What do you think?
Rate this book
The Miles Davis Lost Quintet and Other Revolutionary Ensembles
“Uncover[s] the inner creative method in a band that was literally reinventing their music on a gig-by-gig basis . . . a compelling narrative.” —All About JazzMiles Davis’s Bitches Brew is one of the most iconic albums in American music, the preeminent landmark and fertile seedbed of jazz-fusion. Fans have been fortunate in recent years to gain access to Davis’s live recordings from this time, when he was working with an ensemble that has come to be known as the Lost Quintet. In this book, jazz historian and musician Bob Gluck explores the performances of this revolutionary group—Davis’s first electric band—to illuminate the thinking of one of our rarest geniuses and, by extension, the extraordinary transition in American music that he and his fellow players ushered in.Gluck listens deeply to the uneasy tension between this group’s driving rhythmic groove and the sonic and structural openness, surprise, and experimentation they were always pushing toward. There he hears—and outlines—a fascinating web of musical interconnection that brings Davis’s funk-inflected sensibilities into conversation with the avant-garde worlds that players like Ornette Coleman and John Coltrane were developing. Going on to analyze the little-known experimental groups Circle and the Revolutionary Ensemble, Gluck traces deep resonances across a commercial gap between the celebrity Miles Davis and his less famous but profoundly innovative peers. The result is a deeply attuned look at a pivotal moment when once-disparate worlds of American music came together in explosively creative combinations. “In discussion informed by interviews with many of the principals and by his own detailed analysis of recordings, Gluck examines each group and its music in depth.” —Choice“A look at the profoundly influential but hazily remembered period in the 1970s, after Miles went electric, when pretty much everything was possible, and pretty much everything happened.” —Brooklyn Rail
382 pages, Kindle Edition
First published December 28, 2015
7 people are currently reading
60 people want to read
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews
March 4, 2016
An excellent, eccentric--in the literal sense, off-center--investigation.
I do not know much about jazz, and even less about musical theory, which put be somewhat at a disadvantage coming to this book, but also allowed it to teach me. As many pretentious teenagers, I explored jazz recordings, finding some artists that I liked--Coltrane, always Coltrane, Monk, early Miles Davis, Wynton (but not Branford) Marsalis, Joshua Redman--and what I did not: acid jazz, "smooth" jazz. But after awhile, I no longer felt the need to explore.
I had only the most rudimentary map of the music's cultural geography, and reasons to explain my lack of further investigation. In 1995, I read Peter Watrous's review of Wayne Shorter's latest album, in The New York Times, which doubled as a condemnation of jazz fusion. which had come about through the efforts of Davis in the 1970s and, Watrous said, destroyed jazz for two generations: made it into simpering pop music such that jazz in the 1990s--a la Redman and Marsalis--was focused on recovering the experiments that had been going on just before fusion and trying to develop them. Jazz had to be backward looking now.
I didn't like what I'd heard of jazz fusion--albeit that was always from the rock side, Jeff Beck and other rock and rollers adopting jazz techniques, so I was all right letting jazz slide. I knew what was important.
Judging by the introduction to Gluck's book, my view was not idiosyncratic; Watrous's condemnation of fusion was widely shared. Gluck wants to recuperate what Davis was doing, though, explain it, and explain how others did build on his experiments, though this progressivism was obscured by the economics of the industry. A clue to Gluck's sympathy for Davis is in the title of the first chapter. "Miles Goes Electric," which harkens to the drama over Bob Dylan going electric--what now seems a tempest in a teapot, given Dylan's later output. The same, Gluck seems to be saying, should be understood when we consider Davis's fusion experiments: the uproar is silly when weighed against what the experiments wrought.
The scholarship here is excellent. Documenting musical changes is difficult, and Gluck has to rely on a great deal of bootlegged material, and also does a forensic recreation of some of Davis's "Live" albums--that were actually heavily produced--to understand what he and his quintet were working at. Gluck has scoured interviews--and done his own--to get a sense of the biographical and social issues at play. But unlike many other--most other--all other?--cultural criticism being put out today, he never reduces the art--the music--to psychology and sociology. He understands the aesthetics, the music, as a thing unto itself, and tries hard to explain it, though I admit some of the explanations went right over my head.
The book's structure feels a bit improvised, and probably could have been shorn up some but reflects Gluck's own approach to the music and the personalities behind it, as he veers from the work that Davis was doing and tries to pull in other personalities. I would have liked for him to push harder on some of the connections he was making--he hints again and again at connections between Davis and Sly and the Family Stone without drawing them out--and he sometimes becomes reticent for fear of being a gossip-monger, but if that's part of the story, then gossip is part of of the story.
Not that he doesn't have a clear eye for those he writes about. The book starts with a consideration of Davis in the late 1960s, his place in the jazz world, and the musical problems he was considering. Davis was inspired by the more abstract explorations of Ornette Coleman and John Coltrane, which were breaking down the usual head-solo-head structure of jazz. Davis was fond of Coltrane, who had been in a group with him, but jealous of Coleman--though that jealousy also provided Davis with a good explanation of himself: Davis could play any style; he was a chameleon, a trickster.
What he wanted to do in the late 1960s was experiment with these new forms, and also work to make jazz more popular again. As it had become increasingly abstract and lost contact with dance cultures, jazz had lost some audience. Davis wanted to bring in pop, funk, and rock sensibilities to connect with a younger audience. (He was in his forties.) Thus he formed a new quintet--later called lost because he never made an album just with it, though he toured with it a great deal.
Gluck follows the various individuals who formed this quintet into Davis's orbit, and examines as they played and developed the songs that would become the loudest declaration of the fusion movement, "Bitches Brew." (Wayne Shorter was the group's saxophonist.) Gluck notes that a lot of the development had to do with Davis's light hand in management. During concerts, he would wander off the stage after his solo, allowing the group to explore the more abstract forms--far different than the bebop on which Davis was raised, and confusing even to him at times--before coming back on and brining some of the old jazz sensibility back.
There's a sidestep, then, to Chicago, where a lot of those whom Davis would most influence came from.
Gluck then traces Davis becoming increasingly "electric" through the mid-1970s, continuing to try to channel popular music into jazz, even as he was also making political statements. But his experiments were always constrained by his own sense of what jazz should be and the interplay of the various musicians.
That was not true of others in his quintet, as well as those influenced by what he was doing--as well as Coleman, Coltrane, and Sun Ra. Gluck follows out some of these strands in the works of the experimental groups "Circle" and "The Revolutionary Ensemble." These pushed the experiments even further ahead, to the point that members of "The Revolutionary Ensemble" would sometimes play in parallel. There was no longer the "group consciousness" of improvisation that made so much of what Sun Ra, Coleman, and Coltrane doing exciting. Meaning was being created entirely by the listener.
These experiments, though, had largely run their course by the end of the 1970s, and many of the musicians involved returned to more standard forms of jazz. It wasn't, though, at least in Gluck's formulation, that the experiments were not bearing fruit. Rather, it was an economic decision. Davis's position as a famous bandleader allowed his musicians to experiment while still getting gigs, still producing albums. Circle and the Revolutionary Ensemble were in very different situations.
And this is where Gluck's research and insight really pays off. He shows that Circle existed on the margins of the jazz world, able to make a few albums and play here and there, but in fringe areas without enough remuneration to pay for their continued work. The Revolutionary Ensemble was even further from the center, playing in the lofts of Chelsea, New York, where Ornette Coleman and others had moved after deindustrialization left large, cheap places for rent. Obviously, there was little money here.
In a concluding chapter, Gluck writes of Davis and others he inspired as Coleman's children, which is true, but the evidence of his own book suggests that Coltrane and Sun Ra were equally influential, and I would have liked to have seen him exploring more of those connections. I would also have liked to see him at least sketch a bit more in depth where jazz went forward--a response to Watrous.
But these are the sign of a good book. The research he did was small-scale and exacting, sketching networks of influence and explaining the development of a musical form that is too easily dismissed. And he left me wanting more.
[Note I won a copy of the book in a give-away that asked for but did not require a review.]
I do not know much about jazz, and even less about musical theory, which put be somewhat at a disadvantage coming to this book, but also allowed it to teach me. As many pretentious teenagers, I explored jazz recordings, finding some artists that I liked--Coltrane, always Coltrane, Monk, early Miles Davis, Wynton (but not Branford) Marsalis, Joshua Redman--and what I did not: acid jazz, "smooth" jazz. But after awhile, I no longer felt the need to explore.
I had only the most rudimentary map of the music's cultural geography, and reasons to explain my lack of further investigation. In 1995, I read Peter Watrous's review of Wayne Shorter's latest album, in The New York Times, which doubled as a condemnation of jazz fusion. which had come about through the efforts of Davis in the 1970s and, Watrous said, destroyed jazz for two generations: made it into simpering pop music such that jazz in the 1990s--a la Redman and Marsalis--was focused on recovering the experiments that had been going on just before fusion and trying to develop them. Jazz had to be backward looking now.
I didn't like what I'd heard of jazz fusion--albeit that was always from the rock side, Jeff Beck and other rock and rollers adopting jazz techniques, so I was all right letting jazz slide. I knew what was important.
Judging by the introduction to Gluck's book, my view was not idiosyncratic; Watrous's condemnation of fusion was widely shared. Gluck wants to recuperate what Davis was doing, though, explain it, and explain how others did build on his experiments, though this progressivism was obscured by the economics of the industry. A clue to Gluck's sympathy for Davis is in the title of the first chapter. "Miles Goes Electric," which harkens to the drama over Bob Dylan going electric--what now seems a tempest in a teapot, given Dylan's later output. The same, Gluck seems to be saying, should be understood when we consider Davis's fusion experiments: the uproar is silly when weighed against what the experiments wrought.
The scholarship here is excellent. Documenting musical changes is difficult, and Gluck has to rely on a great deal of bootlegged material, and also does a forensic recreation of some of Davis's "Live" albums--that were actually heavily produced--to understand what he and his quintet were working at. Gluck has scoured interviews--and done his own--to get a sense of the biographical and social issues at play. But unlike many other--most other--all other?--cultural criticism being put out today, he never reduces the art--the music--to psychology and sociology. He understands the aesthetics, the music, as a thing unto itself, and tries hard to explain it, though I admit some of the explanations went right over my head.
The book's structure feels a bit improvised, and probably could have been shorn up some but reflects Gluck's own approach to the music and the personalities behind it, as he veers from the work that Davis was doing and tries to pull in other personalities. I would have liked for him to push harder on some of the connections he was making--he hints again and again at connections between Davis and Sly and the Family Stone without drawing them out--and he sometimes becomes reticent for fear of being a gossip-monger, but if that's part of the story, then gossip is part of of the story.
Not that he doesn't have a clear eye for those he writes about. The book starts with a consideration of Davis in the late 1960s, his place in the jazz world, and the musical problems he was considering. Davis was inspired by the more abstract explorations of Ornette Coleman and John Coltrane, which were breaking down the usual head-solo-head structure of jazz. Davis was fond of Coltrane, who had been in a group with him, but jealous of Coleman--though that jealousy also provided Davis with a good explanation of himself: Davis could play any style; he was a chameleon, a trickster.
What he wanted to do in the late 1960s was experiment with these new forms, and also work to make jazz more popular again. As it had become increasingly abstract and lost contact with dance cultures, jazz had lost some audience. Davis wanted to bring in pop, funk, and rock sensibilities to connect with a younger audience. (He was in his forties.) Thus he formed a new quintet--later called lost because he never made an album just with it, though he toured with it a great deal.
Gluck follows the various individuals who formed this quintet into Davis's orbit, and examines as they played and developed the songs that would become the loudest declaration of the fusion movement, "Bitches Brew." (Wayne Shorter was the group's saxophonist.) Gluck notes that a lot of the development had to do with Davis's light hand in management. During concerts, he would wander off the stage after his solo, allowing the group to explore the more abstract forms--far different than the bebop on which Davis was raised, and confusing even to him at times--before coming back on and brining some of the old jazz sensibility back.
There's a sidestep, then, to Chicago, where a lot of those whom Davis would most influence came from.
Gluck then traces Davis becoming increasingly "electric" through the mid-1970s, continuing to try to channel popular music into jazz, even as he was also making political statements. But his experiments were always constrained by his own sense of what jazz should be and the interplay of the various musicians.
That was not true of others in his quintet, as well as those influenced by what he was doing--as well as Coleman, Coltrane, and Sun Ra. Gluck follows out some of these strands in the works of the experimental groups "Circle" and "The Revolutionary Ensemble." These pushed the experiments even further ahead, to the point that members of "The Revolutionary Ensemble" would sometimes play in parallel. There was no longer the "group consciousness" of improvisation that made so much of what Sun Ra, Coleman, and Coltrane doing exciting. Meaning was being created entirely by the listener.
These experiments, though, had largely run their course by the end of the 1970s, and many of the musicians involved returned to more standard forms of jazz. It wasn't, though, at least in Gluck's formulation, that the experiments were not bearing fruit. Rather, it was an economic decision. Davis's position as a famous bandleader allowed his musicians to experiment while still getting gigs, still producing albums. Circle and the Revolutionary Ensemble were in very different situations.
And this is where Gluck's research and insight really pays off. He shows that Circle existed on the margins of the jazz world, able to make a few albums and play here and there, but in fringe areas without enough remuneration to pay for their continued work. The Revolutionary Ensemble was even further from the center, playing in the lofts of Chelsea, New York, where Ornette Coleman and others had moved after deindustrialization left large, cheap places for rent. Obviously, there was little money here.
In a concluding chapter, Gluck writes of Davis and others he inspired as Coleman's children, which is true, but the evidence of his own book suggests that Coltrane and Sun Ra were equally influential, and I would have liked to have seen him exploring more of those connections. I would also have liked to see him at least sketch a bit more in depth where jazz went forward--a response to Watrous.
But these are the sign of a good book. The research he did was small-scale and exacting, sketching networks of influence and explaining the development of a musical form that is too easily dismissed. And he left me wanting more.
[Note I won a copy of the book in a give-away that asked for but did not require a review.]
May 30, 2025
An excellent read. I’ve always found Miles Davis’s electric era difficult to parse and this book does a brilliant job breaking down in detail the musical timeline of the early 70s avant-garde jazz scene.
January 14, 2016
Bob Gluck’s new work is written with much heart, warmth, and intelligence. I hope this starts a new wave of academic books that focus on good narrative, new concepts, and sophistication without having to fall into the academic jargon charade.
Gluck explores cultural, sociological, and philosophical elements of some of the late-60s/early-70s’ most cutting edge groups, but in a way that is most essential: from a musical perspective. I am flattered to see a mention of my Listen to This: Miles Davis and Bitches Brew in the text for I feel this new volume is a perfect compliment, exploring many of Davis’s outlooks and sociological surroundings with a fresh and well developed perspective.
I must admit, I know very little of some of the more avant-garde bands Gluck writes passionately about, but I enjoyed learning about them, and the whole New York loft scene of the 70s. Some of Gluck’s conclusions are new takes on matters, especially with the relationship with the avant-garde and Davis, which offer much to ponder and debate.
Gluck explores cultural, sociological, and philosophical elements of some of the late-60s/early-70s’ most cutting edge groups, but in a way that is most essential: from a musical perspective. I am flattered to see a mention of my Listen to This: Miles Davis and Bitches Brew in the text for I feel this new volume is a perfect compliment, exploring many of Davis’s outlooks and sociological surroundings with a fresh and well developed perspective.
I must admit, I know very little of some of the more avant-garde bands Gluck writes passionately about, but I enjoyed learning about them, and the whole New York loft scene of the 70s. Some of Gluck’s conclusions are new takes on matters, especially with the relationship with the avant-garde and Davis, which offer much to ponder and debate.
August 3, 2020
Gluck explores a period of Jazz history that to many is incomprehensible. How did Miles Davis move from "The Quintet" of the 60s to the electronic "Rock/Jazz" of the 70s? How did "In A Silent Way" and "Bitches Brew" come about? Gluck throws some light on these recordings and their varied personnel.
But the question that should be asked is why were their no recordings of the "Lost Quintet" released until recently? The quintet featuring Davis, Wayne Shorter, Chick Corea, Dave Holland & Jack DeJohnette seem to be the "glue" that bring these periods together (60s Miles & 70s Miles) and throw light on progression & development from one period to another.
Gluck's book is a serious study of this period - late 60s to early 70s - and brings in various elements such as Ornette Coleman, the "Loft Scene", European Free Scene etc etc and shows how these influenced the music of Miles Davis and those who played with him during this period.
But the question that should be asked is why were their no recordings of the "Lost Quintet" released until recently? The quintet featuring Davis, Wayne Shorter, Chick Corea, Dave Holland & Jack DeJohnette seem to be the "glue" that bring these periods together (60s Miles & 70s Miles) and throw light on progression & development from one period to another.
Gluck's book is a serious study of this period - late 60s to early 70s - and brings in various elements such as Ornette Coleman, the "Loft Scene", European Free Scene etc etc and shows how these influenced the music of Miles Davis and those who played with him during this period.
Read
August 6, 2021781.65092 D263g 2016
December 11, 2025
Really interesting and well researched look at some of my favorite music and musicians.
March 10, 2018
I'd always wondered how Miles' bands could change on a dime. Now I know:
"How did the band know when and how to make the shift? Enrico Merlin refers to Davis’s technique as “coded phrases.”44 He explored how Miles cued the next tune by inserting a representative musical gesture as the band was playing the current tune. The type of phrase reflected the characteristics of the upcoming tune: if it had a core melodic figure, he would play the “first notes of the tune.” If the core was a bass vamp, “the signal would be a phrase from that vamp; or if there was a core harmonic component, the signal would be ‘voicings of the harmonic progressions.’”45 “Miles Runs the Voodoo Down” could be cued either by the bass vamp or by the first notes of the descending trumpet melody. “It’s About That Time” could be cued by alluding to the descending harmonic (chord) progression. In the recorded version of “Spanish Key,” the code was a key change. This approach continued through the mid-1970s."
"How did the band know when and how to make the shift? Enrico Merlin refers to Davis’s technique as “coded phrases.”44 He explored how Miles cued the next tune by inserting a representative musical gesture as the band was playing the current tune. The type of phrase reflected the characteristics of the upcoming tune: if it had a core melodic figure, he would play the “first notes of the tune.” If the core was a bass vamp, “the signal would be a phrase from that vamp; or if there was a core harmonic component, the signal would be ‘voicings of the harmonic progressions.’”45 “Miles Runs the Voodoo Down” could be cued either by the bass vamp or by the first notes of the descending trumpet melody. “It’s About That Time” could be cued by alluding to the descending harmonic (chord) progression. In the recorded version of “Spanish Key,” the code was a key change. This approach continued through the mid-1970s."
Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews