Issued in a 6-panel digipak with 20-page booklet. Recorded Live At The Fillmore East on June 17-20, 1970.
Lord but this album is a frustrating beast. Not that the music here isn't good - if it were poor, the jagged stitched-together Frankensteining of these sets would not matter all that much. This is Miles at the height of his fusion period, playing wild, boundary-expanding live sets with such legends as Joe Zawinul, Keith Jarrett, and Dave Holland (among others), notably at a rock venue on a showcase with rock bands. There is anarchic fire to these performances, with this band playing out on what were the fringes of experimentation. This was like deep space exploration, they were at the outer edges of the known universe, and god dammit, we need all of their data. These fragments are simply not enough. Fifty-three seconds of "Bitches Brew" is a tantalizing pinhole glimpse of an entire galaxy to be discovered. Utterly maddening. Not that the edits are done poorly, mind you. If one were not terribly familiar with the compositions, they could go unnoticed as they blend from one into the next without much of a hitch and these are decidedly sharp-cornered performances that shift constantly within themselves, which makes the transitions considerably easier to blend. However, when I first got this set, I was listening to Miles pretty much all the time and was intimately familiar with the contours of most of the compositions from this period and I found the jumps to be so intrusive and distracting that I was completely unable to enjoy the music. Now, however, with some distance, I can get into a lot of these grooves. Particularly in the longer excursions, one can get a real sense of the manic energy of these shows. Keith Jarrett and Chick Corea are especially driving forces on organ and electric piano respectively and when they get to take charge of a song, it becomes a firestorm. Not that this set ever approaches the mainstream-tempting jazz-funk sound of Head Hunters. As with all of Miles' fusion work, it is unabashedly anarchic, although the two full-length versions of "Bitches Brew/The Theme" do manage to lock into some rumbling, down-and-dirty grooves, right up until it heads off for the outer atmosphere. When the first disc's closing version of "It's About That Time" starts up, the staccato drumming gets the pulse quickening and it builds up into a rhythm monster, then the rendition of it that opens the second disc is totally different, letting more of Airto Moreira's 'someone is drunk and high and probably about to topple over' percussion sounds to lead the proceedings. Anyway, this is a set with a lot of great music that is nevertheless incredibly frustrating and more than a little disappointing. The full recordings are out there, and much more than the various albums Columbia Legacy has put out full sessions sets for, this really suffers from its incompleteness. It is still a good collection of music, but it really ought to be better. (Rate Your Music review)
EAN: 5099706513926
CAT#: C2K65139
Sony Music Entertainment, 1997
Very good condition; CDs like new
C02
