![\"\"](\"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/02\/miles_plugged_nickel1.jpg\")
While serious and exclusively-jazz fans might bristle at the notion, Miles Davis is jazz\u2019s Beatles. While their musical careers and work are vastly different, both Miles and the Fab Four shared an important and defining quality: restless change. In their comparatively brief time together, the Beatles went from catchy pop songs to groundbreaking experimentation, from simple guitar-combo arrangements to wildly ambitious and complex works.<\/p>\n
And over the course of his decades-long musical life, Miles Davis shifted radically from one style to another. Crucially, Davis wasn\u2019t moving into areas occupied by other artists: he was redefining music, effectively creating new styles, genres — or at least subgenres — and making them his own. And before the dust settled, he was on to the next thing. No dilettante, Davis embarked upon his musical adventurism with commitment, with a dedication to taking the music to new places. And in that regard he succeeded brilliantly not once, not twice, but over and over again.<\/p>\n
And one of Davis\u2019 more radical shifts \u2013 a descriptor that has plenty of options from which to choose where he\u2019s concerned \u2013 few are as celebrated as his mid 1960s work. Making a kind of anti-music, Davis sought to upend established and conventional ideas about what music \u2013 jazz, in this case \u2013 was about. He was aided in his exploration by an ensemble made up of some of the very best. And while much of Davis\u2019 experimentation to come would take place in the studio \u2013 I\u2019m thinking here of 1970\u2019s Bitches Brew<\/i> and Jack Johnson<\/i><\/a> from \u201871\u2013 in 1965, the stage was his primary laboratory. So it\u2019s entirely fitting that a defining document of this period is a live album.<\/p>\n But not just any live album. While it captures a mere (\u201cmere!\u201d) pair of nights featuring his second great quintet, The Complete Live at the Plugged Nickel<\/i> brings together recordings that had been issued previously on single LPs plus many unreleased tracks. Originally released on 8 CDs in 1995, the set was also made available in a limited 10 LP format. Copies of the latter are highly prized and rarely found in the wild. A new reissue makes the set available once again on vinyl.<\/p>\n As is the nature of jazz \u2013 and especially where Miles Davis is concerned \u2013 the duplication of songs in the two nights\u2019 set lists doesn\u2019t mean that listeners are hearing the same music. No, the very approach that the players brought to this material \u2013 in short, play the unexpected<\/em> \u2013 meant that each performance was in effect a new, real-time composition. So this set of originals and standards is rich with variety, nuance, unpredictability and even danger.<\/p>\n With Ron Carter on bass, Tony Williams on drums, Herbie Hancock on piano, Wayne Shorter on tenor sax and Miles on trumpet, The Complete Live at the Plugged Nickel 1965<\/i> is valuable not only for its historical import and its influence, but for the challenging and rewarding listening experience it offers. Beautifully packaged and featuring a 12×12 booklet packed with photos and essays, the new 10 LP boxed set is simply essential, and listeners who appreciate and\/or wish to learn more about groundbreaking jazz are advised to connect with this music in whatever format is practical: the vinyl, the CDs, even digital or streaming if necessary.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" While serious and exclusively-jazz fans might bristle at the notion, Miles Davis is jazz\u2019s Beatles. While their musical careers and work are vastly different, both Miles and the Fab Four […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":30815,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_exactmetrics_skip_tracking":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[19,40,42,64,65,73],"tags":[1482],"class_list":["post-30814","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-compilation","category-instrumental","category-jazz","category-reissue","category-review","category-vinyl","tag-miles-davis","cat-19-id","cat-40-id","cat-42-id","cat-64-id","cat-65-id","cat-73-id","has_thumb"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30814","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=30814"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30814\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":30853,"href":"https:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30814\/revisions\/30853"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/30815"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=30814"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=30814"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=30814"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"\"](\"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/02\/miles_plugged_nickel2.jpg\")
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