Miles Davis at 100 – Part 3: The Second Great Quintet

By Fritz Byers

Miles Davis - trumpet; Wayne Shorter - saxophone; Herbie Hancock - piano; Ron Carter - bass; Tony Williams - drums

Two days ago, in the first of these posts, I described the Second Great Quintet as “the most sophisticated small group in the history of jazz, playing music of radical harmonic freedom within an implied but fluid rhythmic structure.” That was an assertion. This is the argument.

One of the members of the Mamas & the Papas – I believe it was Cass Elliot, but I can’t be sure – said in an interview I heard years ago that you can have the greatest voice in the world, but if you don’t have good material you’ll spend your life recording radio jingles. This was Mama Cass’s way of paying homage to the group’s primary songwriter and arranger, John Phillips.

True that. The transcendent reputation of this Quintet rests on two pillars: a series of studio albums – E.S.P., Miles Smiles, Nefertiti, Filles de Kilimanjaro – and live performances that were the subject of whispered oral histories until the 1995 release of live recordings of the band in performance at Chicago’s Plugged Nickel in December 1965.

The studio recordings memorialize the band’s work on its members’ original compositions, with a few other tunes scattered in.  Every member of the band contributed original music to the studio albums.  Wayne Shorter’s was the dominant voice, and his adventurousness in discarding not only traditional song forms but, to some extent, the very idea of form, produced a body of work whose originality and intrigue eclipsed the others’ contributions.  But their original tunes are more than serviceable for this group’s imaginative restlessness. Collectively the Quintet’s original tunes represent a level of compositional sophistication that had no precedent in small-group jazz, and the resulting albums, recorded roughly between 1965 and 1968, are indispensable, and in some ways without equal in the music.

Each of Wayne’s tunes reflects his comfort with formlessness. The melodies, to  the extent the tunes have identifiable melodies, are indeterminate, shifting in shape and inflection; the harmonic structures, to the extent there are structures, are far more suggestive than they are constraining; and the rhythms, to the extent they can be discerned, are polyrhythmic playgrounds, an invitation to each band member to consider the floating nature of meter as a foundation for improvisation.

An illustration of how radically this approach could unfold in the studio: "Nefertiti," the title track of the band’s third album, written by Shorter. Its structure inverts the conventional jazz performance: Miles and Shorter repeat the melody, over and over, while the rhythm section improvises beneath them. The horns are fixed; the foundation moves. It is one of the most radical conceptions in the entire Miles Davis catalogue, and it works because Wayne’s composition is strong enough to bear the weight of that repetition. It works, also, because each member of the rhythm section relished the freedom and was inventive enough to turn each pass through Wayne’s intentional ambiguities into highly original art.

The handy term “rhythm section” barely serves to describe what Herbie, Ron, and Tony represented for the Quintet. I’m not sure there’s ever been an equal. The only analogue I can think of that rivaled their collective trust, intuitive empathy, and ability to move gracefully within a song from supporting role to leading soloist and then to recede while another comes to the fore is the Bill Evans Trio with Scott LaFaro and Paul Motian. But that was a piano trio; this is a trio providing the foundation for a quintet.

Let’s begin with Tony Williams. I recall reading, decades ago as I was first venturing into the music, that Charlie Parker’s most significant innovations were rhythmic. I’ve no recollection of who wrote that, but I recall my reaction: I initially took it as a flash of contrarian thinking, a thirsty critic trying to make a mark, saying in effect “Look at me and the new thing I figured out!” But over the ensuing months it began to make sense to me, at least as a worthwhile way to hear something afresh. And since then, I try to keep in mind that, at some point as you’re apprehending new music, you should focus on the rhythm.

So my recent plunge into this Quintet’s music began with a monofocus on Tony. The nearly omniscient music critic Robert Christgau called Tony “probably the greatest drummer in the world.” Unprovable, but entirely defensible. Williams was seventeen years old when Miles hired him, and he brought to the band a rhythmic conception that had no precedent outside the radical avant-garde. He implied tempo rather than stating it. He treated the cymbal as a melodic instrument. He simultaneously supported and destabilized everything above him, alternately driving the band with a thundering rhythmic insistence and then somehow making the beat itself disappear, so that the music was always in motion, always slightly off-balance in the most exhilarating way.

Tony could do these things because Ron Carter was there. Ron is the most recorded bassist in jazz history – an unimaginable 2221 recording sessions, according to the Guinness Book of World Records. Yet I nominate him as the most persistently underappreciated significant musician in the music. He provided the Quintet not only a rhythmic foundation but a harmonic one – his bass lines implied a scalar and harmonic frame without declaring one, which in turn gave Herbie the freedom to avoid the standard supporting role of comping on chords, so he could depart on his own ventures behind the horns. And Ron’s unmatched sense of time freed Tony to concentrate on rhythmic embroidery, in particular those cymbal colors and cross-rhythms that are unlike anything else in jazz.

Herbie, liberated from conventional comping responsibilities, did things on the piano closer to orchestration than accompaniment – voicings that appeared and dissolved, rhythmic displacements that seemed to float outside the pulse, harmonic implications that opened doors without insisting you walk through them.

So, yes, the rhythm section.

Now, Wayne. His improvisational language bears no resemblance to Coltrane's – they share only the depth and fearlessness of their imaginations. Where Coltrane builds, accumulates, ascends toward ecstasy, Shorter implies, retreats, unsettles. His phrases are compressed and elliptical, darkly colored, syntactically strange. You never know where he will land. Listening to him on these studio recordings, you witness a musical intelligence that operates by its own internal logic – one you can feel without being able to name.

And then there is Miles himself. I find it difficult to say precisely what makes his playing on these recordings so extraordinary – why it feels different from anything he had done before, including the work that had already made him a legend. His tone seems richer, and he seems, for the first time, driven by unbridled outward musical aspiration. His note selection seems freer, less governed by any obligation to the expected, more purely responsive to whatever the band is doing at any given moment. I think of him as being unbound, like Prometheus. Miles was always on the mountaintop; with this Quintet, he was united with similar titans as they assayed the very best of jazz materials and redefined what you could do with them.

Which brings me to a question I have been sitting with for years: if Shorter's compositions are so extraordinary, why did the band play almost exclusively standards in their live performances? The Plugged Nickel recordings from December 1965 contain nearly all standards – "Stella by Starlight," "Autumn Leaves," "On Green Dolphin Street." The band’s originals are almost entirely absent.

The answer, I think, has to do with the nature of the artistic statement Miles wanted to make in each setting - and with the role of the audience in completing that statement.

In the studio, Miles wanted to make monuments: fixed, enduring versions of original compositions standing as testaments to the band's compositional acuity and improvisational gifts. The studio was for permanence.

In concert, he wanted something different. Herbie Hancock has said the band came to each live performance without preconception, inventing the music night after night on the spot. What made this legible - what made it thrilling rather than merely new – was the shared knowledge a standard provides, not only to the performers but to the audience. Everyone in the room at the Plugged Nickel knew "Autumn Leaves." They knew its melody, its harmonic movement, its rhythmic conventions. So when Miles and Wayne and Herbie departed from those conventions, radically, every night, the audience could readily perceive the departures, and wonder at them. The audience could measure the distance between what they expected and what they heard, and and in that distance the could witness the art.  Play Wayne’s compositions in that setting and that measurement becomes impossible – the audience has no template for the tune, no baseline against which to register the inventions. The studio was for monuments; the stage was for live explorations against a known backdrop.

The Second Great Quintet recorded together for roughly three years. What they left behind – four studio albums and a body of live recordings that have become landmarks – is the fullest realization of what Miles Davis meant when he assembled musicians around him and asked them to follow him somewhere no one had been.

Thus, my belief: the Quintet “was the most sophisticated small group in the history of jazz.”