Miles Davis/John Coltrane
The Good, The Bad...And The Experimental
by Raymond Horricks

Part 2: Miles after Coltrane

Before the ‘E.S.P.’ sessions, Miles had said to Herbie Hancock: ‘I don’t want to play chords any more. . . .’ He wanted more abstraction, based on scales and to go for melodic fragments as individual jewels of the improvising art. And, as Hancock remembered later: ‘Rather than play the composition, he wanted to play the conception that composition came from. . . .’

But he didn’t ditch the momentum of time or pulse. The up-tempo pieces are still in 4/4, with the slower ones in 3/4, plus the funky blues in F, Eighty-One, which Miles composed jointly with bassist Ron Carter.

The latter sounds to my ears the outstanding track, with its fine bass ostinato, Tony Williams’ tough, rock-like drumming and a marvellous trumpet solo that ignores conventional bar-lines in its quest for distilled, spontaneous phrasing.