On Jazz: He’s an American Man

There’s some historically important and fabulous jazz available again this month on vinyl and CD, and it might be a surprise that my feelings about that are mixed. On January 30, Sony will be re-releasing the Miles Davis – The Complete Live at the Plugged Nickel 1965, a 10LP/8CD box set that has every note from every recorded set the Miles Davis Quintet (Davis, Wayne Shorter, Herbie Hancock, Ron Carter, and Tony Williams) played at the Plugged Nickel club in Chicago, December 22-23, 1965.

Every note, every sound, including the cash register ringing and a patron in the crowd exhorting, “Thank your bass player, thank your bass player”—this is one of the most alive live recordings in the entire jazz discography, and one of the most important musical documents in the 100 year history of the music.

How important is impossible to fully explain without listening. It starts with Davis himself, one of the greatest musicians of the recording era, someone who at his best combined pinnacles of both abstraction and popular appeal, something the music industry and associated media—from classical to house—has spent decades telling us is impossible. But jazz has done this in general since Charlie Parker, and Davis has really been the only jazz musician since 1960 who maintained a popular presence while also making music that can rightly be catalogued as some of the most artistically profound and even avant-garde of the 20th century. That last specific part of his career began in 1965, with the January recording and August release of E.S.P., the first album from this second of his great Quintets. The Plugged Nickel recordings cement this.

What was happening is that Davis, already a superstar in jazz and with the general public, was being pushed forward by the younger musicians he hired. He had already been key to the bebop movement, invented cool jazz with Gil Evans, arguably launched hard bop, and then created the modal jazz movement with Kind of Blue. There was a consistent path through all this toward the direction of simplicity, Davis searching for the way to say the most with the least. The second Quintet moved this forward through orders of magnitude by knocking Davis off-balance. These younger musicians, especially Shorter and Williams (who had turned twenty less than two weeks before the Plugged Nickel gig), were exploring non-standard ideas about song form, harmony, and the language of improvisation. Shorter was looking at voice-leading in a new way, and writing angular, aphoristic melodic phrases, Williams was breaking up and breaking down rhythm from bar to bar, section to section, and often completely dropping out of time when soloing.

What you hear at the Plugged Nickel is this, and Davis finding his own way into this language, almost literally listening to the slang from the young cats, getting it right, repeating it back to them, then adding to it. Like a hip version of Steve Buscemi from the “Hello fellow kids” meme, Davis was one step away from codifying a new idea the youngsters would then follow. To put it simply, through the pre-Bitches Brew years 1965-1968, Davis made music that has immense sonic and social appeal, that just sounds so fucking good, while also being some of the freest and most abstract jazz ever. With the second Quintet, his music had a profile like a Giacometti, the shape of a Brancusi, and the expression of a Rothko. And he was the most popular jazz musician of the 1960s.

There is a through-line from 1965 to Bitches Brew and the massive slabs of dark, thrilling instrumental rock from his electric period, especially the final live albums from Japan, music that had no equivalent until the doom metal band Sunn O))). Without 1965 and E.S.P. and the Plugged Nickel, Davis would not have gotten there, modal jazz just does not turn into the electric music. The importance of that is clear; less clear and more important is that Davis was making avant-garde music.

Ornette Coleman’s Free Jazz and Eric Dolphy’s Out to Lunch were several years old by 1965, Cecil Taylor had released six albums, A Love Supreme came out the same year—the New Thing was happening. What Davis was doing did not on the surface seem as revolutionary, but structurally and formally he built an entirely new and truly exploratory way to approach jazz inside language still familiar to the ears. To compare it to another medium, it was like the experiments of William Burroughs in the linguistic style of Cormac McCarthy.

And so, thirty years after the initial release, it’s invaluable to have this collection available again. It’s appropriate in so many ways, not least that 2026 is Davis’ centennial year, coinciding with the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence.

There are going to be a lot of flags out in 2026, and a lot of loud, dumb, angry people telling us what this country is, and also a lot of well-meaning people who can’t get their minds out of political and economic thinking to see that there’s far more to America than who gets to be in charge and how much money people make. The Plugged Nickel album is an argument for the humanism and beauty of American culture, and it’s invaluable to have it back in print. The political and economic question around it is, why did it ever go out of print, and why do any Davis albums ever go out of print? The Declaration and Constitution are permanently available, why not these other essential documents that show what this country is?

That something this important and wonderful is beholden to corporate interests is upsetting, and part of the mixed feelings. As to the others, they have to do with how both jazz history in general and Miles Davis in particular dominate jazz, how much time is spent listening to the past, how many words are written on it. I myself have spent many of those hours and written many thousands of them—including twice previously in this column in little over a year—and each second and word takes away from contemporary jazz.

The music continues to thrive and expand, musicians continue to develop the language. A measure of this is the idea of swing in jazz rhythm: from the mid-1920s to 1965, swing defined jazz. From 1965 on, including many important Miles Davis recordings, swing has been replaced by rock, funk, and now hip hop rhythms, and the change has been so extensive that swing now signifies music from the past, everything else feels contemporary.

That cannot be heard or understood without Miles Davis, this album and the ones that followed. So perhaps it’s best to embrace something that I say about Beethoven. People who care about classical music often complain that there’s too much Beethoven on concert programs, but he earned his place at the center of Western culture, and I often think there should be much more Beethoven played because we need much more of his humanist message.

The same with Davis. His musical stature is equal, and his cultural impact is immeasurable. It goes beyond the genius of his music to qualities that are integral to American cultural identity. Think of the idea of “cool,” and if it would exist without Davis. Think of the combination of plain terms and language and profound intellectual and aesthetic depths that is the fundamental birthright for all American artists. Davis the ne plus ultra of that last, his intellectual and creative drive and ambition, and the music he made, is one of there greatest triumphs of American culture. He’s the American Man.