CDOTD 4/29/2023

 Miles Davis: Live at the Fillmore East (March 7, 1970): It's About That Time (Columbia) 

I don't recall where I bought this

I like vinyl as much as the next person. I've kept a couple of records since my high school days. 

Nobody likes CDs. Nobody has the romantic attachment to them the way they do vinyl records.

Here's the truth of the matter: maybe fewer people every year have CD players and buy discs, but if done properly, CD technology is great. Treat the disc properly, it will play ad infinitum. It holds up to about eighty minutes of audio, and a pretty degree of quality.

With a record, you are dragging a diamond across a piece of plastic. To play a record is to, little by little, degrade its quality. They scratch easily, to speak nothing of the lousy quality of many pressings. It used to be, if you wanted to cheap way to hear something, you sought out a used LP version instead of a CD. Now it's completely the opposite in most cases.

It was something of a find when this double CD was issued in 2001. A live document of pieces from Bitches Brew, with an otherwise little-documented band of Wayne Shorter, Chick Corea, Dave Holland, Jack DeJohnette, and Airto Moreiro. This was recorded when the Miles group played bills with Neil Young and Steve Miller, the sort of thing that could probably not happen now except maybe at a big festival. 

The music is aggressive and noisy, maybe in a way jazz needed. Even the recording is distorted from time to time, particularly during Wayne's first solo. It doesn't detract from the recording, if anything the opposite. It's also not murky/noisy the way that the 1974-75 live recordings usually are. 

So guess what? Third Man Records is reissuing this recording on a three LP set, colored vinyl, six side etched, with a bonus 7" of covers, a bumper sticker and patch, and who knows, maybe a hit of blow hidden inside too. 

(God I have to be careful. I AM kidding.)

There's a subscription to Third Man involved, and I don't want to think about how expensive the whole thing might be. Plus the CD gives you two complete sets uninterrupted. I'm sure it's going to be a handsome package, fun to hold, and way too expensive. 

So if you feel like shelling out and putting more money in Jack White's pockets, by all means do so. Yes that's judgy. It's also an interesting performance, very much worth hearing. I'll stuck with the CD though.