Miles Davis - Miles Davis At Plugged Nickel, Chicago (1981 Japanese CBS/Sony Vinyl LP)

Miles Davis - Miles Davis at Plugged Nickel, Chicago | Vinyl LP - 1981 Japanese CBS/Sony Reissue (18AP 2067, Miles 25 series)

In December 1965 Miles Davis brought his second great quintet into the Plugged Nickel in Chicago, and what they recorded across two nights is the only complete live document of the band that made E.S.P. and Miles Smiles. Wayne Shorter, Herbie Hancock, Ron Carter and Tony Williams were by this point so far inside each other's playing that they decided to test it. The band made a private pact to work against expectation, to answer anything predictable with its opposite, and the result is the sound of five musicians dismantling their own repertoire while it plays. This volume gathers four long performances from the second night: "Walkin'" and "On Green Dolphin Street" run past eleven minutes, "So What" past thirteen, and none of them stays where it starts. Tempos lurch, forms dissolve and reassemble, and Shorter and Hancock keep pushing to the edge of free playing without ever quite letting the song go. It is one of the most fearless things any Miles group put on tape.

The Plugged Nickel recordings sat mostly unreleased for a decade. CBS/Sony in Japan issued them first, in 1976, across two volumes, before the complete run finally appeared as an eight-disc box in 1995. What the concerts capture is the quintet at a hinge point, months before it moved fully into the abstraction of the studio records that followed, still working through standards but treating them as raw material rather than songs to be honoured.

This is Volume One. This copy is the 1981 Japanese reissue on CBS/Sony, part of the Miles 25 series, catalogue number 18AP 2067, with Japanese liner notes by Kiyoshi Koyama.