Miles Davis - In Person Friday Night At The Blackhawk, Complete

They Say...

Review by Thom Jurek, All Music Guide

It's finally happened: After all the crazy, edited, packaged, repackaged, remastered, reissued, and resequenced versions of Miles Davis' In Person Friday Night at the Blackhawk, the concert is available as a two-CD set without any edits whatsoever. The Saturday Night gig is also available as a double set, and all four discs are available in a box. The crew over at Legacy has done a fine job of righting the various wrongs in Columbia's vast jazz catalog over the years, and these two collections make the strongest case yet for that argument. While Friday Night is a bit awkward in that the first and third sets are on disc one and the second on disc two (to keep the integrity of the sets without having to switch discs), this is, after all, a minor hassle -- no points off. Sonically, there is no comparison in sound to the earlier version, when this band -- with Hank Mobley on tenor, Wynton Kelly on piano, Jimmy Cobb on drums, and Paul Chambers on bass -- tore up San Francisco's most (in)famous jazz club with a set that balanced bebop, hard bop, and ballads without the stops. Along with burning versions of "Oleo" and Miles' signature tunes from the era -- such as "All of You" and "On Green Dolphin Street" -- are four previously (except on bootlegs) unreleased performances of "If I Were a Bell," "Neo," "I Thought About You," and the ending "Theme." What is most remarkable is the way Kelly fits into this particular blend of the Miles band. Kelly's interplay with Chambers is especially brilliant, because his sense of blues phrasing inside counterpoint harmony is edgy and large, with left-hand chords in the middle register rather than sharp right-hand runs to accentuate choruses. Davis himself has never played with more intensity and muscularity on record than he does here. He is absolutely fierce throughout both evenings. Kelly plays more like a drummer than a pianist, using gorgeously percussive left-hand comps and fills to add bottom to the front line's solos. Mobley displays his bebop rather than hard bop and groove sides here, and reveals his intricate knowledge of the bop phraseology; he sounds free of the baggage and responsibility that he replaced John Coltrane and Cannonball Adderley. His solos on "If I Were a Bell" and "No Blues" are simply revelatory. This is an underappreciated group because of its relatively short life, but as evidenced here, the bandmembers swung fast and hard and never looked back. Hearing a dropped bassline, an out-of-time cymbal flourish, and a shortened series of phrases by Miles because he miscounted -- you guess the track -- adds to the charm of this being recorded as it was, without any cleanup. It is difficult to recommend this set over Saturday Night or vice versa; Miles fans will need both to fully appreciate how special this engagement with this particular band was.