I succumbed to Miles Davis Sony/Columbia/Legacy box set fatigue long ago, and I suspect most of you are feeling the old ennui by now as well. I mean, I was as excited as anyone when the complete Plugged Nickel set came out. And when the Miles/Gil set was released, I naturally snapped it up immediately -- although even I had to subsequently admit that while it might be fascinating for me to listen to a complete rehearsal take of Concierto de Aranjuez without Miles playing over it, the average listener might feel somewhat cheated after buying an expensive box set where two of the six CDs consist of nothing but rehearsal sequences, overdubbed solos, botched takes, and studio chatter. That's why I didn't buy the Wayne-Herbie-Ron-Tony quintet box set -- I owned all the original records and bristled at the idea of re-buying them in order to get a handful of alternate takes. Many of my friends flipped over over the Complete Bitches Brew box. The unreleased material was interesting enough, but I always thought Bitches Brew was by far the most overrated Miles record, and the reissued edition didn't do anything to change my mind on that score. And that was about the saturation point for me. It was like the Columbia/Legacy Miles Davis Box Set juggernaut was bearing down on the jazz-buying public, and you had to either get out of the way or be crushed under the weight of Deluxe Packaging™ and thousands of pages of liner notes.
That said, the Cellar Door Sessions 1970 looks awfully tempting. Complete live takes from 1970 (some of which showed up in incomplete form on the heavily edited Live-Evil), unadulterated by Teo's splice-and-dice production? Keith as the only keyboard player (and, on three of the four nights, without even John McLaughlin's guitar to compete with)? Gary Bartz, Jack DeJohnette, Airto Moriera, and a teenage Michael Henderson on electric bass? Miles's chops in the best shape of his entire career? Okay, I admit it, you sucked me back in, you greedy bastards. I'll take one.
Wait… what do you mean, it's not for sale?
Time Out New York's Steve Smith has more at his brand-new (and highly-recommended) blog, Night After Night -- but it seems that, after several delays, the Cellar Door box set might never be issued at all, due to interference from the Davis estate.
Of course, since the prerelease review copies are already floating around, there are always the [ahem] unofficial channels. But if there's no official release, The Cellar Door Sessions may well end up like the original Jon Brion-produced version of Fiona Apple's Extraordinary Machine and the Global Frequency pilot episode -- a file-sharing hit out of necessity, since you can't get the Entertainment any other way. I swear, it's like Big Media are begging people to steal from them.
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