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As a side note: Thankfully, Columbia issued this album in a different format from the box sets later issued. There is no "book format." Each CD gets its own case and there is a seperate, disconnected book which allows the listener to peruse the liner notes without having to hold the whole collection in his or her hands. Columbia would be well-served by going back to this design.
Everything in the collection would seem at first glance to be a cover of earlier work but that would almost be like saying that a Monk version of an Ellington tune is simply a cover. The versions here mark almost no resemblence to the prior versions that they can easily be classified as completely new songs. There is such a wealth of variation here--interesting variation, not repetitive, multiple-track variation--that you could easily see the box set as 7 or 8 seperate albums.
The sound quality is excellent. The mic tends to pick up Miles a little stronger than the rest but that is to be expected. But overall, these were sets milked pretty close to the stage, if not right on top of it. Wayne Shorter is brilliant throughout and Hancock, Williams and Carter are not too bad either.
I will leave the set details to someone else. I don't want to spoil it for you or set your expectations in the wrong way. Most people who would buy this album would be familiar enough to make their best judgement based on what they can see on the song listings.
Trust me. I highly recommend this album and have been waiting five years to say so. This is well worth your money.
And what I hear is the sound of a GROUP of soloists, not five SOLOISTS in a group. I don't suppose that makes too much sense to anyone, but what I mean is that despite the long, harmonically amazing spotlights given to Wayne Shorter and Miles Davis, the focus (as I hear it) seems to be on the group dynamic - how they liquidly shift time, tempo, and tone around whoever is up front. I'm just amazed at the sixth-sense feeling of these performances, how drummer Tony Williams will toy with the beat while Ron Carter falls in naturally behind him without missing a single note, with Herbie Hancock keeping pace all the time with piano interjections that are more rhythmic than melodic. Speaking of Williams, I normally don't give two sticks about drummers and drumming, but...wow, he's something special, isn't he? Apparently a prodigy in his own day (how old was he when this was recorded, EIGHTEEN?), he cuts up the beat in all sorts of unpredictable ways sometimes, totally flying free, yet he never, ever, ONCE loses the underlying pulse of the song. Furthermore, although he's playing jazz rhythms, when gets loud he sounds almost like (blasphemy, I know) a ROCK drummer to me, pure physicality and muscularity. (I'm talking especially about tracks like "Four" and "Agitation.")
The music itself is both wonderfully quirky and breathtakingly melodic, usually in the same performance - Shorter tends towards jagged, strangely accented bursts of sound which resolve themselves only by implication into "lines" (I think of "Agitation," on the second set of the second night), while Davis takes off on soaringly lyrical runs which are all seduction one moment and pure aggro-fueled energy the next. As for the fact that most of the songs on Plugged Nickel are duplicated two or even three times in the course of the set, it's an absolutely moot point because for all intents and purposes these might as well be 39 different pieces. Except for little fragments of the original melodies here and there, every song on Plugged Nickel seems to be a unique entity to itself, although of course I'm sure there's much that I can't pick up yet.
One thing in particular that I love about Plugged Nickel that I guess most of you jazzers take as a given is the AMBIENCE of the whole thing. Live albums in rock (my realm of expertise) are usually messy, cavernous stadium affairs; the Plugged Nickel is of course a club, and the marvelous production picks up all sorts of wonderful ambient noises that physically transport me to Chicago on a cold, windy pre-Christmas night. Cash registers *ching!*, phones ring, and there are even hecklers of a sort (I agree with whoever wrote that the fellow who keeps on shouting out during Ron Carter's bass solo on "When I Fall In Love" deserves a bop on the head). Even better is the way you can hear the club steadily grow more and more swingin' as the sets progress - by the end of the first night, you can hear a real crowd has gathered. All of this makes the box incredibly intimate; turn down the lights, open the windows, turn up the music, and I defy you to tell me that you're not THERE in front of the Quintet as they play, sipping on expensive liquor, smoking unfiltered Pall Malls, and wishing you could toss a chair at the jerk in front of you who won't shut up.
Another observation: I don't simply see 8 CD's of stunning music, I see a complete package which contributes to the atmosphere. The box, the visual layout, the look of the discs themselves - everything is superb. The thorough, track-for-track liner notes (the content of which remains, sadly, partially inaccessible to me; I don't have the necessary background to appreciate what a "Wynton Kelly groove zone" means in reference to "No Blues," for example) are complemented by the spectacular visual imagery of the jewel case art: all stark blacks and whites, light and shadow. The photograph of that martini glass on the cover of disc 6 alone is work of art.
So that's why Plugged Nickel gets five stars from me, an ignorant and unrepentant rocker. I'm sure as I my ears develop and my sense of history is refined I'll come back and be bowled over by the significance of all of this in terms of the future of jazz, but for now what I am swept away by is the music and EXPERIENCE of hearing it. Music to fly to, music to cry to, intellectual and forceful, gentle and brutal, made by a group of five self-effacing leaders - sweet paradoxes, each and every one. Nothing gets old, nothing gets repetitive, and you get the impression that this is a well they could have drawn water from over and over again without running dry, if they had only felt like it.
I could say that after hearing The Complete Live At The Plugged Nickel I'm going to go out and buy all of the Miles Davis Quintet's albums tomorrow, but that would be a lie.
Because, don'tcha know, I already did.
Recorded over two nights at the Plugged Nickle nightclub in Chicago during 1965 this includes all of the music (approx. 6 hours) played during six sets over a two evening engagement. Frankly, it doesn't get any better than this. Captured at a peak level this band was pushing the boundaries and creating a group approach to the music that current musicians still are using as a road map. Incredibly influential at the time, the availability of this recording demonstrates how fresh and absolutely contemporary the Miles Davis Quintet's music remains 30+ years later.
Interestingly, the 6 or so hours of music consists of only twenty tunes. Some are played a number of times and some appear only once. "The Theme" appears in versions ranging from 22 seconds to 10 minutes 29 seconds. And in no small part that is what makes this set so extraordinary. By adhering to a relatively limited list of tunes over the two nights of performance the group demonstrates an astonishing ability to make the commonplace absolutely of the moment. "Stella By Starlight", for example, appears in three rather different incarnations, each unique from the other and each taking a 'standard' and making something else entirely of it. The tunes become the structure for incredible harmonic invention and rhythmic originality. Avoiding repeated patterns while finding absolute encouragement and support within the group itself each tune is it's own adventure. And after all, that is the goal of improvised music. Few groups have ever achieved this level of accomplishment, fewer still have left such a worthy document of those efforts.
Very important music.
