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Miles Davis is a very special musician to us at Sound Colour Vibration where we find ourselves listening to many of his records through the year and every year. There is no going back to his music, it’s a constant state of discovery from the sheer volume. With Sony/Legacy Recordings involved in the oversight and release of his catalog, there has been a non stop examination of the life of Miles and his 30+ years with the label Columbia Records that is unparalleled in so much of contemporary music history. Miles was the man and the release of more archival material is a welcome treat to 100′s of thousands of dedicated fans around the world. 1969 was one of those years that changed the face of music in every genre imaginable.

Miles was creating the new form of jazz in the studio and his live touring unit was the bridge between his Herbie Hancock, Tony Williams, Wayne Shorter and Ron Carter acoustic period and the electric phase that would dominate his life every interval after the 60′s. Chick Corea, Dave Holland, Jack DeJohnette and Wayne Shorter would play all over the world with Miles in 1969 and it is now with the help of Sony that more recordings form this era will see the light of day.

Ranging from summer 1969 to winter of the same year, the new 3CD and 1DVD set coming to the new Miles Davis bootleg series will surely please fans of the acoustic/electric emergence of sound Miles took on. The first volume in this series took shape in the year of 1967 and featured an entirely different set of players and music to accompany. Just two years later and the addition of electric keys would add a dimension to the sound that had never been possible in any of his bands. Miles was playing music from his Bitches Brew double LP masterpiece along with playing songs from the standards book and many of the career defining 60′s songs in his canon during 1969. Miles was looking in every direction for the new but he never left his foundations and these new live recordings are surely to highlight this balance Miles closely saw a lot of reason to keep in his presentation during the 60′s and 70′s.

Sony will also be doing a special run of mono LP repressings of classic recordings in the Columbia volts. It’s a good time to be alive for a Miles dan with all of the illustrious box sets, reissues and new material that is finding its way to ours. This news has been collected from Miles Ahead.

From Miles Ahead:

Sony is preparing two new sets for release in the fall. The first is another installment in the Miles Davis Bootleg Series, to appear in September 2012 — this will be a three-CD, one-DVD set of live 1969 sets, including two concerts from Antibes on July 25 and July 26, plus pieces of two sets from Stockholm on November 5. The DVD will contain the November 7 performance at the Berlin Philharmonie. The second set is a reissue of the first eight Miles Davis Columbia LPs in mono — ‘Round About Midnight, Miles Ahead, Milestones, Jazz Track, Porgy and Bess, Kind of Blue, Sketches of Spain, and Someday My Prince Will Come. The LPs will be pressed on 180-gram vinyl and will come in heavy facsimilies of the original covers. If this sounds vaguely familiar, you might be recalling Sony’s 2010 box, Bob Dylan: The Original Mono Recordings (Columbia 88697 76105-1), which did for Dylan what the planned set will do for Davis.

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July 25th, 1969 at the Juan-les-Pins Jazz Fest

Milestones, Footprints, ‘Round Midnight

Miles Davis – trumpet
Wayne Shorter – tenor and soprano saxophones
Chick Corea – electric piano
Dave Holland – bass
Jack DeJohnette – drums

*Photo credit: Sandy Speiser