Introduction

Abstract

Extract One of the most serious problems confronted by jazz historians is that, while recordings offer the only tangible evidence we have of the music’s development, some of the most important stages in that development were insufficiently recorded. Miles Davis’s transitional protofusion period is a case in point. Miles spent a lot of time in the studio in 1969, and he came up with In a Silent Way and Bitches Brew, the two albums that are widely credited—or blamed—with ushering in the age of jazz-rock fusion. But Miles also spent a lot of time on the road that year, and the music he made with his working band was even more extraordinary than the music on those two remarkable albums.peter keepnews, “the lost quintet”1Close So exactly what did musically unfold during the period surrounding the recording of Bitches Brew? Until recently, only those who witnessed concerts by Miles Davis’s “Lost” Quintet (1968–70; “lost” in the sense that it never completed a studio recording) or accessed bootleg recordings by the group really knew. The only “official” contemporaneous release—Miles Davis at Fillmore: Live at the Fillmore East2Close—represented a recording so dramatically edited as to obscure its essence.