The Best Miles Davis Live Albums
It’s becoming something of a tradition for me, early in the year, to do a survey of the best live albums by a music legend. In 2024, I kicked off with my five favorite Neil Young live recordings, then followed it up last year with David Bowie. To keep a good thing going, I’m offering the third in the series, for which there was only really one choice: Miles Davis.
This year is Davis’ centennial, and 35 years after his passing in 1991, his music still sounds groundbreaking and visionary. And that goes for his live output as well, which is nearly as overwhelming as his studio catalog. More than 40 live albums and box sets bear his name, which might be overkill for any other artist, but with Davis and the various lineups he played with over the years, you get something wildly different nearly every time. His early fusion years with Chick Corea and Wayne Shorter aren’t going to sound like his performances with John Coltrane. And the frenetic sounds of his mid-’60s quintet is a wildly different band than the funk driven sounds of his pre-hiatus group in the mid-’70s.
There are a handful of minor similarities in programming throughout Miles Davis’ live material from the mid-1960s on; a great number of his live sets feature some variation of a track called either “Directions” or “The Theme,” and none of them are as thrilling as the “Four” & More take on “So What,” or any version of “What I Say.” (Sorry.) But hey, whatever it takes to bring the groove alive. Regardless of one or two minor redundancies, few artists make as good a case for a catalog full of live albums as Miles Davis, with a dozen or more entries making the case for being essential, among them My Funny Valentine, Dark Magus, Pangaea, and several others I didn’t include in the final list—but even with this highly subjective ranking, I can tell you I was deeply conflicted about having to make those cuts. You can make a very strong argument for an entirely different set of five albums, and I probably wouldn’t even disagree, necessarily.
It’s as much about preference as performance, basically, and these are the five that have a special kind of magic to my ears. From his high-energy mid-’60s avant garde intensity to the deep alien funk of his fusion era, here are my picks for the best Miles Davis live albums.
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5. “Four” & More (1966)
Long packaged with the celebrated My Funny Valentine live set, and serving as a ramped-up counterpoint to that set led by a legendary ballad, “Four” & More is both a phenomenal performance captured in pristine quality and an essential piece of Miles Davis lore. Recorded at New York’s Philharmonic Hall in 1964, “Four” & More was a benefit concert for three different organizations: the NAACP, the Congress of Racial Equality and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. Which is a good thing! Except for one detail: Davis neglected to let his band know until just before getting on stage that their payments were being donated too. As such, the fiery performances here from Herbie Hancock, Tony Williams, Ron Carter and George Coleman can be in part attributed to their ire over having to play for free, without any choice in the matter. Pissed-off or not, it’s a spectacular set of performances, taking much of Miles’ late ’50s and early ’60s material and kicking up the BPMs several notches—that opening sprint through “So What” is the most punk anything from Kind of Blue has ever sounded. And the band’s takes on the title track from Seven Steps to Heaven as well as that album’s “Joshua” never let up on the momentum, Williams’ nimble and powerful drumwork driving their intensity. That it’s one of the best sounding documents in Davis’ live catalog makes it all the more remarkable—there’s no mistaking just how much hustle there is in the band’s performances.
Listen/Buy: Spotify | Amazon (vinyl)
4. Live In Europe 1969: The Bootleg Series Vol. 2 (2013)
Throughout the 21st century, pretty much all of Miles Davis’ official live albums have been expanded into box set reissues containing the complete sessions. But the introduction of the Bootleg Series (kinda like Bob Dylan) in the past 15 years has revealed just how much more was in the vaults that never got a proper release in the first place. This triple-disc set, recorded at four different performances in 1969, captures a transitional moment for Davis before the release of Bitches Brew, with wildly different takes on material from that album as well as a handful of standards (“Round Midnight,” almost unrecognizable) and other stellar material given the looser and more frantic treatment of his late ’60s recordings, marked by a more avant garde tonal palette and many of Wayne Shorter’s knottier compositions. These live recordings—featuring Davis joined by Shorter, Chick Corea, Dave Holland and Jack DeJohnette—bridge two eras by causing the most friction, hypnotic fusion colliding with frantic avant garde jazz. It’s a trip.
Listen/Buy: YouTube | Amazon (vinyl)
3. The Complete Live at the Plugged Nickel 1965 (1995)
I had originally sought to differentiate my five picks by lineup, since Davis performed with a lot of musicians over the years, but I wasn’t willing to sacrifice either “Four” & More or Live at the Plugged Nickel, which feature a similar lineup of Hancock, Carter and Williams, with Wayne Shorter on sax instead of George Coleman. Nonetheless, this expansive live set—first released in two Japan-only volumes, then a 2xLP release in 1982, then the entire sessions in 1995 and reissued this month for the first time in 30 years—is much less pissed off and frantic, showcasing a broader spectrum of the quintet’s capabilities. “My Funny Valentine” is a little smokier and more mysterious, a bit more off kilter; “Four” is manic and dizzying; “Round Midnight” alternately climactic and mesmerizing; and it’s hard not to be dazzled by the juxtaposition of the sped up classic “All Blues” and its expansive, lively companion “No Blues.” In contrast to some of the other complete-sessions live boxes out there, it also features an even deeper well of material, many of them standards from Davis’ ’50s recordings given more elastic and unpredictable arrangements, a stunning juxtaposition of the familiar and the alien.
Listen/Buy: Spotify | Turntable Lab (vinyl)
2. Live-Evil/The Cellar Door Sessions 1970 (1971/2005)
It’s worth stating up front that the 1971 2xLP album Live-Evil is one of the best Miles Davis releases in any category: live, studio, or otherwise. And in this case it’s both, sort of. About 90 percent of Live-Evil is culled from live sessions at the Cellar Door in Washington, D.C., with ambient-jazz interludes in between, each of them written by Brazilian jazz artist Hermeto Pascoal, recorded at Columbia Studio B in New York City. The juxtaposition gives it an even more mesmerizing flow, as if Davis were conducting spiritual rituals in between trance-like jazz-fusion freakouts. Yet in 2005, Columbia/Legacy released a box set of the entire Cellar Door Sessions, offering six complete sets of a thrilling and fiery run of shows from 1970 from Davis and his band (which here, in contrast to his Europe shows from the year before, includes Keith Jarrett, Gary Bartz, Michael Henderson, Airto Moreira, John McLaughlin in two sets, and the only holdover from the previous year, Jack DeJohnette). While listening to all six sets in sequence is arguably too much for one sitting, it’s revelatory to hear much of the same material painted in different hues, like how “Honky Tonk” is given Davis’ funky guidance in one take, and then kicked up into a more explosive variant with Bartz’s saxophone soloing. Then-familiar material from Bitches Brew and In a Silent Way is hammered into curious, more concise shapes, and there’s no version of “What I Say” that doesn’t kick ass.
Listen/Buy: Spotify (Live-Evil) | (Cellar Door Sessions) | Amazon (vinyl)
1. Agharta (1975)
The choice of Agharta as Miles Davis’ best live album is, depending on your position, a perfectly logical and perhaps definitive choice, or just plain wrong. If you’re in the latter category, you probably hated On the Corner too. But we have the benefit of hindsight now, and what might not have landed with jazz traditionalists at the time (the reviews in 1975 weren’t very charitable) has since been regarded as a bold and innovative set, capturing a fusion of jazz and rock at its most electrifying. Documenting one of two performances at Festival Hall in Osaka in 1975, the other one being released as Pangaea, Agharta bridges Davis’ groundbreaking 1970s studio output with the psychedelic groove of a band like Funkadelic—”Prelude Pt. 1″ wouldn’t be out of place on Maggot Brain, for instance, thanks in large part to Pete Cosey’s blazing, furious guitar playing. Not that Davis doesn’t hold his own with his wah-wah-addled trumpet playing—you’d never know he was in declining health at the time. Even the material here that’s drawn from Get Up With It and Jack Johnson, “Maiysha” and “Theme from Jack Johnson,” takes on a life of its own, recognizable but otherworldly, carrying a deep funk from far off realms. It’s not music, it’s sorcery.
Listen/Buy: Spotify | Amazon (vinyl)
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