{"id":11848,"date":"2025-12-22T23:32:01","date_gmt":"2025-12-23T05:32:01","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/postgenre.org\/staging\/4567\/?p=11848"},"modified":"2025-12-22T23:32:01","modified_gmt":"2025-12-23T05:32:01","slug":"cellar-door-sessions-at-fifty-five-night-four","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/postgenre.org\/staging\/4567\/cellar-door-sessions-at-fifty-five-night-four\/","title":{"rendered":"The Cellar Door Sessions at Fifty-Five: December 19, 1970"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Saturday, December 19, 1970<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

For first-time listeners to The Cellar Door Sessions 1970<\/em> (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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Arriving at discs five and six is a return to familiar ground, though perhaps with a different\u2014and hopefully deepened\u2014perspective.  Much of this material had been released as much as thirty-four years earlier on Live Evil<\/em> (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 \u201880s, offers in forensic analysis of how the Live-Evil tracks were assembled in the box set\u2019s booklet. The exception to Macero\u2019s strategy of bricolage is an epochal one, and we\u2019ll get to it in a moment.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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 \u201csomething\u201d was pretty obviously Jimi Hendrix.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Miles made little secret of his fascination with Hendrix (sidebar: Was he in the audience at Band of Gypsys\u2019 New Year\u2019s 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 \u201cPower To Love\u201d to open Friday\u2019s second set, and on and on.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

McLaughlin didn\u2019t have Hendrix\u2019s blues feeling, nor did he use signal processing techniques as extensively. But he did play with blazing speed and virtuosity\u2014the inner mounting flame.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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