The Cellar Door Sessions at Fifty-Five: December 16, 1970

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 Miles Davis; in all formats, he is the artist most represented in the collection. Fellow OCDers will appreciate the urgency. While arranging the Miles shelf last week, I noticed the recording dates of the Cellar Door Sessions 1970 (Columbia, 2005). I have a bit of history with this set, which some readers might find helpful to clarify. In the early aughts, I contributed to the late, lamented zine Signal To Noise and claimed this set for a review. Pete Gershon, my editor, sent me the six advance CDs—no booklet, no release that I can recall. Before I could file my review, Pete told me that Columbia Records had put the release on hold, and this is the part I need help with. Does anyone recall this delay, or was it only known to recipients of the set? I never filed the review, and because of a change in my financial circumstances, never bought the Columbia box when it was eventually released in 2005. Though I eventually obtained the booklet when a kind obsessive on Reddit sent me image files—sixty of them. Whoever you are, thank you! Now on to the music. Thanks to Ethan Iverson, whose format for his deep dive into the recordings of Keith Jarrett’s American Quartet I scraped for this.

Wednesday, December 16, 1970

–Directions. Miles establishes the rules of engagement right from the jump. Joined in media res, Joe Zawinul’s composition starts strong and bulls its way forward, thanks in large part to Jack DeJohnette’s furious energy. This is the sound world of Jack Johnson (Columbia, 1970): loud, aggressive, even confrontational. Michael Henderson, to this author’s ears, is the decisive player across these sessions. Here, he, makes his presence heard and felt while Gary Bartz’s blues and R&B-oriented solo marks a break with the more Coltrane-oriented approach of his predecessor, Steve Grossman. Though “Directions” was recorded at a  September 1968 session, it wasn’t released until 1981 on a compilation of the same name. It entered Miles’ band book immediately, often as a set opener.

–Yesternow. A little game of word association: what comes immediately to mind when you think of Michael Henderson’s time with Miles? For me, the ostinato basslines and the bassline for “Yesternow,” in B-flat, are pretty much the whole song. DeJohnette acknowledges this by doubling it early on, before Miles tiptoes into the picture like a sailor scanning the horizon. Jarrett engages him with a kind of duet over a vamp, Bartz has his say, and Jarrett, who consistently expressed a disdain for electric keyboards, embraced them two-handedly, organ with the left hand, Rhodes with the right.

–-What I Say. Miles made no secret of his desire to have a band that played like James Brown’s, and on “What I Say,” his wish was fulfilled. This is the hardest of hard funk: pushy, urgent, and a little unruly. In fact, Brown himself might not have accepted playing this raw from the famously disciplined JBs. Where Brown’s drummers, “Jabo” Starks and Clyde Stubblefield, were tight and controlled, DeJohnette is a firestorm of energy, pounding home his backbeats with a relentlessness that’s a little scary. Henderson catches some of the energy, cranking up the distortion to flirt with fuzz-bass territory under Bartz’s solo. If the two main rhythms of rock are the backbeat 4/4 and the shuffle, “What I Say” and “Right Off” are their apotheoses in the Miles canon.

–Improvisation #1. Keith Jarrett is having fun with electric keys. It sounds like noodling, really, the kind of thing Jarrett might have done in the showroom of a music store.

–Inamorata. The term “jazz-rock” has the anachronistic whiff of patchouli and Mexican weed about it. But it does suggest a unity. The ground truth of the jazz zeitgeist in 1970 meant that you were either on one side or the other. With an invocation of Deep Purple in its portentous, fanfare-like opening, and a near-quote of Band of Gypsys’ “Power To Love,” Miles declares his allegiance to rock conclusively. Henderson, the man of the moment, gleefully follows his leader into the fray with joyous octave leaps around the ostinato, this time in E-flat minor.  The 2005 release of this material was a marked improvement over the muzzy sonics heard on the Live-Evil (Columbia, 1971) cuts, and Henderson is rightly prominent in the mix. Bartz triangulates between post-Coltrane modal excursions and Maceo Parker R&B declamation in his solo while DeJohnette keeps the temperature on a simmer. This is the most overtly rockish composition on the Cellar Door setlist, and even discounting for this writer’s abhorrence of rock and roll hagiography, it’s a little . . . boring. If Miles’ music is about anything, it’s a blazing, almost defiant allegiance to originality. Miles borrowed from other artists all the time, but never quite so artlessly as with “Inamorata,” which doesn’t alchemize the lead of early ‘70s rock into gold. It idolizes it. That would soon change.

Next: A breakdown of the Thursday, December 17 set.