Jazz breaking news: Yesternow – Twenty Years After Miles

Miles’ last few months on the planet were marked by in July 1991 a major appearance at the Montreux Jazz Festival in Switzerland with Quincy Jones recalling the music of Miles’ great collaborator Gil Evans.

Until almost the end of his life Miles had never liked to look back to past glories, but at Montreux, and with many players from many of his bands over the years also in Paris, he did just that. Miles, and this is just one indication of the respect and admiration he was accorded throughout his long career, was also made a chevalier of the legion of honour by the French minister of culture.

Following the Montreux and Paris concerts, in August Miles played at the Hollywood Bowl in Los Angeles which proved to be his last concert. Then in September 1991 he returned to the studio with Easy Mo Bee, the rapper who he had been collaborating with, the music from which would come out on the album Doo-Bop the year after Miles' death. Miles then went for what was ostensibly a check up to St John’s Hospital in Santa Monica but where he was to die of complications arising from pneumonia, aged 65.

Five years earlier in an interview with rock writer Nick Kent for the October 1986 issue of The Face titled ‘Prince of Darkness’ Miles was asked by Kent about whether his oft quoted remark that he had “to change, it’s like a curse” still applied. And Miles said: “I said it once but now I believe, hell, I know, it’s a blessing.”

1986 saw one of the last major indications of his ongoing musical quest, this time working with Marcus Miller, on the album Tutu, which has been reissued this year in a deluxe expanded edition adding a previously unreleased Nice Jazz Festival concert performance. Tutu marks some of the best of Miles’ late period. His passing saw thorough reassessments of his work, the beginning of a remarkably long and sustained period of coming to terms with just what this remarkable man achieved during his lifetime. Since 1991 there has been a constant flow of substantial important reissues and unearthed new material which has added to the considerable body of work and albums released during Miles’ lifetime. His later career work, partly though important research and books written by Paul Tingen and George Cole among others, has also been properly re-evaluated, it having been largely misunderstood during Miles’ lifetime, and also because new material was now available, in particular of A Tribute To Jack Johnson which Miles himself rated highly in his autobiography, and the Cellar Door Sessions, but we still do not know the full picture as the release of The Last Word: The Complete Warner Bros Recordings of Miles Davis which also documented Miles’ work with Prince on the Rubber Band sessions was abandoned in 2002.

The well is still by no means dry and most recently this week a new series has seen the UK release by his long time label Columbia, who Miles recorded for until 1985, titled Miles Davis Quintet Live In Europe 1967 – The Bootleg Series Vol. 1, a three-CD plus DVD set that marks the beginning of a new major phase in Miles’ huge discography. – Stephen Graham