The Miles Davis Lost Quintet and Other Revolutionary Ensembles by Bob Gluck (review)

The influence of the musical legacy of Miles Davis on the history of Western music seems to resonate more strongly as time passes. Davis is perhaps the most visible and often-discussed jazz artist of the twentieth century, largely due to the efforts of Sony Music Entertainment. Beginning in 1995, Sony launched a comprehensive reissue campaign of Davis’s Columbia catalogue, including the release of much previously unheard material. Twenty years later, the releases are still coming fast (in the form of the popular “Bootleg” series), and this flood of “new” music has enabled a wide-scale re-evaluation of Davis and his musical world. Additionally, Don Cheadle’s new biopic Miles Ahead (2015) is helping fuel the ongoing discussion of jazz’s most iconic figure.

What is left to say at this point about Davis and his music? Plenty, as it turns out. Bob Gluck’s The Miles Davis Lost Quintet and Other Revolutionary Ensembles takes a fresh look at Davis’s music from 1968 to 1970 in light of recently released live performances. Gluck provides close analysis of the quintet’s music and situates it in the musical and social context of the late sixties/early seventies. The author combines historical narrative, detailed musical descriptions, and cultural analysis, using Miles’s music as a lens to view an extraordinary period of American music and culture.

The reception history of Davis’s music of this period is problematic; Miles was changing quickly in those days and Columbia’s releases failed to keep pace with his rapid stylistic evolution. Most listeners at the time knew Davis’s newly electrified music primarily through Bitches Brew (recorded 1969, released March 1970), a heady mix of electric jazz, funk, rock, and avant-garde classical music assembled by Teo Macero. Columbia also released live material, but well after the fact and in a heavily edited form that misrepresented how Miles’s bands actually sounded live. Thus audiences at performances were often presented with music that was radically different from what they might have heard on LPs.

The so-called “Lost Quintet” refers to the Davis band that did not complete a studio recording, composed of Wayne Shorter (tenor saxophone), Chick Corea (electric piano), Dave Holland (bass), and Jack DeJohnette (drums). While the group was not particularly well known at the time, it is now possible to evaluate the music of the quintet and explore its relationship to Miles’s oeuvre and creative improvised music generally. The author clearly states his goals in the introduction, the first of which is

to explore how Davis’s recorded performances from 1968 through 1970 illuminate the unfolding of his musical thinking during a period of personal transition. I will suggest the following: a careful listening reveals music that privileged an uneasy dynamic tension between sonic and structural openness, surprise, and experimentation and the rhythmic groove (which includes but doesn’t overly favor beat-driven rock and funk elements). When viewed in this way, new webs of musical interconnection emerge . . . by observing the more open aspects of the work of Miles Davis during this period, the listener can place the Lost Quintet within the context of highly exploratory bands, including Circle (cofounded by two members of the Lost Quintet) and the Revolutionary Ensemble

(p. 2).

Gluck has indeed done some “careful listening”, and his discussion of Miles’s musical evolution in the late sixties is clear and well-reasoned. The author weaves together threads of cultural issues, history, and musical analysis into a convincing web that indeed illuminates both Davis’s music and its cultural milieu. His prose strikes an effective balance between musicological rigor and readability, saving more technical discussions and musical trainspotting for the notes and appendices. A clear strength of the book is Gluck’s exploration of the personal and musical relationship among Corea, Holland, and DeJohnette, which he chronicles carefully and thoroughly. His analysis of the...