«  BACK     2/5     NEXT  »      After several intermediate groups (which featured such giants as Hank Mobley, Wynton Kelly, Victor Feldman, and George Coleman), Miles' "second great quintet" slowly coalesced over 1963-64, into the lineup of Wayne Shorter, Herbie Hancock, Ron Carter, and Tony Williams (who was 17 years old when he joined Miles). They recorded with producer Teo Macero and toured around the world together until 1968, achieving artistic and commercial success that was unprecedented in modern jazz. 1968 was a cataclysmic year of sea change for Miles and for America, a year of upheaval — the escalation of the war in southeast Asia, the assassinations of Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy, and the rise of the Black Power movement were among the factors that pushed Miles' music toward a more insistent electric (amplified) pulse. At the same time, Miles dug the triple-whammy he heard in the music of James Brown, Jimi Hendrix, and Sly Stone. What began in 1968 with Miles' quintet quietly adopting electric piano and guitar, blew up into a full-scale rock band sound on 1969's breakthrough double-LP Bitches Brew (which landed him on the cover of Rolling Stone, the first jazzman to appear on the magazine's front-page. Very cool.) At the core of Bitches Brew, whose sessions took place the week after the Woodstock festival in August 1969, there was the final small group known as the "third great quintet" — Shorter, Chick Corea, Dave Holland, and Jack DeJohnette — augmented by John McLaughlin, Larry Young, Joe Zawinul, Bennie Maupin, Steve Grossman, Billy Cobham, Lenny White, Don Alias, Airto Moreira, Harvey Brooks, and former quintet members Hancock and Carter. Six months later in February 1970, Miles kicked off the Jack Johnson sessions, shuffling many of those same players over the next two months, plus Sonny Sharrock, Steve Grossman, Michael Henderson, Keith Jarrett and others. In no uncertain terms, the jazz-rock fusion movement had been launched full-tilt, and the spirit of Miles permeated the three dominant bands who rocked the stages (as he did) of the Fillmores East and West (et alia) through the '70s and beyond — Weather Report, Return To Forever, and the Mahavishnu Orchestra. His freewheeling lifestyle and high-energy forays into funk and R&B grooves somehow dovetailed with a period of declining health in the early '70s, until Miles finally went underground in 1975, after playing (what turned out to be) his final gig at New York's Central Park Music Festival that summer. A series of live LPs (domestic and imported from Japan) and other archival releases from the '50s and '60s were made available over the next five years to fill the void. Into the '80s, Miles' reputation as talent scout extraordinaire went unquestioned. He surfaced stronger than ever in 1981 on The Man with the Horn with a top-tier lineup of young players — Mike Stern, Marcus Miller, Bill Evans (no relation), Al Foster, and Mino Cinelu (all of whom went on to successful careers). It was Miles' first LP to skirt the Billboard album chart's Top 50 since Bitches Brew, and the band was recorded live for the follow-up double-LP, 1982's We Want Miles. They remained stable (abetted by John Scofield) in 1983 on Star People. The lineup then morphed on 1984's Decoy, as Miller was replaced by Daryll 'Munch' Jones, Robert Irving III was added on synthesizers and programming, and Branford Marsalis shared saxophone parts with Evans. «  BACK     2/5     NEXT  »      © 2010 The Montreal Museum of Fine Arts. All rights reserved. Miles Davis, Newport Festival, Palais des Sports, Paris. November 15, 1973. After photos © Christian Rose Important notice: copyright and reproduction rights http://www.mmfa.qc.ca/milesdavis [ SHARE ] Miles and Betty Davis, backstage at the Isle of Wight Festival, United Kingdom, August 1970. Photo Fred Lombardi. © Frederick Lombardi.