The Cellar Door Sessions at Fifty-Five: December 19, 1970

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 a return to familiar ground, though perhaps with a different—and hopefully deepened—perspective.  Much of this material had been released as much as thirty-four years earlier on Live Evil (Columbia, 1971). Roughly eighty-five minutes of the hundred and two-minute running time of discs five and six made it onto that double-LP set, most of it in the form of excerpts spliced together by Miles and Teo Macero as Adam Holzman, who played keyboards with Miles in the ‘80s, offers in forensic analysis of how the Live-Evil tracks were assembled in the box set’s booklet. The exception to Macero’s strategy of bricolage is an epochal one, and we’ll get to it in a moment.

The accepted narrative around Saturday night at the Cellar Door is that guitarist John McLaughlin was summoned to the club by Miles because the leader felt the band needed . . . something. That “something” was pretty obviously Jimi Hendrix.

Miles made little secret of his fascination with Hendrix (sidebar: Was he in the audience at Band of Gypsys’ New Year’s concert in 1970? The so-called Lost Quartet played a gig the next day at the Village Gate, so he was probably in New York at the time). Bassist Michael Henderson outright quoted the bassline from “Power To Love” to open Friday’s second set, and on and on.

McLaughlin didn’t have Hendrix’s blues feeling, nor did he use signal processing techniques as extensively. But he did play with blazing speed and virtuosity—the inner mounting flame.

–Directions. The wildcard McLaughlin is notable here for playing all over the pulse. There’s no evidence that he ever played “Directions” with Miles, or anyone else, which might explain why. About three minutes of this performance were extracted for the beginning of “Sivad” on Live-Evil.

–Honky Tonk. Like he did the night before, Bartz dug deep into his blues bag for his “Honky Tonk” solo. McLaughlin must have caught some of this spirit. His solo moves from abstraction to blues over its course. Part of this performance was also used in “Sivad.”

–What I Say. Teo Macero wisely set aside his razor blade for this cut. Reproduced in its entirety on Live-Evil, it’s twenty-one minutes of howling, raging jazz rock from the first sharp kick of DeJohnette’s bass drum. Miles instantly picks up on the energy, stabbing out single notes and spewing flamethrower runs at seemingly peak intensity. Jarrett comps behind him like a funk keyboardist and has little to do with jazz. He’s another drum—not that one was needed. DeJohnette maniacally attacks his hi-hat as if it were a rat that jumped into his bed. His fills behind Bartz’s skirling, impassioned soprano solo become increasingly vehement.  By this point, the band has become a vehicle with the throttle stuck wide open, and it’s McLaughlin’s turn to take the wheel, and he responds with a heaven-storming barrage that presages the Mahavishnu Orchestra blowouts that would soon set the jazz world on its ear. With Airto’s flutes crying overhead like birds scattered by a gunshot, Jarrett runs toward ecstasy with what might have been the most ferocious playing of his career. DeJohnette pushes him toward it until the pianist falls away, clearing the stage for an anarchic, carpet-bombing drum solo to end all drum solos. Keith Moon, Ginger Baker, step aside.  It’s simply incredible that once Miles’ solo sets the energy level at eleven, every succeeding solo ups the ante until DeJohnette’s apocalyptic conclusion.

In his book Running the Voodoo Down: The Electric Music of Miles Davis (Backbeat, 2005), Phil Freeman relates some dissatisfaction among Miles’ band—Keith Jarrett in particular—with McLaughlin dropping into the date with no rehearsals and probably no advance notice. Freeman contends that the band was “funkier, more together and altogether a better unit” on the three nights without the guitarist, an opinion with which this author has somewhat reluctantly come to agree. Yet there’s no doubt that McLaughlin’s presence spiked the drink. Miles got what he bargained for, and we got a performance for the ages.

–Directions. There’s no record of the duration of the set break on Saturday night. But it was apparently long enough for the band to come out for the final set with an adrenalized take on Joe Zawinul’s line. Showing no sign of fatigue, the band barrels through the head at full speed with Miles leading the way. McLaughlin’s solo here fails to catch fire, and Jarrett seems to move the band in a different direction by playing the theme under him. This leads to a fascinating four-way blowout by the rhythm section alone. Much of this found its way into “Funky Tonk” on  Live-Evil.

–Improvisation #4. Another performance used for Live-Evil, this time at the conclusion of “Funky Tonk.”

–Inamorata. Part of this was also used to conclude “Funky Tonk,” but most of it was released on  Live-Evil as “Inamorata and Narration By Conrad Roberts,” where the actor’s voice is dubbed over portions of “Sanctuary” and “It’s About That Time”, bringing four nights of music—and a very busy 1970 for Miles—to a serene yet characteristically enigmatic conclusion.

Though Miles would continue to play this material through the next twelve months, changes were afoot. DeJohnette would leave the following summer to form his own jazz-rock band, Compost. On the extensive European tour of fall 1971, he would be replaced by a trio of percussionists, Ndugu Chancler on drums, and on percussion, Don Alias from the Bitches Brew (Columbia, 1970) sessions, and James Mtume, who would be a key player until Miles’ 1975 flameout, on congas and other percussion.