Sold Date: August 14, 2018
Start Date: August 11, 2018
Final Price: $54.99 (USD)
Seller Feedback: 1856
Buyer Feedback: 326

Very rare 2LP set that was produced only for Vinyl Me, Please Classics subscribers.  This set was placed once and includes the listening notes!  
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VMP INFO ON THIS RELEASE:

The performances on this album, The Final Tour: Paris, March 21, 1960 — released here officially on vinyl for the first time—are as renowned for their emotional intensity as they are for their musical fervor. The common judgement is that this concert found a great jazz ensemble—the Miles Davis Quintet of 1960—audibly straining to hold itself together stylistically, its members moving in divergent directions, their music unable to hide an inner turmoil between the musicians—to the point that the audience responded to it, clearly and audibly.

Miles himself looked upon the whole tour, starting with their Paris concert, in a similar manner: “Norman Granz had booked me and my band on a European tour,” Miles wrote in 1989. “[Coltrane] decided to go with us, but he grumbled and complained and sat by himself the whole time we were over there. He gave me notice he would be leaving the group when we got home.”

An equally convincing interpretation of these performances from 1960 is that Miles and his quintet were redefining what a great band could sound like, and how much music it could contain—at one time, in one concert, even in one tune. It’s not that the band members were so much apart, but rather that each were more themselves within the same unit—that divergence could co-exist and be distinct together. It’s this idea that grew from Miles’s 1950s groups and that later became his primary directive to all future sidemen through the ‘60s and ‘70s, up to his passing in 1991: Figure out what to do with the freedom in the music. Bring your identity and your own ideas to the mix. Surprise me!

Surprise indeed; there was that, in abundance on March 21, 1960. The venue was L’Olympia theater, 9th arrondissement, Paris; capacity, 2000, and the show was sold out. It was the opening night of a Western European tour featuring three top headliners—Miles, Oscar Peterson and Stan Getz. As overseas jazz tours went back then, it was longer than most, running for three weeks from March 21 through April 10. The official title was “Norman Granz’ JATP Presents Jazz Winners 1960”: a Jazz At The Philharmonic project produced by jazz impresario Norman Granz in partnership with different promoters in each country, starting in France, then on to Sweden, Denmark, West Germany, Switzerland, Austria, and Holland. Most shows sold to capacity and reviews were uniformly positive, focusing often on Miles. In late April, Billboardmagazine reported from Copenhagen on how the JATP performance on March 24 was the first show “to draw full houses” in 1960, and that “the critics were laudatory, but carped about ‘too many stars’—they wanted more of Miles Davis.”