz, historians often craft a narrative that neatly divides into different generations and schools of thought. Revolutions in composition, improvisation, rhythm, and instrumentation each producing a distinctly novel area of music. While this perspective has some truth to it, the dividing lines between each era are often far […]
