Sax players with Miles after Shorter (70's only)

[rostasi]

Yeah, I have a funny feeling that it's that,

but I'd like it to be another reference that I have in mind...

[Guy Berger]

Maybe a trivial point to make (and really besides the point of this thread), but the main thing that stands out to me is how none of these guys (at least when they were with Miles), even at their best (and to be fair, most of them were much less experienced than Wayne), were anywhere near the same level that Wayne was at during his tenure.

Guy

[JSngry]

Well, there's only one Wayne, of course, but I think you also gotta look at the fact that none of those players were functioning in an environment that they had had such a direct hand in creating as had Wayne.

Which also points to the fact that Miles' post-BB bands were by no means a series of consistant "stylistic" entities. Those bands and their styles were constantly evolving, and it seems that most (if not all) of the evolution was spearheaded entirely by Miles. It's the one period of his career where the true collaborative nature of his other bands' discoveries, before and after, seems to have taken a backseat to Miles taking people to where he them wanted to go. Players came and went, and as they did, so did the style of the music. The difference between the Cellar Door band and the post On The Corner band isn't even two years, but it's not just totally different players, it's totally different music, and different from the ground up.

The closest to anything "traditional" the you get is the last, electronically abstracted glimpses of the already abstract last days of The Lost Quintet that the Fillmore band(s) w/Grossman put out. From there on, all ties to the past, at least in terms of things overtly "stylistic", were gone.

Wayne came into a set gig and morphed it into his own image (with, of course, help from his bandmates and assent/leadership from Miles). Pretty much everybody else came into a situation constantly in flux and were forced to figure out what the music needed. For a sax player, especially ones with the strong "regular jazz" backgrounds as the ones he used, it must've sometimes been a strange ride, to say the least...