This came out in 2000 — or at least that’s when I got it. Here’s what I said about it back then (with some minor editing):
Trying to measure the impact Miles Davis and John Coltrane made on jazz is like trying to gauge the effect The Beatles has on pop music.
Like The Fab Four, trumpeter Davis and tenor sax monster Coltrane practically reinvented the genre from the ground up — not just once, but several times. They did it in an equally remarkable space of time — a little less than four years, give or take. And like The Beatles, their influence spread far beyond their chosen oeuvre into every corner of music, leaving them revered as gods ever since.
Of course, back in 1955, when 29-year-old Coltrane joined Davis, bassist Paul Chambers, pianist Red Garland and drummer Philly Joe Jones to form the Miles Davis Quintet, nobody knew a musical revolution was just around the corner. Not even Miles. In his autobiography, he admits that at first, he “wasn’t excited” by Coltrane. He wasn’t alone; Coltrane’s idiosyncratic style and unusually caustic tone turned off many. Davis himself, despite making a splash with his stint in Charlie Parker’s band and forward-thinking Birth Of The Cool album, wasn’t exactly in the catbird seat either, having just shaken off a debilitating drug addiction. Few could have predicted much from Davis and Coltrane.
It didn’t take long to prove everybody wrong — including Davis himself. “Faster than I could have imagined,” he said, “the music we were playing together was just unbelievable… it used to send chills through me at night and it did the same thing to the audiences.” And the magnificent new box set The Complete Columbia Recordings — without a doubt the ultimate chronicle of Davis and Coltrane’s partnership — will have the same effect on you.
Spread out over six hours on as many CDs, its 58 tracks (including 18 previously unissued takes) are a virtual diary of the dynamic duo’s ground-breaking pairing, presented in fastidiously chronological order. First, you hear the month-old outfit trying to find their feet on their premiere recording session, bopping through standards like John Lewis and Dizzy Gillespie’s Two Bass Hit and Bird’s Ah-Leu-Cha. Then you hear them progress to ‘Round Midnight, gradually pushing the envelope with their audacious arrangements and stellar technique. And finally, you hear them shred that envelope on Milestones, where Davis begins to revolutionize jazz (again) by ditching harmonic-based improvisation for a modal approach — essentially, playing around scales instead of chords — in a move that opened the door for everyone from free-jazz skronkers to post-rock noisemakers.
But most importantly, you get to hear Davis and ‘Trane grow from formidable journeymen into undisputed geniuses. As Miles gains his confidence as a composer and bandleader, his sound gradually becomes leaner and meaner, evolving into the muted, vibrato-free tone that became his trademark. Likewise, by the end of his tenure with the band, Coltrane has begun to find his own voice — the howling “sheets of sound” that he went on to explore on his pioneering solo albums.
Still, despite their later achievements, for my money, the sides on this set include some of their finest moments — the classic albums ‘Round About Midnight, Milestones and Kind of Blue, remixed and remastered from the original tapes and reproduced here in their entirety (Milestones, previously available in mono or enhanced stereo, is issued here in true stereo for the first time). Along with that, the bitchin’ red-metal box contains a 116-page booklet bulging with anecdotes, photos and obsessive detail; 90 minutes of new music, including outtakes, snippets of studio dialogue with Davis talking in his Tom Waits rasp (the permanent result of losing his cool and yelling shortly after throat surgery); and two smoking live shows taped in 1958 at the Newport Jazz Festival and New York’s Plaza Hotel.
If all that doesn’t send a shiver down your spine, I don’t know what would.
