Highlights from the Plugged Nickel

Miles Davis Quintet

album cover

The Art of the Possible

This is excellent music for getting unstuck. Follow along closely, and you may find that the ongoing conversations rippling through the music can lure you into less literal ways of thinking. That's essentially what the five musicians here are doing—using all kinds of untapped resources to change the dimension of the canvas. In motivational-speaker parlance, they're "thinking outside the box," working minute by minute and note by note to create an atmosphere in which happy accidents happen.

Saxophonist Wayne Shorter, pianist Herbie Hancock, bassist Ron Carter, and drummer Tony Williams had been with Miles Davis a little more than a year when they arrived at the Chicago club called the Plugged Nickel for an extended engagement in December 1965. Though the material is basic club fare—a typical set would include a blues, a ballad, standards like "Stella by Starlight" and "Yesterdays," and one of Davis's Kind of Blue tunes—the five approach each as a new chance to create. After the melody has been stated, they move in a flow of rapidly shifting ideas, sparring at an awesome high level some have described as "telepathic." Williams, particularly, senses where the points of emphasis should be; his dancing cymbal patterns and "Hail Mary" bombs coincide perfectly with Hancock's curtly snipped chords.

This part–free-form and part-structured environment brings out the best in these soloists. Davis sends out pouty lost-little-boy long tones, Hancock tugs and pulls the time apart, and Shorter makes intense lunges that are deeply passionate and cerebral at the same time.

Columbia captured just about every set of the engagement on tape—it's available on eight CDs as The Complete Plugged Nickel, an unparalleled trove of great improvisations. This single-disc Highlights is an excellent introduction to the inner workings of the most important acoustic jazz group of the era, which within a few years created equally mindblowing studio sides (ESP, Miles Smiles, Nefertiti). Once you're unstuck, stick around to experience a collaborative intensity that remains unique in all of music.

Genre: Jazz
Released: 1965, Columbia (Reissued 1997)
Key Tracks: "Walkin'," "Yesterdays," "So What."
Catalog Choice: Miles Smiles; ESP; Nefertiti
Next Stop: Wayne Shorter: Speak No Evil
After That: Herbie Hancock: Speak like a Child
Book Pages: 209–210