The Studio Recordings of the Miles Davis Quintet, 1965–68 (review)

Every music library should have a copy of Keith Waters’ new book. It goes beyond a purely descriptive analysis of the workings of the great Miles Davis Quintet of the mid-1960s, providing technical analysis that includes in-depth notated musical transcriptions of solos and accompaniments. To understand most of the author’s analyses readers must have familiarity with chord progressions and chord voicings, and understand advanced music theory and harmony. This offering should be a joy for knowledgeable jazz fans. An enormous amount of work went into its preparation, and there is no fluff in it. Every line reveals more about how the music was made. It will be particularly welcome to jazz musicians who grew up with the mid-1960s Miles Davis recordings and seek to gain further insights and continue verifying the impressions that they had long ago. For listeners just now coming to study this period of jazz history, the work may also provide an introduction that details the rule-breaking achievements of these extraordinary musicians who collectively improvised with almost magical rapport and achieved the highest level of artistry in jazz. The book should also provide a useful textbook for graduate courses in jazz theory and harmony because it takes up where other texts leave off.

Musician-fans who eagerly anticipated every new Davis album during the mid-1960s exerted considerable effort to determine the forms that Wayne Shorter, Herbie Hancock, Ron Carter, and Tony Williams were using for the tunes on these albums. They also pondered the extent of departures from those forms within the solo improvisations and accompaniments. (For example, on what pieces did improvisations keep time but not follow chord changes? “Orbits” is one answer; “Hand Jive” is another.) Waters addresses these questions in his carefully crafted book. He treats crucial elements in the workings of the band’s compositions and improvisations by way of in-depth, moment-by-moment analyses of the band’s albums E.S.P. (Columbia CS 9150 [1965]), Miles Smiles (Columbia CS 9401 [1967]), Sorcerer (Columbia CS 9532 [1967]), Nefertiti (Columbia CS 9594 [1968]), Miles In The Sky (Columbia CS 9628 [1968]), and Filles de Kilimanjaro (Columbia CS 9750 [1969]).

The book should prove particularly handy for working jazz musicians because it incorporates scholarship with which many of them may not be familiar. For instance, some of it is drawn from scholarly journals, such as Steven Strunk’s work in the Journal of Music Theory, and from theses, such as Todd Coolman’s dissertation (“The Miles Davis Quintet of the Mid-1960s: Synthesis of Improvisational and Compositional Elements” [Ph.D. diss., New York University, 1997]). It also taps Library of Congress copyright deposits, including those of Wayne Shorter compositions, which not only answer interesting questions but also pose further ones.

The analyses touch upon many of the band’s virtues. Here are a few of the topics:

• • moments in the music that constitute intermediate stages between chorus structure (which preserves harmonic structure and three metric levels of hypermeter, meter, and pulse) and the abandonment of harmonic structure;

• • instances in which the band makes excursions into shifting harmonies over bass pedal points;

• • spontaneous accommodations by the band members to each other’s departures from strict adherence to song form and meter, including subtle examples of cat-and-mouse interplay between pianist Hancock and bassist Carter, as well as the responsiveness of drummer Williams to rhythmic aspects in solo improvisations by saxophonist Shorter;

• • solo lines that include phrases having the effect of dislocation from the piece’s meter;

• • the creative use of harmonic ambiguity;

• • instances in which the band was elasticizing (or suppressing) the harmonic progression, withholding the crucial musical cues that make apparent the hypermeter and larger divisions of tune form;

• • the seemingly effortless negotiation between hard bop and free jazz;

• • significant differences between the work of these musicians and their...