Fresh off a week’s worth of warm-up shows in California, the Miles Davis septet landed in Tokyo for a three-week tour of Japan – Miles’ final overseas performances until the 1980s. The band’s last visit to Japan in June of ’73 marked a turning point for what was then a fairly new ensemble of musicians, including the debut of setlist staples, as well as the first appearance of Miles on organ and Mtume on the primitive Yamaha EM-90 drum machine – essential components of the band’s sound that would be warped beyond recognition by the time the septet returned to the island in January of ’75.
Rather than coast on the momentum of their excellent warm-up gigs at Keystone Korner and the Troubadour, the septet seems hell-bent on rebirth upon arrival in Tokyo. With both nights captured largely in full, the tapes reveal a quartet of sprawling, lurching, often messy sets in which the band favors heady abstraction over funk, often pushing both the music and the audience’s endurance to their breaking point. As the February 1st date that produced Agharta and Pangea looms on the horizon, hearing the septet begin to fully integrate the more experimental, sinister elements that would define those LPs makes these Tokyo tapes a thrilling listening experience.
1.22 – Night One
Expertly recorded for radio broadcast, the first night is captured in stunning clarity. And though the stereo image is reversed from the band’s stage layout, (Pete Cosey in the right channel, Reggie Lucas on the left) it’s easily the best-sounding unofficial document of the tour. Miles casually loops the “Funk” theme to start the set while the audience sits rapt and the band checks their levels before Foster kicks in and Miles clears the air with a few organ blasts. Some awesome sparring between Miles and Lucas around the midsection sets up a ferocious Cosey solo, his guitar so overdriven it sounds as though it’s melting down in the quieter sections. As Cosey wraps, the groove tightens and the band vamps hard through the tune’s segue into “Maiysha” – dig how Lucas mimics a clavinet in the tune’s final minutes.
Miles states the “Maiysha” theme on an almost perversely distorted organ as the band tumbles in, hitting each pause with incredible precision until Cosey beams back in from a distant planet while the tune plateaus and Michael Henderson drops a dead-on heavy bass figure that nicely counters the more melodic “cocktail jazz” sections. Despite their vigor out the gate, the band loses steam down the stretch and makes an early exit after less than 40 minutes on stage.
“Ife” opens the second set with a fuzzed-out Cosey echoing the theme as Sonny Fortune counterbalances the doom with a haunting flute intro. As Fortune wraps, Cosey and Mtume layer sheets of vicious synth and drum machine noise as Miles switches over to organ and Lucas lays a stunner of a solo overtop. A brief kalimba solo from Cosey leads the segue into “Mtume”, distilled to its essence while the band seesaws between the churning groove and the languid B section almost racing to the finish line before pausing briefly and launching headfirst into an ultra-tight “Turnaroundphrase”.
Lucas riffs hard on “Willie Nelson” while the band shifts into “Tune in 5” until Fortune takes over for an extended solo across the bulk of the tune – accompanied by washes of drum machine, pulsing bass and kitchen sink percussion from Cosey, this home stretch is one of the night’s high points. A skeletal run though of “Hip Skip” closes the set before an exhausted solo from Miles and a loping batch of stop/starts slowly reduces everything to its barest elements and the curtain falls.
Get the tape / Lossless
First set
1. Funk [Prelude Pt. 1] (21:48)
2. Maiysha (15:46)
Second set
1. Ife (18:22)
2. Mtume (4:12)
3. Turnaroundphrase (5:20)
4. Tune in 5 (4:07)
5. Hip Skip (10:28)
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