Live-Evil

Keith JarrettKeith Jarrettキース・ジャレット played Rhodes and organ simultaneously at the Live-EvilLive-EvilMiles Davis · 1971 Cellar Door sessions (December 1970). The pianist who would become famously hostile to electric instruments committed to them fully in this band. Under Miles Davis, personal preferences didn't apply.

Just as Bitches Brew (1970) pushed Miles Davis's electric music to its peak, his own rhythm players Chick Corea and Dave Holland walked out — turning an off-hours trio into Circle, a free, near-atonal group, rather than chasing the fusion market.

The call came not from Herbie himself but from Tony Williams: Miles Davis wanted Chick Corea in Baltimore in 1968 because Herbie Hancock couldn't make the date. Corea's seat at the piano began as a one-night fill-in — and became the core of Miles's electric period.

Dave Holland and Chick Corea, who had played on Bitches Brew, walked out of Miles Davis's band at its peak. 'Dave and I could both see Miles wanted to go a different rhythmic way,' Corea said — and the way they went was not more electric fusion but the free-improv group Circle.

Chick Corea started from a single wish: to have Stanley Clarke — then a young, unknown bassist — play his tunes. After trying several drummers he ended up with percussionist Airto Moreira, and the lineup that fell together almost by accident became the first Return to Forever (1972), the record that launched Clarke.

Ron Carter — now the most-recorded bassist in jazz — was an Eastman student with a 1950 Ford. After a Rochester gig, Miles Davis, Red Garland and Paul Chambers had no ride to the station, so he packed them into the car and drove them there. The future master was just the kid with wheels.

In 1969, Miles Davis showed up to the Bitches Brew sessions with only sketches and a few bass patterns — no charts. He set the tempo in the room and, when a take wasn't right, stopped it and had the band try something else. What sounds like a fully composed suite was steered into being on the spot, drummer Jack DeJohnette recalls.

In 1970, Airto Moreira laid down polyrhythmic percussion on Miles Davis's fusion landmark Bitches Brew — and that same year turned up on one of the era's gentlest folk-pop albums, built on little more than acoustic guitar and voice.

Dave Holland and Jack DeJohnette first played together at a 1967 jam session in London, where Holland says it felt complete from the very first beat. Three years later both names sit in the credits of Bitches Brew (1970). The pairing was not assembled in a New York studio; it had already clicked on the other side of the Atlantic.

Drummer Jack DeJohnette, who played in Miles Davis's early-1970s electric bands alongside Chick Corea and Dave Holland, once said their improvising would go to "totally ecstatic" places — until Miles stepped back in and pulled everything back to a single center. The band's apparent freedom, in other words, actually orbited Miles himself.

Don Alias was brought to Bitches Brew (1970) as a percussionist, but on "Miles Runs the Voodoo Down" he is the one at the drum kit — the New Orleans-flavored beat was his idea, and the leader told him to play it himself.

On Miles Davis's Live-Evil (1971), Chick Corea's electric piano is a distorted roar. A year later, Return to Forever has the same man on the same instrument playing light, Brazilian-tinted tunes — a turn he made on purpose, away from music that shut listeners out. The gap is twelve months wide.

In February 1969 John McLaughlin had only just landed in the United States and knew nothing of the New York scene. Within the same month he was called into the In a Silent Way sessions and told to play like a man who had never touched a guitar. A year later, on Bitches Brew (1970), his name is the title of a track.

Alto saxophonist Gary Bartz made his name on the 1971 electric fusion session Live-Evil and on 1966 hard bop dates. In 1997 he turned up somewhere unexpected: Roy Hargrove's Afro-Cuban band, cutting the Grammy-winning album Habana alongside Chucho Valdés while Hargrove was still in his twenties. Bartz was still releasing albums under his own name in 2025.