Miles runs the voodoo down in Europe.

It is difficult not to shower effusive praise on the music contained in this new set. If for no other reason, it comes from a crucial period in the career of Miles Davis that is not well documented. This group began to coalesce during the 1968/69 recordings of FILLES DE KILIMANJARO and IN A SILENT WAY. But the quintet showcased here-Wayne Shorter, tenor and soprano, Chick Corea, electric piano, England’s Dave Holland, acoustic bass, and Jack DeJohnette, drums, never made a studio recording. LIVE IN EUROPE 1969 includes Davis’ working band with this personnel, and it’s first legitimate release on cd. Ralph J. Gleason, cofounder of the Monterey Jazz Festival and a founding editor of ROLLING STONE magazine, quoted French composer Edgard Varese in his liner notes for FILLES DE KILIMANJARO-‘ An artist is never ahead of his time but most people are far behind theirs.’
How astute of Mr. Gleason, and how apropos for this music.

These concerts were recorded and preserved thanks to various state-owned radio and television stations throughout Europe. We as listeners should be grateful and are the beneficiaries of their foresight. There are antecedents to Davis’ music here. Austria’s Joe Zawinul was a member of Cannonball Adderley’s quintet from 1961 until 1970. Zawinul wrote Cannon’s enduring 1966 hit, ‘ Mercy, Mercy, Mercy, ’ utilizing a Wurlitzer electric piano on the band’s recording. Zawinul was later introduced to inventor Harold Rhodes of the Fender Rhodes electric piano, and Rhodes sometimes traveled with Zawinul on tour. But it was Davis who first exploited the sound quality of an electronic keyboard to full textural effect in a jazz context. The crackling orchestral colors that Corea creates under Davis are a thing of dissonant beauty.

The recordings took place at three locations: CD 1 and 2 at Festival Mondial du Jazz d’Antibes, La Pinede, Juan-les-Pins, France on 7/25-26/69, CD 3 at ‘ The Newport Festival in Europe, ’ Folkets Hus, Stockholm, Sweden on 11/5/1969 , and DVD at Berliner Jazztage in the Berliner Philharmonie, Berlin, Germany on 11/7/1969. Nowhere else in Davis’ discography is his repertoire as equidistant as at Antibes. Here he combines the 40’s ‘ Round Midnight,’ the 50’s ‘ Milestones ’ and ‘ All Blues, ’ the 60’s ‘ Footprints ’ and ‘ Nefertiti, ’ with new Zawinul and Shorter compositions,‘ It’s About That Time, ’ and ‘ Sanctuary. ’ The sound quality is quite good. The Stockholm concert is unique, as the electric piano malfunctions just after the performance begins. This doesn’t deter Davis and his rhythm section, who play magnificently while an acoustic piano and microphones are apparently moved into position. We then hear the only documented performance of Corea playing acoustically with Davis. The recording is superb, capturing all the ambient sound and room dynamics inherent within that concert space. This has been true of nearly everything heard from Sweden, dating back to Davis’ March 22, 1960 Stockholm concert with John Coltrane. The audio/visual quality of the Berlin concert DVD is also exceptional. This writer found it particularly startling, having previously endorsed JAZZ SHOTS-MILES DAVIS QUINTET THE 1969 BERLIN CONCERT DVD in a previous article for THINK. It is a bootleg release obtained from a vastly inferior source tape or broadcast. But many consumers have unfortunately been the victim of bootleg releases from Spain with atrocious video and sound. Let our experience be a word of warning to all fellow music lovers.

So is there anything to criticize about this set? Well, yes, there is. The Antibes performances on 7/25-26 were videotaped in glorious black and white for television broadcast. Large portions of both concerts can be seen on YouTube. Why were they released as an audio cd? Is this an attempt to simply earn more money with a future DVD release? The 11/5 Stockholm concert was actually two sets, the second set list being: DIRECTIONS, BITCHES BREW, THIS, IT’S ABOUT THAT TIME, NO BLUES, THE THEME. Both sets are included in a bootleg release titled MILES DAVIS LEGENDARY COLLECTION SERIES SWEDISH DEVIL. Why was the performance of THIS extracted from the second set, and attached at the conclusion of CD 3? Not releasing the entire second set is especially perplexing as producers Michael Cuscuna and Richard Seidel were involved with this project. Both men are preeminent in the jazz field.

There are other Davis concerts from ‘ The Newport Festival in Europe ’ 1969 tour that have yet to be released. They include televised broadcasts on 10/27 in Rome, 11/2 in London, and 11/3 in Paris, all of which can be viewed on YouTube. There is also a radio broadcast from Rotterdam on 11/9 with excellent sound. Mr. Cuscuna, please take note: Send me overseas. I will be the Detective Columbo of Jazz and retrieve these tapes. Ha!

2013 is the centennial of Igor Stravinsky’s ballet THE RITE OF SPRING. The cacophonic premiere at the Theatre des Champs-Elysees in Paris on May 29, 1913 elicited shouting from the audience, fistfights in the aisles, culminating in a riot. The fury, anguish, and joy of life heard from that stage by the Parisian audience was new. The same can be said of the directions in music by Miles Davis contained in this set. It is especially welcome in our present era of cultural stasis. Those who have ears to hear will listen.

Following the major press hype surrounding his first album, the 1995 home-made effort Everything I Long For, Toronto's Hayden receded from the camera flashes and microphones and relaxed for a while.

The result is a quiet and thoughtful record, one that is well-reflected in its serene cover art of shadowy trees and a light-sprinkled tent. Paul Hayden Dresser writes meditative music, the kind that best suits the wee-small hours of the morning.

Though there are strains throughout of banjo, cello, harmonica, pedal steel and various keyboards and percussion, it is primarily Hayden's lonesome, whiny baritone that sets the album's melancholy mood. There are a few up-tempo moments and some lovely instrumental passages, but the personality and richness of The Closer I Get comes from the texture and tone of his voice.

It's the way Hayden manages to make such simple melodic patterns worm a path into your soft tissue that makes you want to hear them again, to confirm the tender spot into which they've lodged themselves. With a bit of good fortune, Hayden, still being a relative youngster, will not burn out from the suffocatingly dry heat of media lights and will continue to write solid, introspective songs for a long time to come.

The Church were definitely a breath of fresh air when they arrived on the heavily synth-dominated rock scene of the '80s...

With 1985's excellent Heyday, especially, they made their mark, with the neo-Byrdsy pop-rock interplay of guitarists Marty Willson-Piper and Peter Koppes and the equal parts Bowie- and joint-influenced vocals and lyrics of Steven Kilbey revitalizing the notion of guitar rock and meshing nicely with the neo-psychedelic "Paisley Underground" scene then happening in the States.

This formula finally peaked with 1988's commercial breakthrough, Starfish, which yielded the band's biggest "hits," "Under The Milky Way" and "Destination." Subsequent commercial pressures to produce a follow-up, along with various band members' drug enthusiasms, eventually took their toll on the Church. As such ventures like reunion albums go, then, Hologram of Baal (and what was Kilbey smoking when he came up with that title?) isn't half-bad.

While Koppes and Willson-Piper may indeed hate each other's guts, they still work together beautifully, weaving chiming, at times ethereal, at other times doomy guitar lines together like Aussie dream-weavers, proving they belong up there with Thin Lizzy's Brian Robertson and Scott Gorham in the under populated annals of rock's twin lead-guitar greats. The Church try to hearken back to their "Milky Way" golden commercial era here on the mid-paced numbers "Anaesthesia" and "Ricochet," which lead off the album, with Kilbey lyrically detailing his confessed intensive personal drug-research of the last few years, and while these tunes don't quite hit the bull's eye the band is obviously striving for, they do become lodged in the subconscious with repeated listenings.

Overall, as fine as the ambient soundscapes the Church conjure are, this listener can't help but wish they would crank the energy back up a little more often, as they do here on "No Certainty Attached." Perhaps the answer to such a wish is to be found in "Anaesthesia": "So many things need fixing everywhere/ Anaesthesia tells me to slow down a little more/ Why not sleep a little more?" Kilbey sings drowsily. Hey, the man just wants to relax, and who are we to argue? Sweet dreams, Mr. Kilbey. Oh if you’re lucky enough to find a copy with the Bastard Universe bonus CD, you will get 40 minutes of incredible studio session jamming, best part of Hologram!

No 'Sell-Out', so here I am, feeling like the only guy on the planet who heard the album and likes it...

What seems to put people off (the ones that don't just write it off 'cause they hate Courtney) the first time they hear it is that it doesn't sound like Live Through This. In other words, they want another grunge album. (I guess grunge nostalgia is already upon us.)

These are the same people who usually want artists/bands to stay the same, or at least to sound the same. A new look is OK, just don't mess with the music. But I think that a band unafraid to change its sound is a very good thing. Celebrity Skin deals with your love/hate relationship with Hollywood and with all the stuff that goes along with trying to be a star.

The gorgeous pop-rock epic "Awful" is about being a kid and being punk, and then growing up and realizing you can't be punk forever. And it's also about how the music biz sucks the spirit and soul from all the young talent it attaches itself to. And, finally, it's about how despite all that, one song can change everything. And you certainly saw that, since you had a ringside seat as "Smells Like Teen Spirit" changed everything. "Playing Your Song." is all about Kurt Cobain. "And oh, they've bought and sold it all/ It's gone/ They've taken it and built a mall/ And now they're playing your song.“

It’s pretty obvious that that's about how the industry and all the wannabe grunge-rockers got every dime they could out of what Kurt and Nirvana created. It’s good to hear Courtney Love doing her own thing, and facing the critics.