Wayne Shorter (tenor sax), Miles Davis (trumpet), Herbie Hancock (Fender Rhodes electric piano), Ron Carter (electric bass) and Tony Williams (drums). From the album Filles de Kilimanjaro (1969).
Miles Davis Second Great Quintet had a decisive influence on the development of modern jazz. It’s not hard bop or free jazz, it’s between the two. It’s an evolution of the modal jazz that Davis himself started in the late 1950s and then led in more risky directions, giving more freedom to each of the band’s components, but without reaching total atonality. It’s what he himself called “controlled freedom”, that is, the music flows and the phrasing fades away until almost disappearing, but everything is integrated in the group, always on the edge of the acceptable.
The flexible way in which the rhythm section played the usual jazz meter changed Davis’ style, inviting him to play longer lines, to come out of the middle register more often, and sometimes to sound extremely intense. The time between Nefertiti and Miles in the Sky is essential to understand that the electrification of Davis’s music was a slow metamorphosis, not a mere opportunism. After Filles de Kilimanjaro this extraordinary group was dissolved. In 1969, Shorter, Hancock and Williams participated in Davis’ next album, In a Silent Way, and Hancock also contributed to Jack Johnson, On the Corner and Get Up with It.
This song is played by Shorter, Davis and Hancock in unison and has a delicate and kind melody with a more complicated part. Hancock plays a short passage outlining some chords and the group returns to expose the theme in a light and ethereal atmosphere. Then Davis starts with short sentences leaving space between them, but suddenly he shoots himself at lightning speed and then comes back to the peaceful improvisation. He is followed by Shorter playing hasty and nervous way, but in the end he calms down. After that, Hancock arrives with a simple and sophisticated melodic line while Shorter and Davis make a sound mattress underneath, although later he accelerates his sentences. Davis reappears with another solo similar to the previous one, maintaining a dialogue with Hancock until the group gradually stops playing.
© Columbia Records
