MILES DAVIS & JOHN COLTRANE The Final Tour: The Bootleg Series Vol 6 9/10 4CD box represents first official release for two warring jazz giants’ legendary concerts from 1960 European tour. By Neil Spencer
Athe 1960s dawned, Miles Davis could number himself among the coolest men on the planet, the coolest as far as the 33-year-old trumpeter was concerned. There were more famous contenders – Ray Charles, Paul Newman, Jack Kennedy, Albert Camus – but Davis was distinguished not just by sartorial elegance and good looks but by his hauteur, the icy indifference he displayed towards his audience onstage, and the oblique, almost detached style of his music. Not for nothing had some of his earliest recordings been repackaged in 1957 as Birth Of The Cool.
Fine as it was, that collection was a cash-in on Miles’ burgeoning status as jazz’s biggest star, his fame, astutely promoted by his new label, Columbia, reaching a far wider audience than jazz usually commanded, and accelerated in 1959 by Kind Of Blue, which remains the most celebrated album in jazz history.
Among the reasons Kind Of Blue hit a sweet spot is its terrific personnel, allying Miles with John Coltrane and Cannonball Adderley on tenor and alto saxes, Bill Evans on piano, bassist Paul Chambers and drummer Jimmy Cobb. Its sound was unconventional, based on ‘modular’ structures rather than jazz’s customary chord progressions, though its tunes also referenced jazz history; a touch of bebop from the sax players, a dash of swing in its ensemble playing, a little blues in its melodies, a streak of hushed minimalism in Evans’ piano. Best of all was the seductive stealth of its opening track, “So What”, with its catchy minor chords provoking the listener to supply the words of its title. It quickly became a hipster anthem; you still hear it everywhere.
The group Miles led onto the road in the wake of Kind Of Blue was a little different to its studio lineup. Adderley had left to pursue his own path, likewise Evans, perhaps nursing a grievance that he hadn’t received full credit for his part. In his place came Wynton Kelly, a regular Davis sideman with a more robust, bluesy approach. Coltrane remained, but reluctantly. Keen to explore the radical approach unleashed by the ‘tonal’ Kind Of Blue, Coltrane had already recorded Giant Steps and Coltrane Jazz by the time he, Davis and co caught the silver bird for
Europe in spring 1960. The tension between Davis’s studied intimacy and Trane’s unfettered explorations is one of the hallmarks of the legendary European concerts that followed.
Though The Final Tour pretends otherwise, its five shows from three cities (Paris, Stockholm, Copenhagen) have already received widespread if sometimes quasi-legal release, such is their interest to jazzniks (other dates from the same tour exist to savour). Here they are presented in welcome sonic clarity with an illuminating essay by jazz historian Ashley Kahn. Its four CDs offer everything to enjoy and little to dislike aside from Kahn’s expedient assertion that the clash between Davis and Coltrane was “divergent co-existence” rather than outright artistic warfare.
The evidence says otherwise. Coltrane had often played on the standards and Miles’ originals that occupy the setlists here: “On Green Dolphin Street”, “Bye Bye Blackbird”, “’Round Midnight”, “The Theme” and “Fran Dance”. From Kind Of Blue come only “So What” and “All Blues”. Yet the contrast between the two men is often stunning. Miles will deliver a poised, intimate take on a tune, only for Trane’s tenor to follow with an overlong, atonal, balls-out variation.
Not everyone loved Trane for his efforts. Paris, a city with whom Miles had conducted a mutual love-in over two decades, early on sipping wine with Sartre and pursuing an affair with actress and singer Juliette Greco, booed Coltrane’s uproar. By contrast, Scandi audiences were excited. Asked why he was so “angry”, Coltrane responded, “Maybe it sounds angry, but I’m trying so many things at one time. I haven’t sorted them out.”
Still, the combo remains oddly in stride on every version of every tune, whether out of group mind, boredom or subjugation to Miles’ whims. In Paris, “So What”, so hushed on disc, is taken at an almost unseemly clip, with Cobb snapping out rimshots behind Miles’ anguished trumpet. A day later, in Stockholm, the number is restored to its sly, muted self.
There is no shortage of glories. “Bye Bye Blackbird”, a lumbering, sentimental Tin Pan Alley tune in most hands, becomes a sprightly, joyous thing, with Miles’ honeyed, muted horn playing peek-a-boo with Kelly’s jabbing piano before Coltrane pulls the melody inside out, obsessing over a couple of notes for a minute or so before bowing out to a rapturous reception.
The two giants of modernism are on such different trajectories at this point one wonders how they ever got together in the first place. Trane owed much to Davis’ mentoring over the preceding years (not least in losing his heroin habit), but here the pupil has outgrown the teacher. Their final tour proved a magnificent dust-up between the cool and the fiery.
Miles will deliver a poised, intimate take on a tune, only for Trane’s tenor to follow with an overlong, atonal, balls-out variation