The Last Great Set

By David E. Thigpen

PERFORMER: MILES DAVIS

ALBUM: MILES & QUINCY LIVE AT MONTREUX

LABEL: WARNER

THE BOTTOM LINE: Nearing the end of his brilliant career, the jazz master raged valiantly against the dying of the light.

Like a man who had struck a deal with the devil, Miles Davis possessed astounding creative powers, but was cursed with a dark, heavy spirit. His music and his mercurial moods -- he sometimes performed with his back to the audience, and a vicious temper coiled behind his hoarse whisper of a voice --made him jazz's most troubled and intensely gifted star at the time of his death in 1991.

In his lifelong obsession with breaking new ground, Davis revolutionized jazz time and again. One such turning point was the legendary series of albums (among them, Miles Ahead and Sketches of Spain) that he recorded in the 1950s and '60s with arranger Gil Evans. Borne on Evans' rich orchestrations, Davis' risky improvisational strategies and restless experimentation lifted jazz onto higher planes of complexity and excitement.

In the late '70s, Davis' pal Quincy Jones began urging him to revisit the Evans sessions, but for 15 years Davis declined. Then, at age 65, perhaps sensing that his time was running out, he relented. At the famous jazz festival in Montreux, Switzerland, Jones assembled the original Evans scores and led the orchestra with Davis on solo. The result, Miles & Quincy Live at Montreux, is Davis' final live album. Recorded only weeks before he died, it is an excruciatingly openhearted struggle by a master defiantly raging against the dying of the light.

Dogged by respiratory problems, Davis' once assertive, quicksilver trumpet tone flickers and flares like an oxygen-starved flame. On Miles Ahead he sits out long passages, but with trumpeter Wallace Roney backing him up, Davis' pride and defiance burn through as he suddenly leaps into the final chorus, bobbing atop the careening rhythm with a tone that begins as a crackle and winds up pure and delicate as crystal. On the slow-building Solea, he struggles to find himself, then, catching his wind, lets fly a cascade of notes that arc and shimmer with the same brassy authority he wielded 30 or 40 years ago. It was a final courageous flourish, and typically Davis. From struggle and defiance he drew his power, right to the end.