Programme Notes
Miles Davis famously refused to show the 'Kind Of Blue' compositions to his band until they were in the studio - he wanted to hear his musicians respond spontaneously to the music they saw on the page. Later in his career, Miles was in the studio while his bassist Marcus Miller tried to correct a minor glitch over several takes. 'Don't **** with it, man' said Miles. 'USE those mistakes. Play in the moment.' It is this spirit of spontaneity and exploration that tonight's quintet tap into as they commemorate the two musicians' anniversary. In the 75 years since both Miles Davis and John Coltrane were born, thousands of young jazz musicians have attempted to tap into the Miles/Trane post bop vision by copying the superficial gestures - Miles' closely-miked, tightly-muted trumpet; Trane's sheets of sound over rumbling drums and chunky piano chords - but this is a project that digs beneath the surface veneer, capturing Miles's spirit of spontaneity. Coltrane's melodic intellectual diligence, and the oft-neglected romantic lyricism of both. Touring North America last autumn with this project, the date at Toronto's Massey Hall in October has been captured by an extraordinary Verve album called Directions In Music.
'People would have been happy to hear us improvise on the familiar arrangements,' says Herbie Hancock, 'But Miles and John would not be very happy with this safe kind of approach because that's not what they were about... Miles used to tell us that he paid us to try new things on the bandstand, not to prepare it in our rooms beforehand. Jazz is about capturing the moment.'
Modal piano icon Hancock stands closest to this Holy Grail of post-bop, being chosen by Miles to lead his fabled mid-'60s quintet with Wayne Shorter, Ron Carter and Tony Williams ('Mmmm, nice touch,' Miles gruffly announced after Hancock's audition). Hancock has since paid homage to Miles on many occasions, most notably the VSOP Quintet which recreated that popular '60s line-up with Freddie Hubbard deputising for Miles. concert promoter George Wein initially convened the group in 1976 to play from Hancock's Blue Note canon, later using it to perform work from Miles's modal period. Hancock has said how odd it was that music that was cutting edge only a decade earlier was replicated as 'classic jazz' by the mid-'70s, something that the likes of Wynton Marsalis soon transformed into the neo-bop revival (Marsalis, fittingly, later replaced Hubbard in the VSOP Quintet).
This Directions In Music project takes a very different route to that initial wave of revivalism. 'We decided to create our own new way of looking at compositions, to allow new freedoms within the structures in order to stimulate and provoke spontaneity within the group,' say Hancock. 'We're not just playing the original chords of these pieces, but moving beyond that, using our powers of concentration and our hearts and our trust in the ability of the others to respond to whatever happens and work outside the box.' Hancock , in particular, is in masterful form through the set - deft, mercurial, as exploratory as he's been for years, dancing around the keyboard, delicately drumming out unusual intervals, teasing out multiple harmonic possibilities from simple haiku-like phrases.
And the choices of music are inspired. One original composition, 'Misstery', sees them dismantling 'Stella By Starlight' and then reassembling it as some crazy jigsaw puzzle. Although it's a piece associated with Miles, it's Coltrane's explosive harmonic logic, which underlies this performance. Davis's 'So What' and Coltrane's 'Impressions' (from 'A Love Supreme') have been linked together by many jazz bands, but this quintet's epic hybrid strips each theme to its most basic modal elements, creating a slow, loping, ostinato bassline which becomes the basis for a delicate one-chord freak-out.
Texas-born trumpeter Hargrove - one of the young lions of neo-bop to emerge in the last decade - makes no effort to ape Miles's superficial, Harmon-muted sound in this line-up. Instead, he develops a unique take on some of Miles's extemporary techniques. The reading of Kurt Weill's 'My Ship' is a particularly gorgeous example, where Hargrove's flugelhorn solo employs economical phrases, decorated with off-notes, which gave the effect of him casually twisting the melody as if he were turning soft metal. Later, on a reading of Coltrane's 'Transition', you'll find him imitating Trane's fervent, speaking-in-tongues holler, playing as 'out' as we've ever heard him.
Heavyweight fusion tenorist Brecker - one of the most popular and celebrated saxophonists of the post-Coltrane era - has been exploring the 'feminine' side to his playing in recent years, with less pyrotechnics and more delicacy. Here he's on top form, particularly when he transforms Coltrane's heart-tugging 'Naima' into a solo tenor sax cadenza, an elaborate grandstanding soliloquy filled with rippling arpeggios, smudgy harmonic colourations and beautiful chord substitutions.
Tonight's live show replaces bassist John Petrucci and drummer Brian Blade (from the album) with George Mraz and Willie Jones. Bassist Mraz, who left Prague for the States in 1968, around the same time as his Czech compatriot Miroslav Vitous, studied at Berklee and has since played with a host of heavyweights, including Dizzy Gillespie, Oscar Peterson, Ella Fitzgerald, Charles Mingus and the Thad Jones-Mel Lewis Big Band - he's been particularly impressive in duos with the likes of Jimmy Rowles, Tommy Flanagan, Barry Harris and John Abercrombie. Drummer Willie Jones, meanwhile, has worked with Roy Hargrove and Eric Reed for many years, and guested with the likes of Horace Silver and Phil Woods. All five of them put in performances that are often exquisite enough to share a stage with the originals. 'Even though each night we played the same repertoire, something different would happen. By the time we got into it, the music was just soaring.'
2002 John Lewis
