Miles Davis - Sorcerer (1981 Japanese CBS/Sony 18AP 2070 Vinyl LP)

Miles Davis - Sorcerer | Vinyl LP - 1981 Japanese CBS/Sony Reissue (18AP 2070, Miles 25 Series No. 20)

• The third album by the second great quintet, recorded at Columbia’s 30th Street Studio in May 1967 with Wayne Shorter, Herbie Hancock, Ron Carter and Tony Williams, between Miles Smiles and Nefertiti.
• Four Wayne Shorter compositions alongside pieces by Herbie Hancock and Tony Williams, with Davis famously absent from “Pee Wee”, the only track on the album he doesn’t play on.
• 1981 Japanese CBS/Sony reissue with cap obi, part of the Miles 25 series. Manufactured by CBS/Sony Inc. Liner notes by Ralph J. Gleason.

By May 1967 this quintet had been together long enough to stop explaining itself. E.S.P. had introduced the group. Miles Smiles pushed harder. Sorcerer, the third record, is where the interplay becomes so intuitive that the compositions almost dissolve into collective improvisation. Wayne Shorter wrote four of the seven tracks: “Prince of Darkness”, “Masqualero”, “Limbo” and “Vonetta”. Herbie Hancock contributed the title piece. Tony Williams wrote “Pee Wee”, a quartet performance on which Davis sits out entirely and the remaining four players operate without a lead voice. The only tune from the album that became a regular part of the live book was “Masqualero”, which went on to become a standard in its own right. The closing track, “Nothing Like You”, is an anomaly: a vocal number written by Bob Dorough and Fran Landesman, recorded five years earlier in August 1962 with a completely different band. Teo Macero produced. The cover is a profile photograph of Cicely Tyson, then Davis’s girlfriend and later his wife.

The thing about this quintet is that any one of them would be the strongest player on most other sessions. Shorter was writing compositions that sounded like nothing else in jazz, harmonically open and structurally slippery, leaving space for the group to move through them rather than over them. Hancock’s piano comping on “Vonetta” and “Limbo” is a masterclass in suggestion. Carter’s bass holds the centre while refusing to be predictable. Williams, who was twenty-one when this was recorded, plays with a looseness and authority that still sounds modern. Davis’s trumpet enters and exits the arrangements like a thread being pulled through fabric. Fred Plaut and Ray Moore engineered at 30th Street. Ralph J. Gleason wrote the original liner notes. This copy is from the 1981 CBS/Sony Miles 25 series (No. 20 of 25), a Japanese reissue series marking twenty-five years of Davis’s recorded output. With cap obi.