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World Music Revoluxion's Collection

Miles Davis   09/25/1981

Hollywood Bowl, Los Angeles, CA
Media CD   1 disc
J-Card Comment This is Miles in the first stages of his post-retirement comeback. The album Man With The Horn had been released a few weeks earlier, to largely negative critical feedback, but his first live shows over the summer had been hotly anticipated. Such was the interest in Miles's comeback he was booked to play the legendary 17,500 capacity Hollywood Bowl, nestled in the foothills beneath the famed Hollywood sign. It was an important venue for Miles that bookended the comeback years- he would play his final concert there just one month short of ten years later. During intermission an unidentified woman (can anyone help ID her?) reads a statement from the then Los Angeles mayor Tom Bradley, declaring September 25th to be Miles Davis Day. More on that later.

The band surely ranks as one of Miles's most underrated, possibly as a result of the negative critical standing of Man With The Horn. The core of the band had appeared on the album- Miller, Evans, Foster and, on a single track, Stern. Cinelu replaced Sammy Figueroa on percussion. It was an excellent band of young players (Foster was the longest in the tooth, the only holdover from Davis's 1970s band). Miller's springy, funky bass lines, Foster and Cinelu's surging rhythms, Evans's hip saxophone lines, and the heavy metal bebop of Stern's guitar make for some fascinating group interplay. These cats are ready to play!

Perhaps inevitably, the weak link is Miles himself, still working his way back into the trumpet after an extended layoff. There are moments when you can tell there are ideas under his fingers that his chops just won't allow him to execute. Photographs and footage from the era show him looking shockingly sick and frail, shuffling uncomfortably around the stage and looking old beyond his then 55 years. The concert earned a poor review from jazz critic Leonard Feather in the Los Angeles Times, which in turn bought a stinging rebuke from Miles's old friend Max Roach. Davis didn't hold a grudge with Feather, though ('Poor Leonard,' he said to one interviewer when asked about Roach's intervention), later telling him 'I wasn't bothered by your review... I was so sick that night I could hardly walk.' It's hard to imagine the sheer physical effort that was required to make this music but, also inevitably- and despite the reservations of Feather and Davis himself- Miles still manages to produce moments of musical poetry. These are the first steps on a long road back.

Half the material is lifted from the Man With The Horn album, plus a crawling, funky recasting of Gershwin's My Man's Gone Now (recorded by Miles on 1958's Porgy & Bess LP, it's hard to imagine a more different treatment), the bouncy Kix, both of which switch reggae influenced rhythms with swing, and the sing-songy Jean Pierre, one of the most enduring tunes from the comeback years. These pieces would make their LP debut on the live double album We Want Miles, recorded at gigs either side of this concert.
Trades Allowed Yes   Traded from: manalishi WTF!~ music releasing
Ratings Show: A    Sound: A
Owned by World Music Revoluxion · Last Updated Jan 5, 2026