Miles Davis - Live in Helsinki / Berlin 1964 [Mono]

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In 1963, Miles Davis’s “Second Great Quintet” performed at the festival in Juan-les-Pins on the French Riviera. The quintet’s lineup had been constantly changing up to that point and would not stabilize until 1964. At that time, Davis’s personal life was in turmoil. Between lines of cocaine, there were fierce arguments with his wife Frances Taylor, marked by frequent quarrels and fits of jealousy. Perhaps this context also helps explain his need for upheaval and his relentless pursuit of innovation. Perhaps one could say that by the end of 1964, during these legendary concerts now released by The Lost Recordings, Miles Davis’s Second Great Quintet reached a turning point in the history of jazz. The entire future of the genre lay in the hands of this new generation of gifted musicians. As for Miles, he was no longer at the center of the stage and sometimes turned his back on the audience. He preferred to step back into the wings, giving the musicians he so admired free rein to perform the themes.
Impresario George Wein recalled: “I once said to Miles, ‘When you were on tour in Europe with Herbie, Wayne, Tony, and Ron, I wouldn’t have dared go on stage with you.’ This group wasn’t ahead of its time. It was the time.” The repertoire hadn’t changed significantly, but the style was radically different: the interpretations were inventive, broke boundaries, and turned the world of jazz upside down. It was the “newcomers” who revolutionized the sound. They all belonged to a generation younger than Miles Davis. There was, for example, Wayne Shorter, who pioneered jazz fusion in the 1970s. As Miles wrote in his autobiography: “Wayne Shorter was the source of our musical ideas and concepts.” The other was Herbie Hancock, a classically trained pianist with a penchant for Mozart, who altered his improvisation techniques to force himself out of his comfort zone. The third member of the trio was Ron Carter, who was no longer content with pizzicatos but created melodic lines that broke with bass traditions. And last but not least was Tony Williams, the groundbreaking eighteen-year-old drummer, a true genius. Unlike his predecessors, who adhered to a cyclical tempo made predictable by repetition, Tony shattered the musical space, stoked tension, and brought himself to the forefront. To quote once more from Miles’ autobiography: “Tony just lit a big fire under everyone in the group… It slowly dawned on me that Tony and this group could play anything they wanted. Tony was always the center around which the group’s sound revolved. He was something very special, man.”
Frédéric D’Oria-Nicolas, the musical treasure hunter behind The Lost Recordings, describes the path the label had to take to bring this release to fruition as follows: “Thanks to Ulf Drechsel’s persistence, we finally managed to get in touch with the Finnish archive Yle. It took nearly a year before we could hear the first audio clips. Among the unreleased recordings by John Coltrane, Ella Fitzgerald, and Ben Webster was this extraordinary and previously completely unreleased concert by the Miles Davis Quintet featuring Wayne Shorter, Herbie Hancock, Ron Carter, and Tony Williams from 1964 in Helsinki! In July 2025, we will finally be able to hear the original recordings. The preservation of the tape and the absolutely exceptional sound quality did justice to the performance of these geniuses. A few years earlier, we had heard the original recordings of the same band, made during the famous concert at the Berlin Jazz Festival. Here, too, the sound quality was good, but there was still a lot of work to be done on the levels, which varied by nearly 9 dB from one track to the next! We also noticed that the original recording was in mono and sounded far better than the previously released stereo versions. After all, one of the most beautiful tracks from this Berlin concert, “Stella By Starlight,” has remained completely unreleased on vinyl for over 60 years! We are therefore p