standards and signification between jazz and fusion: miles davis and \" i fall in love too...

$: Standards and Signification between Jazz and Fusion: Miles Davis and \" I Fall in Love Too Easily, \" 1963–1970$
Standards and Signification betweenJazz and Fusion: Miles Davis and “I Fallin Love Too Easily,” 1963–1970John Paul Meyers

Introduction

In a career marked by dramatic changes in style, instrumentation, band members,repertoire, and sartorial choices, the 1960s and the early 1970s stands out as a particu-larly eventful time for Miles Davis. He began the early 1960s as perhaps the mostfamous musician in jazz, a genre which was still a major commercial and culturalforce. Here is how British jazz writer Richard Cook describes Davis’s position in1961, on the heels of the Someday My Prince Will Come album:

Davis’s stock as a celebrity and a media personality as well as a jazz musician had con-tinued to grow, as had his personal fortune: he was probably making more moneyfrom jazz record sales than any of his contemporaries with the possible exceptionof Dave Brubeck, whose star had perhaps waned a little since the late 1950s. As faras Columbia [Records] were concerned, he was a guaranteed source of income.Album sales of rock ’n’ roll records had yet to make a significant impact—it wasstill seen as very much a teenage, singles-based music—and Davis could lay title toa business stature on par with that of many leading American entertainers.1

However, by the early 1970s, several developments had occurred that threatened boththe prestige of jazz and Davis’s status as the genre’s most important figure. Jazz’s econ-omic and cultural position was challenged both by music coded as “white” (the rockmusic performed by artists like The Beatles, The Doors, and even Jimi Hendrix) and“black” (Motown, soul, and funk of artists like Sly and the Family Stone and JamesBrown).2 The teenage singles-buyers of the early 1960s mentioned by Cook had

1Richard Cook, It’s About That Time: Miles Davis On and Off Record (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 132.2While Hendrix was of African American, Native American, and European ancestry, his music, particularly early inhis career, was most popular among white rock fans. The African American poet (and later collaborator with Davison his autobiography) Quincy Troupe confirms as much when recounting Hendrix’s meeting with Troupe: “Hewas a shy man and was flattered that I loved his music so much and that I knew who he was, because, as he latertold me, most blacks had never heard of him. That was because the kind of music he played appealed mostly toyoung white fans of rock and roll.” See Quincy Troupe, Miles and Me (Berkeley: University of California Press,2000), 137. Davis himself also seems to have preferred Hendrix’s collaborations with the African American musi-cians Buddy Miles and Billy Cox on the Band of Gypsies album. As recounted in Miles: The Autobiography, “Butwhen he [Hendrix] started playing with Buddy and Billy in the Band of Gypsies, I think he brought what hewas doing all the way out. But the record companies and white people liked him better when he had the whiteguys in the band [i.e., Mitch Mitchell and Noel Redding, who played drums and bass, respectively, in the JimiHendrix Experience]. See Miles Davis with Quincy Troupe, Miles: The Autobiography (New York: Simon and

Jazz Perspectives, 2015Vol. 9, No. 2, 113–136, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/17494060.2016.1196495

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matured into the so-called “baby-boomer” generation, one which made its presencefelt through massive attendance at rock music festivals and spent a good portion ofits income on purchasing recorded music, particularly rock LP records. In a not unre-lated development, white critics and intellectuals began treating rock music as a cred-ible artistic medium, instead of as a novel, disposable commodity. For some Westernclassical music composers and musicians, rock began to replace jazz as a kind of favor-ite hobby: the music that they spoke about in interviews or public appearances andseemed to hold in a similar high esteem as the accepted classical canon. Forexample, beginning in the late 1930s, the composer Ned Rorem was obsessed withthe music of Billie Holiday, and during the late 1950s, Leonard Bernstein intently fol-lowed the developments of musicians like Ornette Coleman.3 By the end of the 1960s,however, these same men were paying more attention to rock music played by and tar-geted to the white counterculture.4 As Keir Keightley notes, jazz was no longer the onlypopular music genre which could be taken “seriously.”5

To a certain extent, Davis was able to navigate—and even profit from—this shiftingmusical and cultural landscape. For an album released by a “jazz” musician, BitchesBrew (recorded in a series of sessions in August 1969,6 and released in March 1970)enjoyed unprecedented commercial success. However, subsequent recordings, includ-ing 1972’s On the Corner, failed to duplicate those sales figures. Davis’s status as thebiggest star in jazz had also been challenged by the rise of other musicians, includinghis former pianist Herbie Hancock, who had more success marketing his music tothe large young black audience that Davis coveted.7 Aesthetically, Davis’s music had

Schuster, 1989), 293. Since the similarity in language between these two accounts of Hendrix’s music is so striking,it is worth nothing that Davis’s status as the sole or even primary authorial voice behindMiles: The Autobiographyhas been questioned by several writers, as Ken Prouty has summarized. Throughout this essay, Miles: The Auto-biography will be treated less as an oracle than as one particularly interesting, if problematic, account of Davis’slife and career. See Ken Prouty, “Plagiarizing Your Own Autobiography, and Other Strange Tales: Miles Davis,Jazz Discourse, and The Aesthetics of Silence,” Jazz Research Journal 4 (2010): 15–41.3Ned Rorem, Knowing When to Stop (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1994). John Litweiler’s biography ofColeman suggests Bernstein even sat in on piano with Coleman’s group at the Five Spot club in New York. SeeJohn Litweiler, Ornette Coleman: A Harmolodic Life (New York: William Morrow, 1992), 82.4Ned Rorem, “The Music of the Beatles,”New York Review of Books, January 18, 1968. See also Leonard Bernstein’smusical explanations of songs by The Beatles, The Monkees, and The Left Banke, “Inside Pop: The Rock Revolu-tion,” CBS News, April 1967.5Keir Keightley, “Taking Popular Music (And Tin Pan Alley and Jazz) Seriously,” Journal of Popular Music Studies22, no. 1 (March 2010): 90–97.6Several additional tracks, recorded in early 1970, have been included on a re-release as the “complete” BitchesBrew sessions.7On his status compared with that of Hancock, Davis writes: “[In 1974] we started a tour of the United Statesplaying with Herbie Hancock’s group. Herbie had a big hit album [Head Hunters, released in October 1973]and he was really well liked among the young black kids. We agreed to be his opening act. Deep down thatpissed me off.” A bit later, the book frames these same events more optimistically: “I was touring all over withHerbie and we were killing everybody. Most of the audiences were young and black and that was good. That’swhat I wanted, and I was finally getting there.” See Miles: The Autobiography, 330–331. For further discussionof Davis’s desire to appeal to a young, black audience during this time period, see Jeremy A. Smith, “’Sell itBlack’: Race and Marketing in Miles Davis’s Early Fusion Jazz,” Jazz Perspectives 4, no. 1 (April 2010): 7–33.For a summary of the marketing and promotion of the Head Hunters album, see Steven F. Pond, HeadHunters: The Making of Jazz’s First Platinum Album (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2005), 155–186.

114 Standards and Signification between Jazz and Fusion

changed in two important ways, compared to his music of ten years prior: with hisincorporation of electric instruments into his touring and recording bands (includingelectric guitar, Fender Rhodes pianos, and various pedals used to manipulate his owntrumpet sound) and his eschewing of many of the formal conventions of jazz perform-ance (such as head-solos-head form, discrete songs, fixed chorus structures, and func-tional harmony) in favor of long, groove-oriented performances organized around bassostinatos, short melodic fragments, or free improvisations.

These musical changes helped to introduce Davis to potential new audiences forboth record sales and live shows, but they also created a major fault line in the receptionof his music. At the time, and in the decades since these important developments,Davis’s musical changes in the late 1960s have alienated many listeners, critics, andfellow musicians who otherwise placed his earlier work in the jazz pantheon.Perhaps the most polemical of these critics was Stanley Crouch in a 1990 essay thatdescribed In a Silent Way (recorded in February 1969 and released in July 1969) as“no more than droning wallpaper music.” Davis’s next studio album, Bitches Brew,with its “multiple keyboards, electronic guitars, static beats, and clutter,” confirmedthat Davis was “firmly on the path of the sellout.”8 In Crouch’s assessment, this isthe path Davis would continue to follow for the rest of his career.

While perhaps uniquely sharp-tongued, Crouch is not alone in his assessment ofDavis’s music. Even some of Davis’s musical peers and friends, while quick to under-score their respect and admiration for him, also admitted to a certain bafflement at hismusic from the late 1960s and onward. A 1972 profile of Davis by the jazz criticLeonard Feather collects a few of these reactions, with Dizzy Gillespie affirming, “Iknow he has something in mind, whatever it is. I know he knows what he’s doing,so he must be doing something that I can’t get to yet.” Clark Terry similarlydemurs, “I don’t know whether or not I’m musically mature enough to understandit,” before noting that one of the reasons Davis’s fusion jazz might be attracting a com-paratively large audience is because it lacks, “the real balls of jazz, the chord pro-gressions, the structures, and so forth.” While not as derogatory as Crouch would betwenty years later, Terry also advances the idea that Davis’s musical direction mightbe a calculated move to reap the financial rewards of attracting a larger audience:

Maybe he’s doing it sincerely, but I do know that it’s a much more lucrative directionfor him. I happen to know that there was a period when in spite of all his many pos-sessions—investments, home, car—there was a period when he needed to bolsterthese; he really needed to get into a higher financial bracket. And there was an oppor-tunity for him to get into this kind of thing, so he took the opportunity to jump outand do it. 9

8Stanley Crouch, “Play the Right Thing,” The New Republic (February 12, 1990), reprinted in The Miles Davis Com-panion: Four Decades of Commentary, ed. Gary Carner, (New York: Schirmer, 1996), 34.9Leonard Feather, “Miles Smiles” in The Miles Davis Companion: Four Decades of Commentary, ed. Gary Carner,(New York: Schirmer, 1996), 131–132. Note the masculinist language Terry uses to describe “the chord pro-gressions, the structures, and so forth” of “real” jazz. For Terry, Davis’s new music is viewed as musicallysimple, appealing to a wide audience, and perhaps therefore, feminine.

Jazz Perspectives 115

Despite these critiques, Davis’s early fusion years are not without critical and scholarlysupporters. These supporters include, perhaps most notably, Greg Tate and Gary Tom-linson: a black public intellectual known for his provocative writing on popular cultureand a white musicologist best known for his scholarship on Renaissance musicalculture, respectively. In Bitches Brew, Tate hears, “James Brown’s antiphonal riffingagainst a metaphoric bass drone with Sly’s minimalist polyrhythmic melodies andJimi’s concept of painting pictures with ordered successions of electronic sounds.”10

While Tomlinson’s prose is decidedly less ecstatic, he prizes a surprisingly similar“rich dialogue of musical voices that went into the making of Davis’s new styles”which “opened lines of communication between traditional jazz, with its blues back-ground and improvisational impetus, on the one hand, and rhythm and blues, funk,and white acid rock on the other.”11 Tomlinson and Tate, along with more recentwork by scholars such as Eric Porter, Jeremy A. Smith, Victor Svorinich, and GeorgeGrella have contributed to a re-evaluation (and, perhaps, a vindication) of Davis’searly fusion period.12 In these various narratives, the story of Davis’s career, either astragedy or triumph, has largely been told through his studio recordings, especially con-cerning the late 1960s and the—apparently—radical shift of albums like In a Silent Wayand Bitches Brew as compared with his earlier acoustic work. This is problematic since,as Chris Robinson notes in a review of newly-released Davis live recordings from 1967through 1970, “most of what has been [previously] available for listeners who wereunable to hear his groups live barely resemble the [studio] albums made during thistime.”13 Close listening to some of this newly-released live material, along withDavis’s studio albums and other live recordings, can further illuminate how Davis’smusic was changing at this controversial time.

In the reminder of this paper, I engage in an examination of Davis’s studio and liverepertoire during the time period from 1963 until 1970, with a particular focus on hisperformances of the ballad “I Fall in Love Too Easily,” which was a remarkably persist-ent presence in his sets, despite the myriad of other changes that took place in this time.Indeed, listening to multiple versions of “I Fall in Love Too Easily” certainly revealsclear differences in musical parameters such as form, tempo, rhythm, timbre, andorchestration, as I will discuss below. But the fact that many performances of “I Fallin Love Too Easily” even exist—in settings as diverse as a recording studio in LosAngeles, a jazz club in Chicago, major concert hall stages in Europe, and the FillmoreEast and Fillmore West rock clubs—provides a compelling case study for scholars andlisteners alike. In a sense, Davis undertook a kind of experiment, holding “I Fall in Love

10Greg Tate, “The Electric Miles, Parts One and Two [1983],” reprinted in Greg Tate, Flyboy in the Buttermilk:Essays on Contemporary America (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1992), 74.11Gary Tomlinson, “Cultural Dialogics and Jazz: A White Historian Signifies,” Black Music Research Journal 11,no. 2 (Autumn 1991): 251, 261.12Eric Porter, “ It’s About That Time’: The Response to Miles Davis’s Electric Turn,” inMiles Davis and AmericanCulture, ed. Gerald Early (Saint Louis: Missouri Historical Society Press, 2001), 130–146; Jeremy A. Smith, Sound,Mediation, and Meaning in Miles Davis’s A Tribute to Jack Johnson (Ph.D., diss., Duke University, 2008); VictorSvorinich, Listen to This: Miles Davis and Bitches Brew (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2015); GeorgeGrella Jr., Bitches Brew (New York: Bloomsbury, 2015).13Chris Robinson, “Media Review,” Jazz Perspectives 8, no. 3 (2015): 321.


Too Easily” constant as part of his repertoire, but varying the contexts in which it wasperformed over a period of seven years. Examining Davis’s performances of “I Fall inLove Too Easily” enables us to focus in on what, according to both jazz critics and jazzhistorians, is a crucial turning point, not only for Davis’s career, but for the genre as awhole. Through detailed examination of various performances of “I Fall in Love TooEasily,” we can also concentrate closely on how exactly Davis’s music was changingduring this period, even if one song remained a part of his repertoire. In my analysis,I show that “I Fall in Love Too Easily,” more so than any other standard, served as adurable vehicle for Davis’s musical goals throughout the mid-1960s. By 1970,however, these goals seem to have shifted as Davis moved, step by step, away from amodel of jazz performance based on improvisation on a familiar, pre-existing tuneor structure. Hence, “I Fall in Love Too Easily,” and all other jazz standards weredropped from the band’s book as Davis pursued other means of communicatingwith his audience.

“I Fall in Love Too Easily” Joins Davis’s Repertoire

“I Fall in Love Too Easily” was written by Jule Styne and Sammy Cahn and first per-formed by Frank Sinatra in the 1945 MGM film Anchors Aweigh. Over the next tenyears, the song was recorded by several jazz musicians, including the singer JohnnyHartman in 1955 and by Davis rival Chet Baker, who sang and played trumpet on arecording of the song for his 1956 album Chet Baker Sings.14

Davis first recorded “I Fall in Love Too Easily” for his 1963 album Seven Steps toHeaven. This album found Davis at an unsettled time in his career, between hisgroups featuring John Coltrane and Cannonball Adderley of the late 1950s andearly 1960s (with which he recorded the celebrated 1959 album Kind of Blue) andthe successes of his “second great quintet” of the mid-1960s, with Wayne Shorter,Herbie Hancock, Tony Williams, and Ron Carter. Health problems were also both-ering Davis, making it difficult for him to keep a regular schedule of recordings andlive performances. Davis was also a victim of his own success in that the membersof his bands—such as Coltrane, Adderley, Bill Evans, Wynton Kelly, Jimmy Cobb,and Paul Chambers—often used the exposure they gained from playing withDavis as a springboard to leave the band and form their own successfulgroups. As a consequence of this instability of personnel, Davis experimentedwith various musicians to fill out his bands for gigs, tours, and recordings in theearly 1960s.

The initial recordings for Seven Steps to Heaven were in Los Angeles in April 1963,yielding takes of the title track, “Baby Won’t You Please Come Home,” “Basin StreetBlues,” “So Near So Far,” and “Joshua.” “I Fall in Love Too Easily” was also recordedin Los Angeles, using a quartet instrumentation, with Davis’s Harmon-muted trumpetaccompanied by the expatriate English pianist Victor Feldman, Ron Carter on bass, and

14For a general discussion of the song, see Ted Gioia, The Jazz Standards: A Guide to the Repertoire (New York:Oxford University Press, 2012), 163–165.


the Los Angeles-based Frank Butler on drums.15 This performance begins with a rubatopiano and bass introduction before a sixteen-measure statement of the song’s melodyby Davis at the tempo of around 50 beats per minute. Davis then plays two solochoruses, Feldman takes a chorus and a half solo, after which Davis returns to playthe melody for the second half of this chorus to end the piece. Perhaps the mostnotable feature of this version is that Butler goes in and out of a double-time feel see-mingly at random and not necessarily coinciding with important structural signposts(e.g., falling out of double time two measures before the end of Davis’s solo, only toreturn to double time during the second measure of the piano solo that follows).Carter never follows Butler’s lead to walk in medium 4/4 time—unlike the laterstudio and live recordings of the Carter–Williams–Hancock rhythm section, inwhich changes in feel and texture, while sometimes abrupt, are usually followed byother members of the rhythm section. In a contemporary review of the album forDownbeat, Don DeMichael noticed: “Butler occasionally seems at a loss as to whatto play behind Davis, sometimes double-timing for a few bars and then droppingback; he sounds more comfortable backing Feldman.”16

After the initial Los Angeles recording sessions, Davis was apparently unsatisfiedwith the results and re-recorded the up-tempo numbers “So Near, So Far,”“Joshua,” and “Seven Steps to Heaven,” in New York on May 14 with new membersHerbie Hancock on piano and Tony Williams on drums, retaining George Colemanon tenor saxophone and Ron Carter on bass. The eventual album Seven Steps toHeaven that resulted from these two recording sessions featured “Basin Street Blues,”“Baby Won’t You Please Come Home,” and “I Fall in Love Too Easily” from LosAngeles and the three tunes recorded in New York.17

Earlier in his career, Davis had often recorded songs from the “Great AmericanSongbook,” perhaps most notably on the albums which finished his contract with Pres-tige Records. These albums—Workin’, Cookin’, Relaxin’, and Steamin’—replicatedDavis’ nightclub sets at the time, and were recorded quickly in two sessions in Mayand October of 1956 so that Davis could fulfill his obligations to Prestige and moveon to a more lucrative contract with Columbia Records, beginning with his album‘Round About Midnight.18

In contrast to these albums for Prestige, the albums Davis would go on to record forColumbia did not feature songbook tunes. Most of the tunes recorded by Davis duringthis time period (from the mid-1950s until the mid-1960s) were either his own original

15The tenor saxophonist George Coleman was also part of these sessions. However, as was fairly typical of Davissaxophonists at the time, he does not play on the tunes taken at ballad tempos during studio recordings: “BasinStreet Blues,” “Baby Won’t You Please Come Home,” and “I Fall in Love Too Easily.”16Don DeMichael, Review of Seven Steps to Heaven [1963], reprinted in The Miles Davis Reader, ed. Frank Alkyer,Ed Enright, and Jason Koransky (New York: Hal Leonard, 2007), 229.17The alternate and master takes from these sessions were released in 2004 on the seven-disc boxed set Seven Steps:The Complete Miles Davis Columbia Recordings of 1963–1964.18For discussion, see John Szwed, So What: The Life of Miles Davis (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2002), 128,134; Jack Chambers,Milestones: The Music and Times of Miles Davis (New York: Da Capo, 1998 [1983]), 234–236,244–247; Ian Carr, Miles Davis: The Definitive Biography (New York: Thunder’s Mouth Press, 1998), 95-104; Davisand Troupe, Miles: The Autobiography, 200–205.


compositions, compositions by members of his band, or compositions by other con-temporary jazz musicians who could be considered his peers (for example, TheloniousMonk’s “’Round Midnight” or Jimmy Heath’s “Freedom Jazz Dance”).19 Seven Steps toHeaven marks something of a departure, then, as three of its tracks, “Baby Won’t YouPlease Come Home,” “Basin Street Blues,” and “I Fall in Love Too Easily,” were well-known standards. And “I Fall in Love Too Easily” would remain a part of Davis’s livesets during the mid-1960s, with the “second great quintet” and during the early years ofhis fusion period until 1970, when he had jettisoned all other jazz standards or songsfrom the Great American Songbook.

Standards and Signifyin(g)

What kind of cultural work is accomplished when a jazz musician plays a standard?Given that the performance of standards was (and is) such an important part ofjazz, but that it vanished almost entirely from Davis’s playing after 1970, right at thetime his music attracted new fans and alienated some of his old followers, it isworth pausing and considering what is communicated when a jazz musician likeDavis plays a standard—and what the absence of this practice in his playing wouldhave meant for his audiences.

To begin, playing a jazz standard allows for the possibility of a moment of recog-nition from the audience; this is true if we consider the experiences of both attendinga live performance and listening to recordings. Davis was notorious for not announcingthe titles of the songs that he was about to play during live performances, but audiencemembers could still recognize opening melodic gestures and respond with applausewhen they recognized the piece. This can be heard in numerous live recordings byDavis, even in live recordings made in Europe and Japan, showing that the global dis-tribution of Columbia Records was able to make his studio recordings available andfamiliar to a wide international audience.20

In other genres of music, such as rock or pop, audiences at live performances largelyexpect to hear songs that they know, either from that artist’s recorded catalog or coversof other well-known songs. In his study of the relationship between music and record-ing technology, Mark Katz has detailed how this expectation could be one result ofwhat he terms a “feedback loop” operating with recorded music. Because recordingsare repeatable in ways that live performances are not, listeners can become habituatedto hearing the same songs (and even minute details of the same performances) over andover. They then expect to hear these same performances replicated in live settings. Evenin music that is so ideologically connected to the idea of improvisation as jazz, this samekind of feedback loop is possible through what Katz terms the “repeatability” of

19The main exceptions to this were his orchestral collaborations with the arranger Gil Evans, including an albumthat featured their versions of songs from the Gershwin opera Porgy and Bess. But in his studio work with smallgroups, Davis rarely recorded songbook tunes during this time.20For example, see the July 1964 performance issued as Miles Davis Quintet in Tokyo (CBS-Sony 60064R) and theSeptember 1964 concert released as Miles Davis Quintet in Berlin (CBS 62976).


recorded music, through which, “unique spontaneous acts, then, may come to beregarded as fixed.”21

More generally, audiences in a variety of Western musical genres over the pastcentury have become used to the idea of hearing songs, compositions, or melodiesin live performance that they have some prior experience with. This has becomesuch an engrained part of musical experience that musicians, listeners, and scholarsonly rarely remark on what a fundamental change this is from prior practice. The clas-sical music critic Alex Ross has noted that, for much of its history, Western classicalmusic was characterized by an insatiable desire for new music and that the works bythe previous generation’s acknowledged masters were, within a few decades time,often seen as hopelessly old-fashioned and left to gather dust.22

Such revivals or a more general audible presence of music from the past in thesoundscape are now a common occurrence for listeners, aided by the advent andspread of recording technology from the early twentieth century onward. Themusic critic Simon Reynolds argues that audio recordings are “what ultimatelycreated the conditions of possibility for retro,” by which he means a general predi-lection for cultural artifacts from the past, a predilection that is “based… on obses-sive repeat-play of particular artifacts and focused listening that zooms in on minutestylistic details.”23 Extending Reynolds’s analysis, this “zoom-in and rewind” allowslisteners to become obsessed with, (and therefore demand to hear in live perform-ances) familiar music.

This is not a neutral development. Critics such as Ross and Reynolds seem to at leastbe slightly critical of this tendency to repeat and re-play music from the past, taking acritical stance that can be categorized as progressivist or modernist, in favor of newmusic and development; Reynolds himself fully admits to this ideological position.24

However, there can also be great power in the re-use of prior musical materials, andthere may be particular reasons why musicians re-play and repeat (and why listenersfind this appealing) which may not line up with critical prerogatives.

The theory of Signifyin(g) as proposed by Henry Louis Gates, Jr. has been used as acompelling explanation for the creative re-use of prior materials in a variety of AfricanAmerican artistic traditions, including literature, the visual arts, and music.25 In Gates’stheory, texts signify on other texts, playing with an audience’s expectations, alternatelyhighlighting and withholding aspects of the signified-on text that are already familiar tothe listener, reader, or viewer. For a jazz musician, this could be as simple as delayingnotes of a melody or words of a song by a few beats to create a sense of anticipation thatis eventually fulfilled. In the bebop era, jazz musicians signified on standards such as“How High the Moon” by adopting their chord progressions and writing new melodies

21Mark Katz, Capturing Sound: How Technology Has Changed Music (Berkeley: University of California Press,2010), 89.22Alex Ross, Listen to This (New York: Picador, 2011).23Simon Reynolds, Retromania: Pop Culture’s Addiction to Its Own Past (New York: Faber and Faber, 2011), xxxv.24Ibid., 404.25Henry Louis Gates, Jr., The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of Afro-American Literary Criticism (New York: OxfordUniversity Press, 1988).


to place on top of these chord progressions; such was the case of Charlie Parker’s com-position “Ornithology.”

However, this relationship to a previous text can be limiting. A song may haveassociations that an artist does not want to have and is unable to subvert eventhrough his or her “signifying” on it. In the case of music, intellectual property andthe payment of royalties are also major issues. For recordings, artists (or their recordcompanies) will have to pay royalties to the owners of the song’s copyright, even ifthe melody is embellished, improvised on, or otherwise “signified” on. Conversely,the royalty income earned from recordings of one’s own composition can be an impor-tant source of income for musicians. Since a chord progression cannot be copyrighted,bebop musicians were able to claim copyright by writing a new “head” or melody overan existing chord progression.

Moving forward twenty years to the 1960s, such concerns remained important forAfrican American jazz musicians, at a time when black ownership and black capitalismwere promoted as important strategies in the fight for civil rights and respect. In therecord industry in particular, many African American musicians such as Davis com-plained about economic slights from the white-owned companies (like Columbia)for which they were earning money. Therefore, the decision to record and performtunes either written by oneself or Tin Pan Alley tunes (composed largely by white song-writers) has to be viewed as a political one.

Throughout his career, Davis has been widely hailed as an interpreter of songs, par-ticularly of ballads. He is not typically held up as a major jazz composer, and few of hiscompositions (with the exceptions of “So What,” “All Blues,” and “Milestones”) havebeen frequently performed by other jazz musicians—in contrast to peers like CharlesMingus, Thelonious Monk, or Charlie Parker. It is primarily through his versions ofsongs written by other people, particularly Tin Pan Alley standards such as “MyFunny Valentine,” that Davis’s formidable reputation as a trumpeter and bandleaderrests.

At a certain point in his career, up until about the mid-1960s, this made sense forDavis. To perform such standards, particularly in live settings, was typical practicefor jazz musicians. Indeed, Davis’s performances of jazz standards were highly regardedby contemporary listeners, lauded by jazz critics, and have been analyzed in great detailby jazz scholars in the intervening decades. In a 1983 article, Howard Brofsky publisheda music-theoretical analysis of solos by Davis from 1956, 1958, and 1964 recordings ofthe ballad “My Funny Valentine” in Black Music Research Journal. While the subject ofhis analysis was certainly a novel one for a music theorist in the early 1980s, Brofsky’sanalysis otherwise uses the typical tools and methods of music theory to aestheticallyvalidate Davis’s performances, concluding that “there is, among these three versions,a kind of progression from improvisation to composition, from unique moments inthe earlier pieces to the global conception of the 1964 performance.”26

26Howard Brofsky, “Miles Davis and ‘My Funny Valentine’: The Evolution of a Solo,” Black Music Research Journal3 (1983): 35.


While examining in detail one of these same performances (the 1964 version of “MyFunny Valentine” recorded live at Philharmonic Hall in New York), Robert Walsertakes a very different approach in his 1995 article “Out of Notes: Signification,Interpretation, and the Problem of Miles Davis.” Walser discusses both the specificways that Davis performs the notes (necessitating a detailed transcription and aprose description of aspects of the performance difficult to capture in Western nota-tion) and how these performances functioned in a greater cultural context. Crucially,Walser’s analysis suggests that the ways in which Davis approached particular notes—bending them, using false fingering, rushing or playing behind the beat—are in factmeaningful and dialogical: communicating with the audience and their sense of expec-tation built on their prior musical knowledge. In so doing, Walser adapts Gates’s theoryof “Signifyin(g)” as an analytical tool. Comparing Davis’s performance of “My FunnyValentine” to that of the jazz singer Tony Bennett, Walser asks:

Now can we say that Davis is signifyin’ on—commenting on, in dialogue with, decon-structing—Bennett’s version? The question is made more complex by the idea that asa performer, Davis is signifyin’ on all of the versions of the song he has heard, but forhis audience, Davis is signifyin’ on all the versions each listener has heard. What isplayed is played up against Davis’s intertextual experience and what is heard isheard up against the listeners’ experiences. Moreover, Davis is no doubt engagingthe many Bennett-like performances of “My Funny Valentine” he must haveheard, but he is also signifyin’ on many jazz versions, including his own past perform-ances. This chain of signifyin’ spins out indefinitely, though most fundamentallyDavis is in dialogue with the basic features of the song itself, as jazz musicianswould understand them and as listeners would recognize them. The whole pointof a jazz musician like Davis playing a Tin Pan Alley pop song can be understoodas his opportunity to signify on the melodic possibilities, formal conventions (suchas the AABA form of the 32-measure chorus), harmonic potentials, and previouslyperformed versions of the song.27

With only a few substitutions (Chet Baker or Johnny Hartman for Bennett, the sixteen-measure form of “I Fall in Love Too Easily” for the 36-measure AABA’ form of “MyFunny Valentine”), Walser’s description of Davis’s signifying here could easily applyto his performances of “I Fall in Love Too Easily,” including the studio recordingfrom 1963 and the live versions he played of the piece in the years that followed.

As has been well-described both inMiles: The Autobiography and in a wide variety ofliterature by scholars and critics, Davis’s music began to change in the mid-1960s.28 Onthe studio recordings made with his quintet of Shorter, Hancock, Williams, and Carter,many of the markers of codified jazz style (twelve- or 32-bar forms, functionalharmony, head-solos-head arrangements) are not present or radically altered. But

27Robert Walser, “Out of Notes: Signification, Interpretation, and the Problem of Miles Davis,” The Musical Quar-terly 77, no. 2 (Summer 1993): 351.28Two in-depth musical analyses of Davis’s music during this period have been published in recent years: JeremyYudkin,Miles Smiles: Miles Davis and the Invention of Post-Bop (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2008) andKeith Waters, The Studio Recordings of the Miles Davis Quintet, 1965–1968 (Oxford: Oxford University Press,2011). Additionally, Todd Coolman’s dissertation provides detailed transcriptions and analyses of several perform-ances by the quintet. See Todd Coolman, Miles Davis Quintet of the Mid-1960s: Synthesis of Improvisational andCompositional Elements (PhD diss., New York University, 1997).


what has not been well-described is the fact that Davis and his quintet still performedjazz standards, including “I Fall in Love Too Easily” in these new performance stylesduring live gigs at clubs and concert halls. The Davis quintet in the mid-1960s andearlier bebop musicians were both signifyin(g) on jazz standards, in the sense ofusing an audience’s prior familiarity with a text (the expected melodies and chord pro-gressions of a particular Tin Pan Alley song) as a basis for creating a richly-layered newperformance.

During his lifetime, a handful of live recordings of Davis were available. Since hisdeath in 1991, Columbia Records has been engaged in a process of monetizing record-ings made of him during his lifetime, since he remains a highly bankable commodity asa musician. A steady stream of re-issued CDs, new archival recordings, and boxed setshave been issued.29 For scholars, this means that a profusion of live recordings havebecome available, and we can now hear more clearly how Davis and his quintetwere playing (and, indeed, signifying on) standard tunes during the 1960s, how theirperformances of these tunes varied over the course of several years, and what pointsof continuity existed in their live repertoire that are obscured by only listening totheir studio albums.

The “Second Great Quintet” at the Plugged Nickel

Davis assembled the “second great quintet” in the fall of 1964, with Wayne Shorterbecoming a permanent replacement for George Coleman. (Sam Rivers had alsoplayed with the group briefly for a tour of Japan.) The group, now in its final form,quickly made both live recordings (Miles in Berlin, recorded at the Berliner Philharmo-nie, on November 4) and studio recordings for the album E.S.P. in January 1965.However, Davis was again experiencing health issues that prevented the group fromtouring or recording for much of 1965. The members made use of this free time towork with other musicians and pursue their own projects, which included severalBlue Note albums made by members of the group during this time: Hancock’sMaiden Voyage, Williams’s Spring, and Shorter’s The Soothsayer, Etcetera, and The AllSeeing Eye. Perhaps more importantly, they had the opportunity to play with musiciansassociated with more experimental styles of jazz: Ron Carter worked with the saxopho-nist Charles Lloyd, Wayne Shorter played with Roy Haynes at Slugs (a Lower East Sideclub favored by members of the avant garde such as Albert Ayler and Sun Ra), and thetrio of Williams, Shorter, and Carter did a gig together in Boston playing freeimprovisations.30

While the members of the quintet picked up other playing experiences, Davis slowlyconvalesced, and in December of 1965, he took his now-solidified quintet into the

29Presciently, Davis observed in his autobiography, “I made six studio dates with this group [the ‘second greatquintet’] in four years… and there were some live recordings that I guess Columbia will release when theythink they can make the most money, probably after I’m dead.” See Davis and Troupe, Miles: The Autobiography,278.30Michelle Mercer, Footprints: The Life and Work of Wayne Shorter (New York: Penguin, 2004), 104–108; Mile-stones 2, 90


Plugged Nickel club in Chicago. Columbia made recordings of the group and, in 1995,released a boxed set of 39 tracks, documenting two complete nights (seven sets total) ofplaying.31 In his autobiography, Davis described the band’s repertoire at the time,drawing a distinction between the music that the quintet played live and what theyhad been recording in the studio for Columbia.

My playbook, the songs we would play every night, started to wear down the band.People were coming to hear those tunes that they heard on my albums; that’s whatwas packing them in the door: “Milestones,” “’Round Midnight,” “My Funny Valen-tine,” “Kind of Blue” [sic]. But the band wanted to play the tunes we were recordingwhich we never did live, and I know that was a sore point with them.… Instead ofdeveloping the new music live which we were playing on records, we found waysto make the old music sound as new as the new music we were recording.32

Davis seems to admit that commercial concerns—and, broadly speaking, a considerationof his audience—motivated his repertoire choices. This fits in well with Crouch’s idea,quoted above, of Davis being a “sellout” for performing rock-influenced music fromthe late 1960s onward, but it does not fit most descriptions of Davis in the early andmid-1960s. For example, the journalist Lionel Olay began a 1964 profile of Davis bydescribing him as someone who “is distinctly anti-performance” and “barely maskshis contempt and hostility for the fans.”33 Writing in 1964, this was already the conven-tional wisdom about Davis, but it was conventional wisdom that, at times, Davis was atpains to dispute. In a 1968 interview with the drummer Arthur Taylor for the latter’sNotes and Tones book, Davis seems to take direct aim at critics and journalists like Olay:

Most guys want to know about…well, they say I’m rude, and that I turn my back onthe audience, and that I don’t like white people. And that I don’t like the audience.But the thing is, I never think about an audience. I just think about the band. And ifthe band is all right, I know the audience is pleased. I don’t have to hold the audi-ence’s hand.34

Davis in 1965 seems to be at a crossroads. He is caught between his bandmates’ desireto perform the new material on his studio albums, his audience’s desire to hear familiar

31Limited excerpts from the recordings were first released in 1976 and 1982. While all live recordings are mediated,the Plugged Nickel boxed set recordings are particularly important in that they preserve order and running times.This approach differs from some other live jazz recordings that either take a “best of” approach, combining per-formances from various nights or venues onto a single recording or editing lengthy live performances for time to fitthe constraints of physical media. It is also significant that this boxed set was released posthumously, at a timewhen Davis had (and has continued to have) a dependable commercial appeal. In this context, complete,lengthy live performances are not a commercial liability, but an attraction for jazz CD buyers.32Davis and Troupe, Miles: The Autobiography, 278. The reference to Davis performing “Kind of Blue” is either amisprint or a misunderstanding between Davis and Quincy Troupe, the writer who draftedMiles: The Autobiogra-phy based on interviews with Davis. However, “All Blues” and “So What,” two compositions from the Kind of Bluealbum, were often performed by the Davis quintet during the 1960s. Confusing the matter is the fact that the titlesthat are listed here in quotation marks are also the titles of albums Davis released. Elsewhere in the autobiography,however, album names are italicized.33Lionel Olay, “Miles Davis: Winner Take All [1964],” reprinted in Miles on Miles: Interviews and Encounters withMiles Davis, eds. Paul Maher Jr. and Michael K. Dorr (Chicago: Lawrence Hill Books, 2009), 26.34Arthur Taylor, “I Don’t Have to Hold the Audience’s Hand [1977],” in The Miles Davis Companion: Four Decadesof Commentary, ed. Gary Carner, (New York: Schirmer, 1996), 111.


songs, his reticence as a performer to “hold the audience’s hand,” and his knowledgethat these people are the ones who are buying his albums and “packing” his clubsand concerts. His approach these two nights that we have recordings of, December22 and December 23 at the Plugged Nickel, was to play mostly pieces he had firstrecorded in the late 1950s and early 1960s, not the newer compositions by Shorter,Hancock, Carter, and Williams. Even of these older pieces, his set lists were heavilyweighted towards songbook standards. His typical sign-off “The Theme” closes allseven sets (with lengths varying from a cursory 30 seconds to over ten minutes). Other-wise, songbook tunes make up nineteen of the remaining 32 performances, includingfour versions of “I Fall in Love Too Easily.”

On a large scale, these four versions share a basic shape. Davis always plays theopening chorus, solos for a few choruses, and then Shorter and Hancock play solos,before Davis returns to reprise the melody to end the piece before going quickly intothe next song—which, in these recordings, was either “No Blues” or his set-closer,“The Theme.” This is the usual “head-solos-head” form that had become a cliché by1965 and against which certain jazz musicians, including free jazz musicians andeven Davis himself, would rebel.

Beyond the general structure of the performance, there are distinct similarities inexecution between these four versions. For the opening melodic chorus, Davisalways clearly plays the first eight notes (which correspond to the title lyrics, onenote per syllable). For a group that was often working without breaks between songs—and certainly without spoken introductions from its leader!—this helped to signal,both to his fellow band members and to the audience, that the band will now beplaying “I Fall in Love Too Easily.” During his opening melodic statements, Davis isalways accompanied by Hancock on piano. Carter on bass will usually begin playingaround the fifth measure, while Williams on drums will either play very sparselywith brushes on the snare drum or he will lay out entirely. Without Carter anchoringthe ensemble, Davis and Hancock typically play rubato, without a discernible 4/4metrical structure or steady pulse. When Carter is playing, the quarter-note tempo isslow, around 60 beats per minute or less.

On all versions of “I Fall in Love Too Easily” from the Plugged Nickel, Daviscontinues his solo for a few choruses after the opening melodic head chorus.During these solos, Williams provides the most contrast, usually playing indouble time, making choices to go back and forth between brushes on the snareand sticks on cymbals. Carter often plays a walking bass line to go along withthe feel set by Williams. Within this framework, however, Williams was notoriousfor being a particularly interactive drummer, by switching his patterns and accentsoften. Shorter always solos on tenor saxophone after Davis, and during these solosthe rhythm section texture is similarly varied. During the first set on December 22,Williams goes into a quick waltz time on the ride cymbal (with each measure of3/4 equivalent to one quarter note of the initial slow tempo) at the end of Davis’ssolo and keeps this going for the beginning of Shorter’s solo, with Carter playingdouble time against it, for a composite 3 against 2 feel in the rhythm section.


For the members of Miles Davis’s quintet, these were no ordinary performances.Hancock describes the band’s approach in his recent autobiography:

By now [1965] Miles, Ron, Tony, Wayne, and I had been performing in the quintetfor more than a year, and we’d gotten so cohesive as a band that it had become easy toplay together. We had figured out a formula for making it work, but of course playingby formula was exactly the opposite of what we wanted to do. We needed to put thechallenge back in, to figure out ways to take more risks. I had noticed that our playinghad gotten a little too comfortable, but on the flight to Chicago it was Tony whostarted the conversation.

‘I’ve got an idea,’ he said. ‘Let’s play some anti-music.’ He wanted us to promise thatduring our sets at the Plugged Nickel, whatever anybody in the band expected us toplay, we would play the opposite. Some people have suggested that Tony was trying tosabotage the band by doing this, but really he was only trying to sabotage our comfortlevel, to break us open again. It was just another step in trying to push our boundariesas musicians and as a band.…

We knew we were using the audience as guinea pigs for our experiment, but this was away to break the habits we had formed—by destroying the structure, then picking upthe pieces and building something new.35

Hancock’s role in this music is usually to add ambiguity by drastically re-harmonizingthe tune’s lead sheet chords, rather than the harmonic grounding a pianist would beexpected to provide in a more traditional jazz combo. As free as the Plugged Nickel per-formances of “I Fall in Love Too Easily” are harmonically and melodically, there is stilla discernible chorus structure: in this case the sixteen-bar structure of the tune. In fact,Davis even telegraphs this chorus structure by often playing relatively clear paraphrasesof the tune’s opening eight-note melody which coincide with the beginning ofchoruses; this is true even for his “solo” choruses when he would otherwise be expectedto mostly stay away from the tune’s composed melody in favor of improvising on thetune’s underlying harmonic structure. During the Plugged Nickel gigs, however, thisharmonic structure itself was often all-but-unrecognizable.

The “Second Great Quintet” in Europe

Whether or not one characterizes the band’s playing as “anti-music” (as Williams pro-posed), they finished their residency at the Plugged Nickel on January 2, 1966. Healthproblems continued to bother Davis throughout the first few months of 1966, but thequintet played a West Coast tour in the late spring and the Newport Jazz Festival inJuly.36 Davis returned to the studio in October 1966 to record Miles Smiles. Alongwith tunes written by quintet members (“Circle” by Davis, “Dolores,” “Footprints,”and “Orbits” by Shorter), two other compositions were recorded and released: “Gin-gerbread Boy” by Jimmy Heath and “Freedom Jazz Dance” by Eddie Harris. As withall other studio albums made by the group, no jazz standards were recorded. In May

35Herbie Hancock with Lisa Dickey, Possibilities (New York: Viking, 2014), 92–93.36The 1966 Newport performances were recently released by Columbia Recordings on The Bootleg Series Volume 4:Miles Davis at Newport 1955–1975.


1967, the quintet recorded the music that would be released as the Sorcerer LP. A monthlater, the quintet was back in the studio recording the Nefertiti album.

In the fall of 1967, Davis and his quintet toured Europe with a package of other jazzartists, including Thelonious Monk, Sarah Vaughan, and Archie Shepp. On several ofthe concerts, the Davis quintet was paired with Shepp and his band, a pairing whichDavis biographer Jack Chambers attributes to the “recognition… of Davis’s recent alli-ance with freer jazz, a recognition not nearly as widespread as it should have been,perhaps because most jazz fans and many reviewers were still smitten with Davis’searlier records and had not caught up to him in the interval.”37 In 2011, ColumbiaRecords released a four-disc set, The Bootleg Series Volume 1: Live in Europe 1967 com-piling live recordings made by the quintet on this tour in October and November of1967 in Antwerp, Copenhagen, Paris, Karlsruhe, and Stockholm.

In discussing the quintet’s playing in his autobiography, Davis writes: “I loved thatband, man, because if we played a song for a whole year and you heard it at the begin-ning of the year, you wouldn’t recognize it at the end of the year.”38 This is at least aslight exaggeration. Nevertheless, now that many of Davis’ live recordings are widelyavailable, we can hear for ourselves how these songs were changing from night tonight and year to year. “I Fall in Love Too Easily” is a particularly good case study,since it was a consistent presence in Davis’s sets and recordings of it are availablefrom a comparatively long range of time.

For at least these five sets released on disc, the band’s repertoire fell into a predictablepattern, even if what they did with these pieces from night to night was fluid. “Agita-tion,” a Davis original released on E.S.P. which had been performed twice on thePlugged Nickel recordings, has been promoted to being the group’s usual set-opener. “Agitation” is always followed by “Footprints,” a Shorter composition releasedboth on the composer’s 1967 Adam’s Apple album andMiles Smiles. Other quintet orig-inals performed on the European recordings include “Riot” and “Masqualero;”together with “Agitation” and “Footprints,” recent compositions by the band total15 of the 34 tunes on this set. “Gingerbread Boy,” a Jimmy Heath tune recorded onMiles Smiles is also played twice. This is a marked departure from the PluggedNickel gigs in which “Agitation” was the only tune from the group’s recent studiorecordings that was performed.

However, some material would still have been familiar to fans who, in Chambers’swords, “were still smitten with Davis’s earlier records and had not caught up to him inthe interval.” The Thelonious Monk composition “’RoundMidnight,” which Davis hadrecorded with his “first quintet” for Columbia Records in 1956 is played three timesover the span of five gigs. “No Blues” appears three times and an even older blues com-position, “Walkin’,” is performed once. The standards “On Green Dolphin Street” and“I Fall in Love Too Easily” are each performed twice. Finally, “The Theme” still servesas a set-closer for most of the sets, ranging dramatically in length (as it had during thePlugged Nickel gigs) from 30 seconds to over eight minutes. Davis therefore had a

37Chambers, Milestones 2, 116.38Ibid., 277.


rather limited repertoire of pieces for these concerts, even if they did span a widechronological range of his career, from pieces that he had only released within thepast year to songs he first recorded over ten years prior (“’Round Midnight” and“Walkin’”). Comparing the song selection from this European tour to the set listsfrom the Plugged Nickel two years earlier, we can see how the group was changing.Most of the standards performed in 1965 at the Plugged Nickel have permanently van-ished from Davis’s repertoire. Songs like “If I Were a Bell,” “All of You,” and “IThought About You” received their last performances by Davis at the PluggedNickel, while others like “Autumn Leaves” and “My Funny Valentine” would begone by the summer of 1966.39

“I Fall in Love Too Easily,” however, was one of the survivors, and the quintet playedit on November 6, 1967 at the Salle Pleyel in Paris. For this performance, Davis isaccompanied only by Hancock on piano for the first two choruses, lasting nearlytwo minutes. (This duet orchestration can be seen as a precursor to later versions ofthe piece, discussed below.) The first eight measures is a fairly clear presentation ofthe tune’s written melody. During the second eight measures of the sixteen-barchorus structure, fewer of Davis’s melodic choices match up with the composition’swritten melody, but experienced listeners would still be able to pick out occasionalreferences to the tune. A second chorus starts at 1:06, still rubato with only Hancockand Davis playing. Carter and Williams join on bass and drums at 1:52 to beginanother chorus, playing in double time at about 144 beats per minute. Davis’s solohangs over into the next chorus, starting at 2:43, but Shorter enters in the sixth barof the sixteen-measure chorus at 3:00. By the time the next chorus begins at 3:36,Carter and Williams have doubled the tempo again, and shortly thereafter, Hancockstops comping. For the next minute and a half, accompanied only by Carter and Wil-liams playing at a very fast tempo, Shorter’s solo is in a context that sounds very close tofree jazz, as Chambers’s description above suggests. Williams and Carter stage a dra-matic deceleration and diminuendo at the end of Shorter’s solo, eventually leavingHancock to play an unaccompanied rubato solo. At 7:55, Hancock’s playing suggeststhe comfortable double-time tempo from the beginning of the piece, which acts as acue for Williams and Carter to rejoin the performance.

Davis re-enters at 9:42, and he finds himself in three different rhythm section tex-tures in quick succession. The rhythm section maintains its double-time tempo forthe first eight measures of this chorus, with Williams greeting Davis’s arrival withseveral loud bass drum hits and cymbal crashes. Hancock and Williams seem tojointly decide to switch the feel to 12/8 for the next four measures of the chorus, begin-ning at 10:00. But by 10:10, Williams has dropped out and Hancock and Carter areplaying out of time accompaniment for Davis to end the piece. In less than thirtyseconds, then, the rhythm section has shown three of its seemingly infinite ways ofinterpreting the structure of a song like “I Fall in Love Too Easily.” Davis repeats acadential figure four times, each time ending on the third degree of the scale, but

39Information on set lists from live performances is taken either from commercially released recordings or fromPeter Losin’s “Miles Ahead” website, www.plosin.com.


http://www.plosin.com

neglecting to resolve down to the tonic. Instead, he moves immediately on to the nextcomposition, “Riot.”

Davis and the quintet performed “I Fall in Love Too Easily” the following night inKarlsruhe, Germany on November 7, 1967. In Karlsruhe, the performance begins withDavis by himself for the first eight measures, before Hancock joins him to finish thesecond half of the first chorus. This time, however, Davis and Hancock play threechoruses by themselves before Davis plays a short phrase that cues Carter and Williamsto come in at double time. Williams seems eager to play even faster, however, so he re-doubles the time, which Carter eventually follows. Once Carter is walking in 4/4 at thisvery quick tempo, Williams takes this as a license to play loud flourishes on the snareand cymbals which threaten to disrupt the meter, though he keeps a steady tempo onhis hi-hat. For Shorter’s tenor solo, Williams’s playing again provides sharp contrasts,dropping out entirely at 18:30, playing out-of-time snare drum rolls at 18:55, andlocking into a steady groove on his ride cymbal at 20:00.40 Hancock plays a (compara-tively brief solo) starting at 22:08. Davis returns to finish the piece, actually ending onthe tonic this time at 25:14. The sense of repose is short-lived, however: almost as soonas the trumpet leaves Davis’s lips, Williams begins the drum solo that introduces “Gin-gerbread Boy.”

Comparing the live recordings of “I Fall In Love Too Easily” from this tour in Parisand Karlsruhe with those from the Plugged Nickel, we can hear some important differ-ences. Davis’s playing, in particular, sounds much stronger and more confident in the1967 European recordings. There are just as many, if not more, shifts in tempo, texture,and feel as the “anti-music” of the Plugged Nickel performances, but they are accom-plished much more smoothly than the 1965 recordings. The context is also quite differ-ent. At the Plugged Nickel, “I Fall in Love Too Easily” was just one standard amongmany played; listeners at the Chicago performances would have heard other standardslike “If I Were a Bell,” “Stella by Starlight,” “All of You,” “I Thought About You,”“When I Fall in Love,” and “Autumn Leaves” during the same set as “I Fall in LoveToo Easily.” By 1967, as I noted above, set lists were dominated by quintet originals.“I Fall in Love Too Easily” would therefore take on added significance for the audienceas one of only a few familiar scraps of melody, in a night of newer, and probably lessrecognizable, music.

New Experiments

Both contemporary reviews of the quintet’s concerts in Europe in 1967 and recentreviews of the 2011 release of these recordings agree that the band’s performanceswere at a remarkably high level.41 Once Davis returned to the United States,however, he was not content to rest on his laurels. Instead, he seemed eager tochange and expand his ensemble’s timbral palette. In December of 1967, he began

40Timings are taken from the DVD of this concert included on The Bootleg Series, Volume 1: Live in Europe 1967.41Chambers, Milestones 2, 115–116; Nate Chinen, “Miles Davis, Live at the Apogee,” The New York Times (Sep-tember 8, 2011).


bringing in a series of guitarists for recordings in the studio, including Joe Beck, BuckyPizzarelli, and George Benson. Davis also purchased a Fender Rhodes piano forHancock to play. Hancock eventually took to the electric piano (and has had a deepinterest in various kinds of technology in his ensuing career), but Carter was less enthu-siastic about the electric bass that Davis had him play on several tracks recorded at thistime. Hancock and Carter left the band, and by the September 1968 sessions thatyielded “Felon Brun” and “Mademoiselle Mabry” for the Filles de Kilimanjaroalbum, Chick Corea on electric piano and Dave Holland on bass had become perma-nent members.

In February 1969, this group, augmented in the studio by Joe Zawinul on organ,Hancock returning on electric piano, and John McLaughlin on electric guitar, wouldrecord what Crouch termed the “droning wallpaper music” of In a Silent Way. Afterthese sessions, Williams left the group and was replaced by Jack DeJohnette ondrums. This group, with Shorter remaining on tenor and soprano saxophones, is some-times known as Davis’s “lost quintet” since few recordings of the band exist. Daviswrites in his autobiography, “Man I wish this band had been recorded live because itwas really a bad motherfucker.…Columbia missed out on the whole fuckingthing.”42 In fact, while bootleg recordings of the group have circulated among collec-tors, Columbia has recently officially released a few of these performances as TheBootleg Series Volume 2: Live in Europe 1969. Davis was certainly correct in that thelive performances of this group are a revelation. They provide a fascinating linkbetween the music of the mid-1960s quintet and Davis’s controversial fusion albumsfrom 1969 and later.

This band’s live repertoire was decidedly mixed, with selections from the quintet’smid-1960s albums, newly-recorded (or yet-to-be recorded) tunes from Bitches Brewand In a Silent Way, and even venerable songs like “’Round Midnight,” “No Blues,”and “Milestones.” On recordings from performances at jazz festivals in Juan-les-Pins, France and Berlin, the group also performs “I Fall in Love Too Easily,” theonly remaining Tin Pan Alley standard in the band’s book. Listening to full setsfrom this group, the sound of the “lost quintet” is a striking shift from both Davis’squintet with Hancock, Williams, and Carter and from the studio sessions that pro-duced In a Silent Way. DeJohnette plays the opening of “Directions” (the group’snew set-opener) with sustained loud snare rolls punctuated by cymbal crashes, see-mingly even less interested in serving as a steady timekeeper than Williams hadbeen. Crouch criticized Bitches Brew for having “static beats,” and it is certainly truethat the steady, chugging grooves on much of that album are far more regular andeasy-to-follow than DeJohnette’s playing in live performances during 1969.43 Addition-ally, those who think of Davis as a trumpet player who lacks technical proficiency or

42Davis and Troupe, Miles: The Autobiography, 297.43In context with these live recordings, the steadiness found in Bitches Brew could be heard as necessary for keepingthe large ensemble of multiple drummers, keyboard players, and bassists together in a way that was less of aconcern for the quintet instrumentation.


power will also be surprised by these recordings, as he seems to effortlessly hit andsustain high notes and play quick runs.

The two performances of “I Fall In Love Too Easily” captured on Live in Europe 1969are equally revealing, and quite different from the 1965 and 1967 live quintet record-ings. Their instrumentation consists only of Corea on electric piano and Davis ontrumpet. Their running times are also significantly shorter, clocking in around threeminutes in length, rather than the ten-minute excursions with long solos by Davis,Shorter, and Hancock the group performed in 1965 and 1967. The July 26, 1969 per-formance at the Juan-les-Pins festival consists only of two choruses and an extendedtag. Corea and Davis play rubato, with Davis playing a fairly straightforward versionof the melody for the opening chorus. Perhaps most interestingly, he repeats a cadentialfigure that goes up to the third scale degree several times, as was also present in the liverecording from Paris in 1967. But unlike most of his other live performances, Davisactually resolves and ends on the tonic and waits a few seconds before proceeding tothe next number. The effect is a performance of “I Fall In Love Too Easily” far morewrapped up and neat than had been his usual practice.

Four months later in Berlin on November 7, “I Fall in Love Too Easily” found its wayinto his set again. Still a rubato duet between Davis on open horn and Corea on electricpiano, the tune’s opening melody is only recognizable for the first four measures. Afterthat, neither Davis nor Corea make much audible effort to follow the tune’s melodicstructure or sixteen-measure chorus form. Most significantly, “I Fall In Love TooEasily” now serves as an introduction to the Shorter composition “Sanctuary,” aplace it would have in the repertoire before being dropped from the book entirely(and with it, the last of the Tin Pan Alley standards from Davis’s repertoire).44

In the 1965 and 1967 live recordings, ballads like “I Fall in Love Too Easily” weremobilized to showcase the quintet’s wide range: its ability to shift between vastly differ-ent tempos, dynamic levels, pitch ranges, and time signatures. By 1969, however, “I Fallin Love Too Easily” is used for a more limited function in live performances: to act as aperiod of relative calm in terms of its tempo (rubato), its orchestration (electric pianoand trumpet), and its volume (without the snare drum and cymbal punctuations heardon other tunes in Davis’s sets).45 In 1965 and 1967, Davis and his quintet were takingharmonic and melodic structures that would have been familiar to at least part of theiraudience and manipulating them—signifying on them—in various ways.46 By 1969,the pieces Davis and his new quintet were playing would likely have been less familiarto their audiences: tunes like “Directions,” “Spanish Key,” “Miles Runs the VoodooDown,” “It’s About That Time,” “Sanctuary,” and “Bitches Brew” had not yet beencommercially released by the time of these performances in France. Even tunes that

44This is a position it would also have on the Bitches Brew album, in which its opening melody makes a brief cameoappearance at the beginning of “Sanctuary.”45During the performance in Berlin, DeJohnette and Holland both wipe their faces with a towel after the workoutof the preceding “It’s About That Time.”46Coolman quotes the saxophonist Dave Liebman describing the band’s playing in the mid-1960s: “What’s greatabout it is that he has these young cats, especially Herbie [Hancock] and Tony [Williams] playing standards fromsuch a different standpoint.” See Coolman, Miles Davis Quintet of the Mid-1960s, 19.


Davis’s earlier bands had recorded and released (such as “Milestones,” “’Round Mid-night,” “No Blues,” and “Footprints”) were probably less well-known than the Tin PanAlley standards Davis played in 1965. As described by Gates, Signifyin(g) is a broadartistic practice, and one could still describe Davis here as Signifyin(g): putting the per-formance conventions of jazz, rock, and free jazz into dialogue with each other. But thisdialogue was based less and less on shared knowledge between Davis and his audienceof a pre-existing text.

Final Performances

By the time of the Berlin performance in November of 1969, In a Silent Way had beenreleased, giving both Davis’s fans in the jazz community and other interested listeners achance to hear his new musical direction: one in which electric instruments were fore-grounded and post-production editing was used to assemble a final product fromvarious takes in the studio.47 In the world outside jazz, the Woodstock festival hadtaken place, finishing up on Monday morning August 18: the same morning thatDavis would take a group of musicians into the studio for the first of the sessionsthat would eventually yield Bitches Brew. His 1968 marriage to Betty Mabry and hisfriendship with Jimi Hendrix assured that Davis was well aware of events in theyouth counterculture.

Whether one credits this development to pressure from Columbia label executives,Davis’s desire for a wider audience, or his own wandering muse, Davis began toperform in new venues associated with the rock counterculture, most notably BillGraham’s Fillmore East in New York and Fillmore West in San Francisco. In March1970, the Davis group, now augmented by Airto Moreira on percussion, opened forNeil Young and Crazy Horse and the Steve Miller Band for two nights at the FillmoreEast.

A month later in San Francisco, Davis and the sextet, now with Steve Grossmanon saxophone, opened for the Grateful Dead and Stone the Crows at the FillmoreWest in San Francisco for four nights. The April 10 show was released by Colum-bia as Black Beauty: Miles Davis at Fillmore West. Davis’s performance of “I Fall inLove Too Easily” from this gig fits the pattern established during the Berlin record-ing: it serves as a brief rubato electric piano-and-trumpet introduction to“Sanctuary.”

In June 1970, Davis and his group, now with Keith Jarrett joining Chick Corea onkeyboard, were back in New York at the Fillmore East, opening for the folk-rocksinger Laura Nyro. At the June 19 performance at the Fillmore East, the groupplayed “I Fall in Love Too Easily” as an out-of-time interlude for keyboards andtrumpet, with Moreira adding occasional comments on percussion. The performanceonly lasts for one chorus before quickly transitioning to “Sanctuary.”DeJohnette taps at

47In a review of the album, the jazz critic MartinWilliams was shocked that “a portion of the music is inadvertentlyrepeated” on the album. Of course, this repetition was actually intentional. See Martin Williams, “Jazz: Some OldFavorites are Back,” The New York Times (January 18, 1970), 112.


his cymbals and Moreira’s moaning contributions on cuica are more obtrusive duringthe following evening’s performance of “I Fall in Love Too Easily” on June 20. Davis,however, abandons the tune before completing a full chorus, moving on to“Sanctuary.”

Later in 1970, Davis played at the Isle of Wight festival in the U.K. on August 29.With performances by artists like Jimi Hendrix, The Who, The Doors, and Sly andthe Family Stone, the Isle of Wight festival is perhaps second only to Woodstockitself in the counterculture mythology. For the estimated crowd of 600,000, Davis’sset consisted entirely of recent material from Bitches Brew and In a Silent Way, alongwith Joseph Zawinul’s “Directions.” All jazz standards, including “I Fall in Love TooEasily,” had now been dropped from Davis’s repertoire.

Conclusion

The gigs that Davis and his band played in high profile rock venues had important con-sequences. As Davis notes in his autobiography, playing on the same bill as the GratefulDead at the Fillmore West in California:

was an eye-opening concert for me, because there were about five thousand peoplethere that night, mostly young, white hippies, and they hadn’t hardly heard of meif they had heard of me at all.… The place was packed with these real spacy, highwhite people, and when we first started playing, people were walking around andtalking. But after a while they all got quiet and really got into the music.… Afterthat concert, every time I would play out there in San Francisco, a lot of youngwhite people showed up at the gigs.48

Some of these “venturesome white rockers willing to try something new” (as Tomlin-son describes them) made up a good portion of the record sales for Bitches Brew.49

Indeed, playing concerts in these venues lined up with what Smith argues was “Colum-bia’s broader interest in exposing the entirety of its roster to the newly recognized, andpredominantly white, youth market.”50

While Davis was no doubt happy with the increased record sales from this new audi-ence, he also began to be increasingly interested in appealing to a young black audience.Smith has extensively discussed the marketing of Davis’s music in his article, “‘Sell itBlack’: Race and Marketing in Miles Davis’s Early Fusion Jazz.” To summarize hisresearch, both Davis and Columbia Records were interested in expanding his audiencebeyond the traditional jazz audience to a youth market, but Smith warns us against thetendency to “conflate a musician’s interests and goals with those of a recordcompany.”51 Instead, Davis, as he mentioned in various interviews during the 1970sand in his autobiography, specifically wanted a young black audience for his newmusic.

The tendency in the reception of early fusion, from Clark Terry to Stanley Crouch, isto assert that Davis’s music changed for the worse because he wanted a new, bigger

48Davis and Troupe, Miles: The Autobiography, 301.49Tomlinson, “Cultural Dialogics and Jazz,” 260.50Smith, “Sell it Black,” 11.51Ibid., 7.


audience. A viewpoint that is more sympathetic to Davis’s music or to an ideology ofautonomous art would suggest that concerns about audiences (white or black, large orsmall) were incidental to Davis’s shift in musical direction. Determining causality canbe a tempting path: did Davis change his music (to electric instruments and away fromstandards) to appeal to a new audience? Was his new audience a result of the change inDavis’s music? However, I want to suggest that understanding causality in this case isless important than understanding consequences. Simply put, continuing to performstandards would likely not have been an effective communicative strategy for Daviswith the audience he was playing to in 1970. Similarly, the comparatively massive audi-ence (for a “jazz” musician, at least) he attracted for his performances and recordingswould likely not have been interested in his music had he continued with his olderrepertoire.

Where does this leave Davis’s performances of “I Fall in Love Too Easily” between1963 and 1970? Given the frequency with which he performed it, Davis clearly believedthat “I Fall in Love Too Easily” was perhaps uniquely adaptable to the quicksand-liketextures of the second quintet in 1965 and 1967. Though his studio albums wouldfeature almost exclusively quintet originals, Bob Blumenthal’s liner notes to the 1995release of the Plugged Nickel boxed set gives several possible reasons Davis continuedto play standards in live performances in late 1965: “[1] a continued fondness forthe likes of ‘Autumn Leaves’ and ‘If I Were a Bell,’ [2] a conviction that they couldbe molded to more abstract ends, and [3] a realization that the audience expected atleast this much familiarity in a Davis performance.”

Of these three reasons, the first two could just as easily apply in 1965 as to the quin-tet’s European tour of 1967, Davis’s “lost quintet” proto-fusion heard in Europe in Julyand November 1969, or his live performances at the FillmoreWest and Fillmore East in1970. As for Blumenthal’s third reason, “familiarity” is exactly what is necessary for theparticular kind of signifyin(g) that Walser has located in Davis’s performances andwhich Davis seems to suggest in his autobiography was one of the main reasons thatpeople sought out his live performances—at least in the mid-1960s. However, this fam-iliarity and the process of signifyin(g) that it affords becomes less and less of a factor forDavis’s live performances as his audiences—or least the audiences he desired—changed. Whether his audiences in 1969 and later were white rock fans or youngblack followers of soul and funk, neither of those two potential audiences wouldlikely have had a familiarity with Tin Pan Alley songs such as “Autumn Leaves,” “IfI Were a Bell,” or, indeed, “I Fall in Love Too Easily.”52 Perhaps this is why his per-formances of “I Fall in Love Too Easily” at rock venues are so cursory and Davis

52Surprisingly, Davis returned to what might be broadly termed “popular songs” during his “comeback” in the1980s: “Time After Time” by Cyndi Lauper and “Human Nature” by Michael Jackson. A detailed descriptionof these studio recordings (and subsequent live recordings: both songs remained a part of Davis’s live repertoireuntil his death in 1991) is beyond the scope of this paper. However, Davis’s versions of these tunes differ in severalimportant respects from his versions of “I Fall in Love Too Easily” and other standards during the mid-1960s andinto his electric era. Perhaps most importantly, the harmonic form of the song is clearly audible in live perform-ances of both “Time after Time” and “Human Nature.” The striking shifts in rhythmic feel and texture that TonyWilliams brought to live performances of standards in the mid-1960s are also absent from these performances inthe 1980s.


does not interpret the song’s chord changes and melody in the various tempos andrhythmic feels that had characterized his performances of the song a few yearsearlier when he was playing to a “jazz” audience. The form and melody of “I Fall inLove Too Easily” may still be attractive to Davis but it was, apparently, no longernecessary or desirable to extensively improvise or signify on the song’s structure.

Conversely, the February 1964 recording of “My Funny Valentine” analyzed byWalser and Brofsky comes from a concert performance by the Davis Quintet at abenefit concert for the NAACP at Philharmonic Hall. The audience for such aconcert would likely have been middle- and upper-class elites, a far cry from theblack youth audience that Davis was courting by the end of the 1960s or the whiterock audience that Columbia was pushing him towards. The middle- and upper-class, older audience that likely attended the Philharmonic Hall concert would probablyhave been familiar with tunes like “My Funny Valentine” and “I Fall in Love TooEasily.” Insofar as this audience was a jazz audience, they would have also been inti-mately familiar with the idea that jazz musicians signify on standards in their perform-ances, even if they would not have used the language adopted by Gates (and laterWalser) to describe this practice.

“I Fall in Love Too Easily” was the last jazz standard in Davis’s book, and bydropping it from his repertoire in the summer of 1970, Davis left behind this par-ticular kind of communication with his audience. In Tomlinson’s and Tate’sappreciations of Davis’s electric music quoted above, neither writer is dismissiveof audiences. However, the communication, dialogue, signifying, and mixing theyare most concerned with celebrating is between musical styles and techniques—rock, funk, jazz, black musicians and white musicians, “black” music and“white” music—not between musicians and their audiences. Perhaps this is oneof the reasons that Davis’s music from this time period has been so controversial,since it represents a shift in the materials and methods of jazz performance: awayfrom signifyin(g) based on the audience recognizing a relationship between a tuneand an improvised performance and towards a conversation of musical styles andgenre conventions.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

AbstractThis paper examines Miles Davis’s studio and live repertoire during the time periodfrom 1963 until 1970, particularly his performances of the ballad “I Fall in Love TooEasily,” which was a remarkably persistent presence in his sets, despite the myriad ofother changes that took place in this time. Indeed, listening to multiple versions of“I Fall in Love Too Easily” certainly reveals clear differences in musical parameterssuch as form, tempo, rhythm, timbre, and orchestration. Examining Davis’s perform-ances of “I Fall in Love Too Easily” enables us to focus in on what, according to bothjazz critics and jazz historians, is a crucial turning point, not only for Davis’s career, but


for the genre as a whole. Through detailed examination of various performances of “IFall in Love Too Easily,” we can also concentrate closely on how exactly Davis’s musicwas changing during this period, even if one song remained a part of his repertoire. Inmy analysis, I show that “I Fall In Love Too Easily,” more so than any other standard,served as a durable vehicle for Davis’s musical goals throughout the mid-1960s. By1970, however, these goals seem to have shifted as Davis moved, step by step, awayfrom a model of jazz performance based on improvisation on a familiar, pre-existingtune or structure. Hence, “I Fall In Love Too Easily,” and all other jazz standardswere dropped from the band’s book as Davis pursued other means of communicatingwith his audience.


standards and signification between jazz and fusion: miles davis and \" i fall in love too...

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