Get The Drums Right: The Free Jazz of Miles Davis

I’ve been listening to some of the Miles Davis live concerts from 1973. I love the studio album Get Up With It but I found Agartha and Pangera live albums a noise. Mind you, I found the first FIllmore album a bit ragged. This time round, I find the music oddly compelling, even though it’s still a mess compared to the studio work.

Then I realised. It’s Miles doing Free Jazz. As he’d been doing since the mid-60’s.

Go back to the early Sixties, and there’s not a lot of difference between Miles In The Studio and Miles On The Stage. The live performances are generally a little faster and more intense, the studio performances are more polished and considered. Then came the Second Great Quintet: Shorter / Hancock / Williams / Carter. Shorter, Hancock and Williams could all play free jazz, and often did, on stage. Miles let them: that’s what he had hired them for. Carter was there to stop them going totally berserk.

The cliches of ‘free jazz’ include lots of over-blowing, honking, squeaking, rattling percussion, discords, noisy guitars, a very busy but inaudible bassist, no obvious tune nor chord structure, and clearly some rule that a hint of a tuneful phrase will be punished by loss of any and all grants the player may be receiving. And Lord alone there’s still enough of that stuff going around. This is a less noisy but just as directionless example:


However, ‘free jazz’ can also have a defined rhythm and a something like a tune. Here’s Coltrane doing it:


Coltrane went on from the sublime heights of the Village Vanguard sessions to the organised chaos of Ascension...


...and then even further out. Miles did not follow. That sort of stuff was not going to buy him any Ferraris. He recognised as well that he couldn’t go on doing If I Were A Bell live. I suspect Miles realised that the Vanguard sessions work because of the telepathic communication between Elvin Jones and John Coltrane. One reason Ascension does not work is that not even Elvin Jones can figure out what he should be doing. The rhythm section comes across as an afterthought.

What Miles realised was: get the drums right, discourage honking and over-blowing, the soloists can blow as free as they like, and it will make sense to a reasonably hip audience. So he hired three guys who could do free jazz and let them figure out how to do free jazz in the Miles Davis Quintet. One of those was the seventeen year-old Tony Williams: Miles knew that kid could drum up a storm in three different time signatures at once. He followed Williams with Jack de Johnette, who drummed up a rock-influenced storm, and he followed de Johnette with the powerhouse combination of Al Foster and James Mtume, who did heaven knows what, because it’s not jazz, funk or rock, but is exactly what Miles needed to make his then style of free jazz accessible to the majority of jazz fans.

Because what’s going on over that percussion is as free and weird as anything anyone else in free jazz ever did.