Miles Davis – That’s What Happened 1982-1985: The Bootleg Series, Vol. 7 (ALBUM REVIEW)


Looking back on Miles Davis’ return from his six-year hiatus in 1981, he quite clearly began to draw a sketch of the musical style he wanted to pursue for the foreseeable future. That’s What Happened 1982-1985: The Bootleg Series, Vol. 7 not only provides details and variations on that outline represented by his initial studio recording, The Man With The Horn, but also offers the subsequent results of his studio and stage work with a brand new band. 

Personnel of high pedigree, wholly of his own choosing, the roster of accompanists was in flux as much as what they composed, recorded, and played together. It might actually be fair to say the means of selecting musicians was the main link of continuity with the music Miles was making prior to his cessation of recording and touring, except that 1983’s Star People represented the last LP to feature the production wizardry of longtime producer Teo Macero. 

Yet in much the same fashion as the latter worked so imaginatively  with the studio recordings he had at hand, so too have The Bootleg Series producers–the multi-Grammy Award-winning team of producers Steve Berkowitz, Michael Cuscuna, and Richard Seidel–availed themselves of some novel sources for content: “Freaky Deaky, Part 1” and “Freaky Deaky, Part 2” on the first disc both comes from a cassette recording owned by guitarist John Scofield

With all its content, music, and otherwise, permeated with purposeful attention to detail and focused depth, Legacy Recordings’  Volume 7 matches the previous releases in this archive series, such as Volume 2 Live in Europe 1969. In fact, there’s a discernible flow within the sequencing of the studio cuts contained on the first two CDs of this latest package: the brisk, percolating thirteen minutes of “Santana” grabs attention that subsequently holds through the languorous likes of “Minor Ninths Part 1” and “Part 2.”

The inclusion of Michael Jackson’s “Human Touch” and Cyndi Lauper’s “Time After Time” on disc two reminds us of the critical and fan-based blowback to the work of Miles at the time it was first released. The Marcus J. Moore essay included in the accompanying booklet of photos and more prose provides offers support for Davis’ approach, but these covers of pop material contain their own innate defense in the very context of the jazz icon’s own recorded history: the classic version of “Bye Bye, Blackbird,” long considered one of the essential modern jazz recordings, is only one of a number of such selections in the trumpeter’s discography.

The content of the third compact disc of That’s What Happened 1982-1985–like the others housed in their own mini-album covers inside the slipcase–isn’t quite so rare as its all previously-unreleased counterparts. Live in Montreal was issued as a standalone item on vinyl for June 18th, 2022’s Record Store Day. Nevertheless, it gains considerable resonance from the very collection to which it imparts a palpable logic: juxtaposed with the studio content, this concert from July 7, 1983, is proof positive of Davis’ dual success as a singular live performer as well as an extremely nuanced recording artist. 

In his role as bandleader, Miles has sufficient confidence to rely on the intuition of his bandmates virtually as much as he does his own. In leaving players such as Scofield and sax/flute player Bill Evans to their own devices, literally and figuratively, the musicianship generates momentum that waxes and wanes as noticeably through the sequence of selections as through the respective solos, primarily by that aforementioned twosome (in addition to the leader who also supplies regular keyboard flourishes). 

On their own terms, then, the ensemble’s readings of “Hopscotch” and “Star On Cicely” almost but not quite render redundant their studio counterparts. On “Speak (That’s What Happened),” the sextet often sounds larger than its number, but never overly dense in its interplay and that’s even with the percussion of Mino Cinelu keeping rhythms percolating in conjunction with bassist Daryll Jones (later a Rolling Stones tourmate) and the venerable drummer Al Foster. 

Irascible as he could be and as removed as he might seem here–from his band as well as the audience–Miles Davis’ charisma remains pervasive. Here, for instance, how, after the almost immediate recognition of the childlike sing-song air of “Jean Pierre,” the attendees in the Theatre St-Denis during the Festival International De Jazz De Montreal were clapping along with the music. For the similarly open-minded, such is the response compelled by the whole of That’s What Happened 1982-1985: The Bootleg Series Vol. 7.

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