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Being the saxophonist in a Miles Davis band was never the easiest job in the world. Even if he liked you, he often led by challenging his musicians, giving them enigmatic or even contradictory instructions. Once, when saxophonist Gary Bartz complained that he didn’t like what Keith Jarrett was playing behind him, and asked Davis to rein the keyboardist in, the trumpeter instead told Jarrett that Bartz loved was he was playing and wanted to hear more of it. When John Coltrane earnestly explained to Davis that he was having trouble figuring out how to end his solos, Davis replied, “Try taking the horn out of your mouth.” Dave Liebman, Davis’ saxophonist for a period in the early ’70s, felt lost within the band’s stormy sound (two electric guitars, deep funk bass, multiple percussionists, Davis’s own piercing one-finger synth stabs) and asked what his role was; the trumpeter replied that audiences liked to watch a saxophonist’s fingers move while he played.
Some saxophonists, like Coltrane, Wayne Shorter, and Kenny Garrett, spent years in the band. Others, like Hank Mobley or Sam Rivers, only played a few dates and then went back to what they were doing before, leaving just a few brilliant records behind — Someday My Prince Will Come, The Complete Friday And Saturday Nights At The Blackhawk and Miles Davis At Carnegie Hall in Mobley’s case, Miles In Tokyo in Rivers’. Sonny Stitt’s tenure as a member of Davis’ group went entirely unrecorded.
In 1962, Davis began working with tenor saxophonist George Coleman, a player from Memphis who had already made a name for himself with Max Roach, Lee Morgan, and Jimmy Smith, among others. He was a strong player with a grounding in bebop and a deep feeling for the blues. They first played together at the Blackhawk in San Francisco, in a group that also included Coleman’s high school friend, pianist Harold Mabern.
Back in New York the following year, Davis began assembling a new band, recruiting pianist Herbie Hancock, bassist Ron Carter, and drummer Tony Williams to back himself and Coleman. They went into the studio and recorded three pieces — “Seven Steps To Heaven,” “Joshua,” and “So Near, So Far,” for the album Seven Steps To Heaven, which was released in the fall of 1963. (The rest of the disc featured Davis and Coleman accompanied by pianist Victor Feldman, Carter, and drummer Frank Butler.)
Before the album even came out, Davis and his new band were already on the road. They went to Europe, where they played the Festival Mondial du Jazz in Antibes. They were there for three nights, July 26 through 28, and portions of the second performance were released as Miles Davis In Europe, which was nominated for a Grammy in 1965. Their performance at the Monterey Jazz Festival in September of that year was also recorded, though it went unreleased until 2007. The final live recording of the quintet with George Coleman was a concert at Carnegie Hall from February 12, 1964, which was originally split into two LPs: My Funny Valentine contained all the ballads, while “Four” & More featured the uptempo numbers.
In late spring 1964, Coleman left the group. There were multiple reasons for his departure. Despite being the youngest member of the quintet, Tony Williams was a dominant voice, striving to push the band in new and more abstract directions. Before joining Davis, he had worked with Sam Rivers in Boston, and during his tenure with the trumpeter he also recorded with Eric Dolphy, Andrew Hill, Grachan Moncur III, and Jackie McLean, and made two forward-looking albums of his own, Life Time and Spring. He saw Coleman as yesterday’s man, a drag on the band who was limiting its potential.
In Davis’ autobiography, he wrote, “Sometimes when I would finish my solo and start to go in the back, Tony would say to me, ‘Take George with you.’ Tony didn’t like George because George played everything almost perfectly, and Tony didn’t like saxophone players like that… He was a hell of a musician, but Tony didn’t like him.”
The albums mentioned above, as well as the newly released The Bootleg Series, Vol. 8: Miles In France 1963 & 1964, proves that Williams was utterly wrong in his assessment of Coleman’s role in the band. The box, which is available in 5CD and 8LP configurations, contains five full concerts: three from July 1963 with Coleman, and two from October 1964 with Wayne Shorter. The second of the 1963 shows has been released before, as Miles In Europe, but it’s got extra tracks here, and some performances are presented in full when they had previously been edited to fit on vinyl. The other four concerts are entirely unheard.
The quintet didn’t have very much new music to their name, but over the three concerts you do get to hear them play “Seven Steps to Heaven” once and “Joshua” twice, along with a range of tunes that were familiar parts of Davis’ live sets in the early ’60s, like “So What,” “My Funny Valentine,” “If I Were A Bell,” “Walkin’,” and “Stella By Starlight.” And every time Coleman steps to the microphone, he hits it out of the park. His solos are imaginative but disciplined, honoring the actual song he’s playing but taking the melody out for a spin and delivering one master class after another in how to build energy gradually and then bring it back down. A lot of players don’t finish a solo; they just stop. George Coleman’s solos have a beginning, a middle and an end.
Still, if you know what the other three members of the band were up to in 1963 and 1964, it’s easy to understand why they might have made him feel unwelcome. They were all part of what’s come to be known as the “in-out” school of post-bop, as heard on Blue Note albums by Sam Rivers, Bobby Hutcherson, Andrew Hill and, yeah, Wayne Shorter.
Shorter might have been somewhat constrained in Art Blakey’s Jazz Messengers, where he’d been since 1959, but it was still obvious that with him, Hancock, Carter, and Williams would be able to take the music farther out — not all the way to free jazz, but certainly into realms that might unsettle the more conservative audience who came to see Miles Davis, one of the few jazz musicians to get profiles in major magazines.
Some years ago, I interviewed Coleman, and he told me about his tenure with Davis and the conflicts with Hancock, Carter and Williams, which clearly still burned. “They were these so-called young lions and they wanted to step out into the so-called hip zone of playing the out stuff, because they thought that was hip… they said, ‘We don’t want no old-fashioned guy like you playing.’
“I was regarded as old-fashioned, but Miles always respected me. Whatever I played was cool with Miles. But when he would leave, then they felt like, why should you take over this spot?”
One night, at San Francisco’s Jazz Workshop, Coleman had had enough. “Miles kicked off a fast blues, I think it was ‘Walkin’,’ and he played his solo and then he got off the stand and went off to the bar like he would oftentimes do, to have his champagne. So he played his solo, I laid back, Herbie played after him, and when it came time for me to play, I shocked all of ’em. ‘Cause I played some of the weirdest stuff. I just wanted to show them that I could play that kind of shit if I really had to…And when I did that, these guys’ eyes popped out. All of ’em. Ron, Herbie and Tony.”
The Shorter-Hancock-Carter-Williams band is commonly referred to as Miles Davis’s Second Great Quintet. And I love the music they made, particularly the 1967 studio album Nefertiti, and the 8CD Complete Live At The Plugged Nickel 1965 (out of print in physical form, but available on streaming services), which is some of the most high-wire live jazz you’ll ever hear, the sound of a band totally unafraid to alienate the listener and challenge each other moment by moment. But I also love what George Coleman was able to bring to the band in the year or so that he held down the saxophone position. The three concerts included in the latest Bootleg Series box make possibly the best argument yet for his tenure, and should inspire re-evaluation in any serious fan of Miles Davis’s 1960s work.
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