Miles Davis Quintet - Freedom Jazz Dance: The Bootleg Series, Vol. 5 / 3CD set

The fifth volume of Miles Davis’ The Bootleg Series will focus on studio recordings of Miles Davis’ “second great quintet,” celebrating the 50^th anniversary of their landmark album Miles Smiles.

Miles Davis Quintet: Freedom Jazz Dance: The Bootleg Series Vol. 5 finds Miles Davis in 1966, during the prime time he spent playing with a quintet he’d assembled two years prior. Wayne Shorter (tenor saxophone), Herbie Hancock (piano), Ron Carter (bass) and Tony Williams (drums) were all bold, young talents in the jazz world, and their energy revitalized Miles’ own. Their first LP together, 1965’s E.S.P., featured material written mostly by the other members of the quintet, and Miles’ own free jazz-inspired “time, no changes” performance style with these vibrant musicians allowed for a much greater group dynamic than ever before.

The material on the three-disc Freedom Jazz Dance was recorded mostly in sessions for Columbia Records between 1966 and 1968 with longtime Miles Davis producer Teo Macero. Most of the master takes of this material were first released on Miles Smiles, the quintet’s second album, released in 1967, while other tracks appeared on the albums Nefertiti (1968) and Water Babies (1976).

Sourced from original four-track analog session reels and master tapes transferred and mixed in high resolution at 24-bit/192 kHz, the full presentation of these recordings on Freedom Jazz Dance, produced for release by the multiple Grammy Award-winning team of Steve Berkowitz, Michael Cuscuna, Richard Seidel and engineer Mark Wilder, allows for a richer look at Miles and his quintet. These performances anticipate the bold new directions Miles and members of this quintet would take during his “electric” period at the end of the 1960s. Accompanying studio dialogue allows us to hear the development of master tracks, offering a rare peak into the creative process of these legends.

The collection also includes a unique, unreleased track, “Blues in F (My Ding).” Recorded at home by Miles during the same period as the studio sessions, “Blues in F (My Ding)” finds Miles working out a new composition on piano and engaging in lively, informal conversation with Wayne Shorter.