The Cellar Door Sessions at Fifty-Five: An Introduction

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 their way onto Live-Evil (Columbia, 1971), a two-record set released exactly eleven months later in somewhat dim sound. It took almost three decades, with the release of The Cellar Door Sessions 1970 (Columbia Records, 2005), a six-CD set, for a fuller appraisal of this pivotal band to emerge.

In 1970, Davis was moving fast and breaking things. By the fall, pianist Chick Corea and bassist Dave Holland left to form Circle, leaving Keith Jarrett as the sole harmonic instrument. Saxophonist Steve Grossman also left around that time, and Gary Bartz, a player strongly rooted in blues and R&B language, joined the band. But it was the arrival of nineteen-year-old bassist Michael Henderson that changed the direction of Davis’ electric music away from jazz and toward the hard funk of Sly Stone and James Brown.

The Cellar Door Sessions are the first commercial recordings of Miles’ new band, which also included drummer Jack DeJohnette and percussionist Airto Moreira (this lineup made no studio recordings). The recording was also the last Davis would make for eighteen months, though there are many bootleg recordings of European concerts from 1971.

Taken in the context of the releases that preceded it in 1970 alone, The Cellar Door Sessions doesn’t have the explosive, uncontainable power of A Tribute to Jack Johnson (Columbia, 1971), which was recorded in February and April of 1970. It also lacked the world-changing import of Bitches Brew (Columbia, 1970) that, while recorded in August 1969, came out in March 1970.  The Cellar Door band was a fairly new unit playing a new setlist. Gone were “I Fall In Love Too Easily,” “Paraphernalia,” and “Spanish Key.” In were simpler, vamp- and groove-oriented tunes like the “Honky Tonk,” a slow blues, the floating, trance-y “Yesternow,” and the stomping funk blowout “What I Say.”

Miles Davis is often credited with inventing what was called at the time “jazz-rock.” He didn’t; Tony Williams got there first with Lifetime. Yet Bitches Brew and In A Silent Way (Columbia, 1969) maintained a connection with jazz, a way of thinking about musical organization that all but disappeared when the six (and for a night, seven) players took the stage at 34th & M Street NW in the Georgetown neighborhood of Washington. Fifty-five years later, what they laid down still matters.

Tomorrow: A breakdown of the Wednesday, December 16 sessions.