The "other" Miles...pick your favorites from this selection.
...I thought I'd share a shot of my Miles Davis collection, since I've mentioned him many times during my time at DU.
This is where I go when I need a spark, a catalyst for the creative juices.
Yes, there are two copies of "Kind of Blue"...the Mobile Fidelity and 50th Anniversary editions, and the music shows up a third time on the "Complete Columbia Recordings of Miles Davis and John Coltrane" box set.
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...like a lot of people, I first approached the music via the "fusion," guitar-centric phase. That led me to the Herbie-Wayne-Tony phase, that led me to the Coltrane, and I've just started collecting the Prestige / Blue note albums. I'll get to the beginning eventually.
I'm a typical "classic rock" fan, all of it. A friend gave me a copy of "The Inner Mounting Flame" as a Christmas gift. I thought "What the hell is this?" Then I listened to it. That led me to Bitches Brew, and that led me to the Shorter / Hancock stuff. It's impossible to be seriously into music without hearing about "Kind of Blue." I finally relented and listened and then collected the Coltrane years.
That's the reason why I was heavily into Prog Rock but never heavily into Emerson, Lake and Palmer. The electric guitar had to be there, and it had to be front and center. So with Bitches Brew, you get that. And that opened the door to the scope of Miles' music, and the fact that in some of the McLaughlin-era lineups, he pulled off the intensity of having a guitarist in the band when there was no guitarist.
Chick Corea, in particular, relished that spot as the keyboardist who filled the absence of a guitarist. Keith Jarrett did that to a lesser degree on "The Cellar Door" sessions, which spawned the live tracks on "Live Evil." Those sessions have an interesting story. Jarrett played most of the nights without McLaughlin, who showed up on one night. Jarrett wasn't all that happy about it. He's had a reputation as a "difficult character" to work with, and he wasn't welcoming when it came to a guitarist. Corea, however, took "Bitches Brew" and ran with it in the Return To Forever albums with Al DiMeola. I listened to them as well, back in the day. It was all about the guitarist until I was open enough to give it a go without one.
I was a rocker who was enticed by jazz. If I had been handed a copy of "Steamin'" I probably would have said "That's nice," and moved on. But because I followed the path that I did into his music, I gained my appreciation for it all via "the path less chosen."
