Miles Davis sought out – and got – the best rhythm sections in this business. Here’s one with Dave Holland. 1969. A hot day in July in Antibes, France.
Miles. Wayne Shorter. Chick Corea. Dave Holland. Jack DeJohnette.
What can you do to follow a group that included John Coltrane, Cannonball Adderley, Bill Evans, Wynton Kelly, Jimmy Cobb? Miles found a way. Miles Davis sought out – and got – the best rhythm sections in this business. A hot day in July in Antibes, France. 1969 was the year when the Woodstock generation came of age. Musical change was in the air, and Miles Davis was the poster-boy of those dramatic changes occurring in jazz. When his in-demand group finished their set at the Garden State Jazz Festival in New Jersey in November 1969, Downbeat magazine reported: “During the second minute of the tumultuous ovation, the young lady seated behind me was still gasping, ‘Oh God, oh God, oh God.’ Her reaction was understandable. She had just witnessed contemporary jazz at its peak of perfection.”
Fifty years later, those judgements, from fan and critic alike, still hold good – and some. Yet extraordinary though it may seem, the 1969 quintet – the immediate successor of Davis’ renowned Shorter-Hancock-Carter-Williams group featured on Live in Europe ’67: The Bootleg Series Vol. 1 – fell into what can only be described as a black hole as far as jazz history is concerned. As Peter Keepnews noted in a prescient feature for the Village Voice back in 1986: “One of the most serious problems confronted by jazz historians is that while recordings offer the only tangible evidence we have of the music’s development, some of the important stages in that development were insufficiently recorded… Miles spent a lot of time in the studio in 1969, and he came up with In a Silent Way and Bitches Brew… but [he] also spent a lot of time on the road that year, and music he made with his working band was even more extraordinary than the music on those two remarkable albums.”
Keepnews called Davis’s ensemble ‘The Last Quintet’, because, he said, “It was the last band Miles ever had that adhered to the standard instrumentation of trumpet, saxophone, piano, bass and drums.” Significantly, he added, “it might also be [called] the Lost Quintet, because for some reason it was never recorded.” The name stuck and ever after this band became known as The Lost Quintet.