Guy Berger

I think Ghost is talking about the 1972 band that is represented on In Concert (and a few bootlegs including the Paul Mall one), not the fall 1971 iteration of the Cellar Door band. Imho the 1972 recordings are fascinating but IIRC the sound quality isn’t great. if sound quality is a constraint then the top pick would have to be the 1975 Japan tour. I think you could get a fair amount of mileage out of the 1973 Japan and Europe concerts too. It’s been a while since I listened to the North American shows from this period - do any of them have good sound quality?

This one is great, as is Another Place on Label Bleu.

Thanks for sharing!

Gave this a few listens. Enjoyable if you liked the prior two. No strong opinion beyond that.

Bingo. I don’t mind the stylings, I do mind the lack of substance

arrived!

It’s funny I wrote this way back when… a few years after, Rudresh Mahanthappa recorded Kinsmen which has a relevant vibe and is a top notch album.

Wait how did you find this out?

RIP. I love his “ugly beauty” Coltrane-influenced approach to the organ

Yeah. I think this is a general feature of takes on Davis’s music from 1965 onward - a lot of the innovation was happening in concert, and official documentation of that is not necessarily representative

Thanks guys. Familiar with a little but not all of this stuff!

The group’s 4th album overall, and 3rd one overall. Hart, Mark Turner, Ethan Iverson, Ben Street, I liked their prior two ECM outings a lot, especially One Is the Other. (Separately: I wish someone would reissue Enchance, even digital only!)

I’ve been starting to explore this group of musicians. A lot of them pop up on Spotify, some I’ve encountered on my Clean Feed Records binge, some are active in collaboration with American musicians. any recommendations? I have a wide range of tastes from straight ahead to avant-garde to fusion. My sweet spot is music that sits somewhere between those poles.

The afternoon and evening concerts at Osaka’s Festival Hall turn 50 tomorrow (February 1st 1975). Ive been listening to these albums for more than 25 years. It’s taken me a long time to appreciate them. (And I’d still say that I like some of Davis’s other electric music better - though I like them a lot.) Some things I’m interested in: 1/ “this was just one day in the life of the band”. My sense from lightly grazing recordings of other concerts from this Japanese tour is that these 4 LPs weren’t even the best performances. 2/ On a similar theme, a lot of our received history of post-1965 Miles Davis is because of a few releases. So for a long time folks thought of these as the last word. Now it’s more apparent there was a steady evolution from On the Corner to the summer of 1975 (final recording we have is from July). It’s interesting to imagine what would have happened if Davis had not retired due to health/drug issues - maybe there would have just been a smooth transition to the more commercial early 1980s music. 3/ I remember listening to “Bush Baby” from Arthur Blythe’s Illusions for the first time and thinking, ok, that’s an obvious nod to this music! A lot of Julius Hemphill’s stuff, too. Though maybe just convergent evolution.

Never got any notice except the announcements on the website