The Studio Recordings of the Miles Davis Quintet: 1965-68. By Keith Waters.

New

York: Oxford University Press, 2011; [xvi, 302p. ISBN 978-0-19-539384-2. $84] Music

examples, bibliography, index.

Every music library should have a copy of this reference work. This book goes beyond a

purely descriptive analysis of the workings of the great Miles Davis Quintet of the mid-

1960s. It provides technical analysis that includes in-depth notated musical transcriptions

of solos and accompaniments. To understand most of the author’s analyses readers must

have familiarity with chord progressions, chord voicings, and understand advanced music

theory and harmony. This offering should be a joy for knowledgeable jazz fans. An

enormous amount of work went into its preparation, and there is no fluff in this book.

Every line reveals more about how the music was made. It will be particularly welcome

to jazz musicians who grew up with the mid-1960s Miles Davis recordings and seek to

gain further insights and continue verifying the impressions that they had long ago. For

listeners just now coming to study this period of jazz history, the work may also provide

an introduction that details the rule breaking achievements of these extraordinary

musicians who collectively improvised with almost magical rapport and achieved the

highest level of artistry in jazz. The book should also provide a useful textbook for

graduate courses in jazz theory and harmony because it takes up where other texts leave

off.
Musician-fans who eagerly anticipated every new Davis album during the mid-1960s

exerted considerable effort to determine the forms that Wayne Shorter, Herbie Hancock,

Ron Carter, and Tony Williams were using for the tunes on these albums. They also

pondered the extent of departures from those forms within the solo improvisations and

accompaniments. (For example, on what pieces did improvisations keep time but not

follow chord changes? “Orbits” is one answer; “Hand Jive” is another.) Waters addresses

these questions in his carefully crafted book. He treats crucial elements in the workings

of the band's compositions and improvisations by way of in-depth, moment-by-moment

analyses of the band’s albums ESP, Miles Smiles, Sorcerer, Nefertiti, Miles In The Sky,

and Filles de Kilimanjaro.

The book should prove particularly handy for working jazz musicians because it

incorporates scholarship with which many of them are probably not familiar. For

instance, some of it is drawn from scholarly journals, such as Steven Strunk's work in the

Journal of Music Theory, and in theses, such as Todd Coolman's doctoral dissertation. It

also taps Library of Congress copyright deposits, including those of Wayne Shorter

compositions, which not only answer interesting questions but also pose further puzzles.

The analyses touch many of the band’s virtues. Here are a few of the topics.

1. moments in the music that constitute intermediate stages between chorus structure

(which preserves harmonic structure and three metric levels of hypermeter, meter and

pulse) and the abandonment of harmonic structure;

2. instances in which the band makes excursions into shifting harmonies over bass pedal

points;

3. pointing out spontaneous accommodations by the band members to each other's

departures from strict adherence to song form and meter, including subtle examples of

cat-and-mouse interplay between pianist Hancock and bassist Carter, as well as

responsiveness of drummer Williams to rhythmic aspects in solo improvisations by

saxophonist Shorter;

4. identifying solo lines that include phrases having the effect of dislocation from the

piece's meter;

5. examples in the band’s creative use of harmonic ambiguity;

6. instances in which the band was elasticizing (or suppressing) the harmonic

progression, withholding the crucial musical cues that make apparent the hypermeter and

larger divisions of tune form;

7. documenting the group's seemingly effortless negotiation between hard bop and free

jazz;
8. identifying significant differences between the work of these musicians and their

contemporaries in the John Coltrane Quartet of the same years, for instance, in less

emphasis on slow harmonic rhythm, dense activity and loudness;

9. showing how pianist Herbie Hancock was working out the implications of odd-

numbered measure groupings at quick tempos and adding his considerable mastery for

generating lyrical motives and flexible reharmonizations within an eighth-note oriented

bop language;

10. proposing harmonies that are suggested by solo improvisations, though not

necessarily contained in the composition;

11. documenting the richness of motivic organization that trumpeter Davis demonstrated

in his solo improvisations;

12. analyzing how saxophonist Shorter's phrasing works to delicately obscure the beat;

13. explaining the presence of circular compositions: works composed in such a manner

that, following the initial statement of the melody line, the beginning of the repeating

chorus structure no longer sounds like the beginning of the form. Such compositions

contain an overlap of the form that disguises the beginning of the form in each cycle.

This arises when the opening phrase is sounding as a continuation of the previous phrase,

the opening chord progression is continuing a sequence begun at the end, and irregular
metric groupings are suggesting a continuation from the end of one chorus to the

beginning of the next.

14. identifying instances of hypermeter, which refers to metrical groupings that are larger

than a single measure (such as 4, 8, 16, or 32 measures). Hypermeter suggests that these

larger units often operate in more or less the same way that measures do.

15. identifying metrical conflict in which grouping patterns suggest one or more meters

that are distinct from an underlying meter. This is distinguished from accentual shift in

that the latter is a type of metric displacement that maintains an underlying meter but uses

groupings that may shift the perception of the metrical downbeat, whereas metrical

conflict implies metrical groupings that are distinct from the underlying meter.

In an undertaking of this magnitude it is what is present, not what is absent, that is

important to acknowledge. Waters concedes in his Preface that readers may be

disappointed to not find transcriptions of Tony Williams' drumming in the book.

However, in lieu of transcriptions, more details about the drumming and its influence

could have been provided, if only impressionistically. For example, Waters could have

pointed out that insiders consider Williams' work on "Prince of Darkness" to constitute a

turning point in the evolution of jazz drumming. Some musicians feel that it exhibited a

way for a lone drummer to combine the rhythms of a multi-drummer Latin American

ensemble with the freedom of swinging modern jazz. Additionally, while it is to his credit

that in an introductory chapter Waters mentions Williams' innovative practice of crisply

snapping his high-hat shut on every beat, instead of employing the conventional practice

of closing it only on every other beat, he does not mention any group effects of that

technique when he devotes several pages to the band's "Freedom Jazz Dance"

performance in his treatment of the Miles Smiles album. Omitting discussion of the drum

parts in a number of different analyses is also a drawback because Williams was the

instigator behind many of the advances made by this band.

Though Waters quotes a number of published interviews in which band members reveal

what went into making particular recordings, the author leaves unresolved some

questions that probably could have been settled if he had personally contacted the

musicians. To cite just one of these instances, he devotes several pages to plausible

speculation for the absence of trumpet, saxophone and piano solos on the band's classic

recording of Wayne Shorter's "Nefertiti." An interview could have rendered speculation

unnecessary and perhaps refuted it. Elsewhere, band members have recounted the

"Nefertiti" format's origins (personal communication with Wayne Shorter, April 23,

1976). As the trumpeter and tenor saxophonist were playing Shorter's melody line over

and over in order to learn it, drummer Williams had told bandleader Davis, “I can do

something with that.” Davis then gave Williams the prerogative to follow his muse. So

the horns continued to repeat the melody, and the performance almost became a drum

feature, with Williams crafting what ultimately served the double duty of both solo and

accompaniment. In other words, it was not a planned format. It was one of those

serendipitous occurrences that become innovations in jazz history. Pianist-composer-

bandleader Josef Zawinul reported that upon hearing this rendition of "Nefertiti" he was
inspired to format many of his own productions in a similar way. Activity on the top was

minimal and repetitive, while activity on the bottom was the most creative and least

repetitive portion of the performance. This became the typical pattern for Zawinul's and

Shorter's subsequent pieces in their band known as Weather Report.

As the preceding caveats are minor in relation to the major contributions of Waters' work

we must recognize that this is the first book-length account devoted entirely to unearthing

the nitty gritty in this remarkable band’s music. Bravo for Waters!

Mark C. Gridley

Author of Jazz Styles and Concise Guide to Jazz (Prentice-Hall)