It’s nearly impossible to call anything by Miles Davis under-appreciated or overlooked. A universally praised trumpet player, Davis created a catalogue that is long, storied and highly influential.

Miles is credited with bringing jazz into the fusion era when he started experimenting in the late 1960s with rock and funk influences as well as a number of players from various backgrounds and styles. He was a leader in the fusion movement, but he was also influenced by what was going on around him, as he had always been, while jazz and rock began to merge in various forms.

Bitches Brew (1969) is rightly chronicled as a seminal work and before it In A Silent Way (1969) and Filles De Kilimanjaro (1968) have received quite a bit of notoriety as the first steps that culminated in Brew. But truly the experiment started with Miles In The Sky in 1968, our fourth Hidden Treasure. This work with his classic quintet, augmented by George Benson on guitar for one track, really was the beginning of fusion for Miles.

Three important aspects of this project were the use of Hancock’s electric piano for the first time by the quintet, the sense of complete collaboration that would manifest more and more in Miles’ music in the coming years, and extended improvisation over one chord or a series of modal chords as opposed to the bebop tradition of seemingly never-ending changes, something he started as far back as Kind Of Blue (1959). Continue reading From The Vaults: Hidden Treasure, No. 4 →