Sean Trane
Following BB's success, Clive Davis (the Columbia label owner) decided to record a bunch of concerts of Miles' different concert following BB's release. And quite a bit of these recordings surfaced to make their own releases: amongst them : Live - Evil (my fave), MD At Fillmore, Black Beauty, Message Of Love.. Just to name some of the legit ones. Recorded in the Fillmore East (that's NYC) on June 17th, the sets are probably among the least accessible Miles that year., made from four improvisations between 22 and 28 minutes-long, named inaptly Wednesday to Saturday miles, leading the rookie to think this was recorded over four days. But these improvs never received any names and Miles gave goofy names, even suggesting that night's technician to "call it anything". The album came as a double Lp gatefold with a centrefold of Miles lying down with his trumpet on a round bed of furs; I bet more than a few females would've paid to be on that picture.
If I said that this album was one of the least accessible , but it's maybe because of the line-up (Jarrettt, Holland and DeJohnette together n MD album), but the music is not just improvised with the odd dissonance here and there, (as it was on IASW or BB,), but now the improv are frankly dissonant and even almost reaching some free-jazz atonal improv, but not quite (it never gets to Pharoah Sanders's FJ). All four tracks have moments when they went "over the top", so it's hard to pinpoint if there is one track more accessible than the other three. For me, it's all the same, it's was that night's experimentation, and IMHO, it probably wasn't their most inspired performance. And while I fully understand why these performances were released (they represented one of the darkest side of miles' music), this MDAF is certainly not the ones I would recommend.