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| Miles Davis on Columbia/Legacy The year-end crush of reissues and boxed sets includes performances by Davis, Cole, Holiday, Parker and others. There's something for fans of all kinds, hard-core or not-so. The year-end holiday season is always prime time for jazz boxed sets, reissues, offbeat collections and reminiscences. Record companies love the opportunity they provide to help the bottom line. And it turns out to be a win-win situation for jazz fans as well, with the release of newly packaged and annotated classic material, some of it never before available. The closing quarter of 2007 offered an unusually abundant harvest, with attractive items in several forms of media. Here are a few of the highlights: MILES DAVIS - “THE COMPLETE 'ON THE CORNER' SESSIONS” (COLUMBIA LEGACY) This is the eighth release in Sony Legacy's boxed set Miles Davis series (others have included “Live at the Plugged Nickel,” “Seven Steps” and “The Complete Jack Johnson Sessions”). And despite the often uneven quality of the music, it affirms Davis' role as one of jazz's chief envelope-stretchers. Although he was never as innovative as Duke Ellington nor as radical as Ornette Coleman, each of the creative phases he passed through had a profound effect on the music's evolving trends. And the “Corner” sessions were no exception. Recorded between 1972 and 1975 with a 20-man collective of players (Dave Liebman, John McLaughlin, Michael Henderson and Jack DeJohnette among them), the sessions produced a collection of long, rambling takes. Obviously influenced by the avant-garde successes of Coleman, Albert Ayler and others, as well as the pop audience breakthroughs of Jimi Hendrix and Sly and the Family Stone, the music represents Davis' effort to hold on to his core listeners while establishing relevance with the vital, record-buying baby boomers. But the trumpeter wasn't particularly successful with either goal this time out, and the “Corner” LP was one of his least admired albums, even though extraordinary moments often surface amid the occasional chaos. Some of the material included in this six-CD set is also available on “Get Up With It” and, of course, the “On the Corner” album. There's a great deal of previously unreleased material -- intriguing for hard-core fans, but in some cases often simply underscoring why it was omitted from the original release. write your comments about the article :: © 2008 Jazz News :: home page |