Summarize this content to 2000 words in 6 paragraphs in Arabic Unlock the Editor’s Digest for freeRoula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.The eighth volume of Sony Legacy’s Bootleg series, a six-CD box set, traces the formation of Miles Davis’s second great quintet between 1963 and 1964. Its repertoire sets broody ballads alongside the trumpeter’s greatest hits — the title track of Milestones is included, as are “All Blues” and “So What” from Kind of Blue. Brisk tempi, a fiery young band and a sense of risk create music that resonates to this day. The unedited performances, most of them unreleased until now, rarely falter.The first four discs were recorded over three days at the Festival Mondial de Jazz in Juan-les-Pins, Antibes, in July 1963. Davis had assembled the band a couple of months before — they recorded half of the album Seven Steps to Heaven that May — and from the get-go they play with both abandon and control. The remaining two discs present concerts from the Paris Jazz Festival held on October 1, 1964. The rhythm section is the same throughout, but between the two festivals, Wayne Shorter replaced George Coleman as saxophonist, completing the second great quintet.The set opens with a pulse-changing “So What”; the evergreen “Stella By Starlight” tugs the heart, and three speed-of-light versions of “Walkin’” clock in at widely different times. Pianist Herbie Hancock, bassist Ron Carter and the late drummer Tony Williams were all then new to both Davis’s music and life on the road, but their adventurous spirit, honed in the Blue Note label’s recording studios, was now let off the leash. Coleman was more seasoned — he toured with BB King in 1953 — and here his playing gives full rein to that knowledge and skill.The Paris concerts find the band pushing their ideas closer to the edge. The repertoire overlaps, with Davis as imperious and the band playing with as much confidence and snap as before. But Shorter’s oblique lines, harmonic ambiguity and furry tone broaden the soundscape, adding emotional width. A superb band had become one of jazz’s all-time greats.★★★★★‘Miles Davis in France 1963 & 1964: The Bootleg Series Volume 8’ is released by CBS/Sony Legacy
