Miles Davis, Philharmonic Hall, February 12, 1964

On the peak of the trumpeter live caught on record

Hello again music lovers!

This time around, I’ve written an essay on my favourite live recording by Miles Davis, the benefit show he and his quintet gave at Philharmonic Hall on February 12, 1964. The music was initially released on two albums: the ballad-heavy My Funny Valentine and the super-fast Four & More. In 2004, the complete concert, including a performance of ‘Autumn Leaves’ that opened the show, was finally released as part of a box set of the recordings the trumpeter made in 1963 and 1964. For me, that’s the best way to listen to it.

I hope you enjoy the essay and will share your thoughts as well.

Coming up next will be something a little different, an essay on William Friedkin’s The French Connection that will focus, in part, on Don Ellis’ supreme score, but will also touch on why it’s quite possibly the finest movie shot in and about New York and, of course, Gene Hackman’s powerhouse turn as Popeye Doyle. This will be fun to write!

See you in ten days’ time!

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It’s one of the most honest moments of audience appreciation caught on tape. There’s a pause in the music and out of the stillness comes a long and loud “YEAHHHHHHHH!!!!!!” The serendipity of it all is that the music doesn’t resume until our excitable fellow lets out the last of his exclamation.

It transpired a little over 20 minutes into the first of two sets Miles Davis and his quintet played at Philharmonic Hall (now David Geffen Hall) at Lincoln Center on February 12, 1964, a Wednesday. New York is always exciting but the past few days in the city that winter had been especially so. That same night at Carnegie Hall, the Beatles played two sold-out shows, the culmination of their epochal first visit to the Big Apple. Three days earlier at Philharmonic Hall, Leonard Bernstein led the New York Philharmonic in a matinee program of astonishing diversity starting with the fall movement of Vivaldi’s The Four Seasons and Tchaikovsky’s Pathétique Symphony and concluding, after an intermission, with three experimental pieces under the heading Music of Chance: Improvisation by the Orchestra.

The first of the three compositions was John Cage’s Altas Eclipticalis with Winter Music, a thoroughly avant-garde piece for which there is audio of the performance that afternoon, including Bernstein’s contextualizing of the composition betraying more than a little ambivalence about it and the audience’s sound of relief when it finally concludes. One wonders if some of the audience were equally befuddled when watching the Fab Four make history that evening on The Ed Sullivan Show.

Not so the yelling man at the end of Davis playing the theme of ‘Stella By Starlight.’ He and the rest of his working group at the time: George Coleman on tenor saxophone with Herbie Hancock, Ron Carter and Tony Williams, were at Philharmonic Hall for a performance benefiting, in part, the Congress of Racial Equality (two days earlier, Freddie Hubbard recorded his own salute to the Congress, better known as CORE, with Art Blakey and the Jazz Messengers for the often-incendiary Free for All) as well as the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee and the NAACP’s Legal Defence Fund. The particular cause was for what would be called Freedom Summer, the drive to get Black voters on the voting roll.

Initially, Davis and his group were to play for free. When Carter insisted on being paid or he would sit the show out, that changed and everyone was given the chance to donate whatever portion of their fee they wished for the cause.

The trumpeter’s music in February 1964 had once again entered a period of invention. His latest studio album, Seven Steps to Heaven, recorded in the spring of 1963 and out shortly after, signified two distinct directions in which his music was travelling. One was propelled by the loose and sometimes-explosive-on-a-dime drumming of the still-teenaged Williams. The other was telegraphed through three ballads Davis recorded with pianist Victor Feldman, Carter and drummer Frank Butler (part of a very early version of the group that would morph into what would be called Davis’ second great quintet) that hung languidly, almost floating in mid-air.

Davis’ concert at Philharmonic Hall explored both of these directions in equal measure. Columbia’s initial release of almost all that was played on stage siphoned four of the five ballads played plus ‘All Blues’ onto My Funny Valentine, out in 1965. The rest of the fast numbers were then collected on Four & More, issued a year later.

This skewed matter of presentation inevitably shaped the perspective of the music played with My Funny Valentine being far more absorbing than the machine-gun velocity of Four & More. When the music was first issued on CD in 1992, the division remained under the title (misleading, as we shall see) The Complete Concert: 1964.

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Back to our rapturous fan in the audience. His yell appears to have been the result of a long musical seduction, any defenses he may have had worn away by the lengthy performances of ‘My Funny Valentine’ and ‘All of You’ that preceded ‘Stella By Starlight’ on My Funny Valentine.

More than most musicians, Davis cleaved to a thin book of pieces for his live shows from the late fifties to the late sixties, adding to it only occasionally—after recording ‘No Blues’ as ‘Pfrancing’ for 1961’s Someday My Prince Will Come, it became part of the live show until 1969, for one example—but he kept the core intact, the three standards that open My Funny Valentine among them.

Six LPs of Davis live were issued by Columbia between 1961 and 1966. Others were released before that and afterwards. The trumpeter’s archives have been opened to release much more, including the ongoing Davis Bootleg Series.

A convincing argument can be made that the summit of Davis’ live discography is Philharmonic Hall on February 12, 1964. That view crystalized about 20 years or so ago with the release of Seven Steps: The Complete Columbia Recordings of Miles Davis 1963-1964 which presented the complete concert (finally) and in the order it was played. It remains the best way to hear it.

The concert is Davis and his group at its two extremes. As mentioned earlier, up-tempo on this night meant blistering fast. On ‘So What,’ the first fast number of the night, Davis tears through five 32-bar solo choruses in less than two-and-a-half minutes. His phrasing is jagged, a constant tension between the rush of his ideas and his ability to get them out of his horn. It’s a conundrum that becomes more pronounced as the evening progresses. The constant movement from phrase to phrase on ‘Four’ and ‘Seven Steps to Heaven’ turns his playing into almost an incantation, so frenzied that it becomes a blur.

That approach had its advantages. His super-brisk statement on ‘Walkin’’ incinerates its blues structure. On ‘All Blues,’ he and Williams spar with each other. Davis careens through a descending line to end a chorus that Williams then picks up on as they both explode into the next one.

The theme statement to the Kind of Blue stalwart is the most thoroughly arranged section that Davis and group tried to replicate from a studio recording. It is done perfunctorily, Williams is already loaded for bear at the end of the repeat of the theme and Davis quickly removes the mute from his horn to blast the two-note pick-up that starts his solo on the version of ‘All Blues’ from Kind of Blue. There’s an interesting switch up after Davis’ scorcher of an improvisation as it’s Hancock who follows, playing behind a quickly switching rhythm between tightly wound (Williams on the hit hat) and a gallop (Williams switching to the ride). As Hancock concludes his improvisation, repeating the trills that Bill Evans used in 1959, Coleman enters with a smooth, headstrong declaration.

The tenor saxophonist was with Davis’ group for just over a year and while at first, the amorphous method of the rhythm section took a while for Coleman to get used to and Williams, in particular, found him too conventional a player, his work with the quintet is undoubtedly his best-known music over a career that has spanned almost 70 years. And yet, how much he painted within the lines is not as important as how his style was complementary to his bandmates.

At Philharmonic Hall, his solos were frequently works of art, complete statements that on the fast numbers often remain more satisfying than Davis’. For example, what he offers on ‘Four,’ including at one point stopping on a dime to quote the theme, is way more considered than what Davis does. He also, on the concert closer ‘There Is No Greater Love,’ the greatest surprise of the night’s setlist, hooks Williams into a gospel-fueled yet resolutely cool detour.

The best of the Philharmonic Hall show, and the reason why it seems to leap ahead of Davis’ other shows immortalized on tape, are the ballads. Hearing them interspersed throughout the show rather than in straight succession makes their impact even more shattering.

As Davis raised the tempo on the original lines, he did the opposite on the standards, taking as much time as needed to say what needed to be said. ‘All of You’ is unhurried, almost lazy in how the trumpeter teases out an approximation of Cole Porter’s melody. Moments of deep inspiration appear, seemingly out of thin air, like a switch to a shuffle beat during Coleman’s solo and to a boogaloo beat (before it was really a thing) during Hancock’s statement. Davis returns for an extra-long rumination on the tag that was the defining feature of his arrangement of the tune. The mood is accentuated by coming after the rush of ‘Walkin’.’ It closes the first set.

It started with ‘Autumn Leaves,’ the one performance from the night that remained locked up in the vault for 40 years. It was the ballad the brought out Davis and the quintet's playful side and here, it serves as the table setter for the fluidity for the music to come such as when Coleman locks into a pedal point and moment that Hancock seamlessly hands things over to Carter. ‘I Thought About You,’ played midway through the second set, has one of Coleman’s finest improvisations of the night.

The two other ballads, the aforementioned ‘My Funny Valentine’ and ‘Stella By Starlight’ are the highpoints of the night. In both cases, there is a strong argument to make that these are reference recordings.

The former follows ‘All Blues’ in the second set. Davis hits on the most distinctive points of the Rodgers and Hart tune such as the opening line with the song’s title, the dramatic rises of Rodgers’ melody, the pleading cadence of “stay, little valentine, stay” and the artful resolution at the end of the chorus. As Davis begins his solo, Williams enters after sitting out the theme. The audience applauds. What happens for the remaining 12-and-a-half minutes is something almost beyond telepathy. Every Williams accent, Hancock comp and Carter slur up and down the bass is just right, played at the right moment, imparting the right feeling.

There’s a kind of rhumba pattern that first pops up during Davis’ improvisation that adds a seductive edge. It returns twice when Coleman solos. He also, like Davis, plumps the depth of the “stay, little valentine, stay” lyric. Hancock’s statement is the best of all, offered in stillness and the pianist at his most romantic. Davis returns to continue that mood and the pianist ends it on a chordal run that imparts a perfect symmetry to the performance.

Davis plays a thematic statement just as good on ‘Stella By Starlight.’ His phrasing is delicate, full of long tones. The line he plays to bring Williams in is a kind of idée fixe that is also picked up by Coleman and Hancock during their solos, adding a continuity that was uncharacteristic of the group.

But what again of that “yeah” that comes one minute, 50 sections into it. Many have wondered who was the guy yelling. It’s been claimed it was Dizzy Gillespie or Bill Cosby (on Cosby, he, as the ornery Hilton Lucas, claimed it was he) or a radio personality. No one knows for sure. It could have been any of us. It was that kind of night of musicmaking.

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