Miles Davis reviewed: The Complete Live At The Plugged Nickel 1965 is a moment of magic from turbulent times

One of the signal releases from Miles Davis’s second ‘great quintet’, the two-night stand recorded for The Complete Live At The Plugged Nickel 1965 has long been held in high esteem by both Davis obsessives and jazz scholars. It wasn’t simply a case of conquering personal trials and tribulations that made the music here seem so relevant and biting, though surely that has something to do with its significance. The quintet had been off the road for seven months while Davis suffered through firstly hip surgery, then further surgery for a broken leg and a subsequent implanted plastic hip joint.

By 1965, the second great quartet of Davis, Herbie Hancock, Tony Williams, Ron Carter and Wayne Shorter had already recorded one of the strongest albums in Davis’s sixties catalogue, 1963’s ESP, and several of the players were busy with side-gigs, or launching solo careers, most notably Hancock, whose Maiden Voyage was released in 1965. Davis had brought Shorter over to the quintet from Art Blakey’s Jazz Messengers, after letting go of George Coleman, and a brief tryout for Sam Rivers, who was deemed too avant-garde. (Indeed, Davis’s relationship with the jazz ‘avant-garde’ and free jazz, which was building a head of steam in the mid-’60s, was combative and tendentious.)

Decades of subsequent aesthetic development across jazz can sometimes leave the music performed on Plugged Nickel feeling a little understated; similarly, given the general hosannas that have accumulated around its extensive, documentarian 450 minutes, its occasional passages of longueurs have you wondering, is it really that good? It’s understandable, particularly given the way Plugged Nickel is often presented to listeners as a line drawn, quietly, in the sand. After all, free jazz got much wilder and fiercer, far more immediately and mappably interactive than this.

But if Miles Davis and his various 1950s and 1960s groups pioneered ‘quiet intensity’ within bop and post-bop contexts, Plugged Nickel comes across differently. There’s little ‘quiet’ here, in the mold of Kind Of Blue. Instead, lip-bitten feverishness spreads everywhere, almost unchecked, like a virus. There’s something distinctly uneasy, brittle and febrile about much of the music here that makes it stand out, not just from contemporaneous Davis albums, but from the corpus of 1960s jazz – free and otherwise. Put simply, nobody else was doing quite what this music did.

It was the result, in part, of a silent mutiny in the quintet. If 1965 was an annus horribilis for Davis personally, it was also a year where the quintet was beginning to feel as though it was stagnating. In a later interview, pianist Herbie Hancock reflected, “even within our very creative and loose approach to the music, everybody did things according to certain kinds of expectations… It became so easy to do that it was almost boring.” They’d come to this collective conclusion after the first batch of quintet shows after their half-year break, where they’d played in Washington DC, New York, Detroit and Philadelphia.

For Tony Williams, the response was what he would term ‘anti-music’ – working at right angles to the other musicians; giving a 180-degree response to upturn expectations; constantly pushing and pulling at each other to pull the rug out from under the collective feet. They didn’t tell Davis, though; later, he admitted in his autobiography that his playbook had “started to wear down the band”, but at the performances themselves he wasn’t consciously aware of the other musicians’ new approach, one which scholar Garrett Michaelsen correctly divined as ‘divergent’; one where musical interactions weren’t assured or expected, and where the quintet seem, repeatedly, to pull apart aspects of the music as we’re hearing it reel before our ears.

Nothing falls into disrepair or unstructured lassitude, though; these players are far too canny for that. Sometimes you can hear the disruptive and divergent logic playing out through small gestures, such as the way Williams brooks the flow of cymbal with punctuating crashes in the hypnotic 14-minute “Milestones” from the second set on December 22; the other musicians play on, unperturbed, but the statement’s been made. There are also tender moments that are bewitching, such as the renditions of “My Funny Valentine”. Elsewhere, such as the crashing, electrical-jolt entries from Davis when he previews “Agitation” from ESP, or the psychic fusing that plays out through “On Green Dolphin Street”, new possibilities are whisked out of the air.

They’re also, just as often, left undeveloped; this isn’t so much ‘unrealised potential’ as what’s left on the side of the road through the thrill of the chase. That most of the performances here are of jazz standards seems particularly important, too; this was an indication of other ways you could move jazz forward and bring its history along for the ride. If Albert Ayler was eviscerating gospel tunes through his ecstatic free jazz albums of the mid-’60s, Davis and his quintet were offering another way forward for jazz, one of contiguous movement that somehow works despite clashing internal tensions, and the desire to make music happen at cross-purposes to itself. It’s exhilarating in its dense majesty.