Rediscovering That Old Magic : Jazz: Sans their late leader, a powerhouse Miles Davis group gets together for a tribute tour and recording. The results are fine even though it wasn’t all smooth sailing.

Miles Davis--jazz Trumpet Master, Prince of Darkness, the very symbol of improvisational adventurousness--was listening to his new, young rhythm section during a performance one night and wondering what they were doing to set his musical antenna quivering.

The players were pianist Herbie Hancock, bassist Ron Carter and drummer Tony Williams, all still in their teens and 20s.

“We were moving things around,” recalled Hancock of the episode that happened almost 30 years ago, “not just playing in standard time, doing unusual rhythms, with Ron playing melodies on the bass instead of the traditional bass lines.”

The problem was that they were playing in this style behind the solos of George Coleman, the tenor saxophonist at the time (later replaced by Wayne Shorter), rather than behind Miles.

“So Miles turned to us,” continued Hancock, “and said, in that unique, gravelly voice of his, ‘Why don’t you play like that behind me?’

“We didn’t answer, but what we thought was, ‘Because you probably won’t be able to play with it. We’ve heard you play in a certain way, and that’s the way we expect you to play.’ ”

“Of course,” added Hancock with a laugh, “we didn’t actually say that, but that’s what we thought, in our youthful arrogance.”

Davis was, nonetheless, the leader of the band, so the rhythm trio gave him what he requested.

“The first day we started playing that open rhythm style behind Miles, he was struggling with it,” said Hancock. “But he wanted more of it, and the next day he was better. By the third day, I was struggling with it--but he had gotten it.”

Miles got it then as he always had and as he continued to, right up until his death in September, 1991. The impact of his passing resonated through the jazz community. Controversial to the end, always open to new vistas, he assembled a series of groups over four decades that were almost always on the cutting edge of jazz. The mid-’60s group was one of the best.

Hancock, Shorter, Carter and Williams, who had each drifted away from the Davis band in the late ‘60s and not not worked together as a complete unit since the late-’70s, decided that the best way to celebrate the enigmatic trumpeter’s extraordinary life was to reassemble for a tribute tour and recording.

The reunion seemed like a good idea at the time--at least in principle.

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But what had been a combination made in jazz heaven turned out at the start of the reunion, at least, to have something less than celestial interaction. Hancock, the initial organizing force behind the record, pushed for the group to go into the studio before the tour, in part because of the complications of his busy career. Others were less enthusiastic about recording before they had an opportunity to do some live performing.

The resulting album--”A Tribute to Miles,” released last week on Qwest Records--was recorded in June, 1992, at Signet Soundworks in Los Angeles (with two additional tracks done “live” at a Berkeley concert in September).

The initial studio sessions were thorny encounters for all involved.

“The first day we played, it was terrible; it wasn’t grooving, at all,” recalled Hancock.

“Painful,” added Williams. “That’s what it was.”

Williams, like Hancock, anticipated that the music would flow from the very beginning with the easy togetherness of the group’s salad years when their work with Davis on albums such as “E.S.P.,” “Miles Smiles,” “Sorcerer,” “Filles de Kilimanjaro” and “Miles in the Sky” resulted in a refinement of the stretched-out, rhythmically free-floating improvisational style that has had enormous impact upon the jazz of the last three decades.

But that was not to be the case.

The problem was that the remarkably intuitive interaction they had in the mid-’60s simply could not be recaptured on demand. As Hancock noted, years of individual stardom and experiences with other groups and other music had intervened. And it just could be that the absence of Miles had seriously changed the dynamic that had been so effective 30 years earlier.

The difficulties of rediscovering the old magic revived the disagreement over the wisdom of recording before the tour--at a time when the musicians had barely begun to integrate with each other--rather than later, after the mellowing aspects of the road had enhanced their renewed musical association.

“We should have waited,” said Williams. “But (at the time) they were in too much of a hurry to put the record out.”

Other issues emerged. An initial plan to record new compositions by each of the players was set aside. “It didn’t seem like such a good thing to do,” said Hancock. Instead, it was decided that numbers composed by Davis would open and close both the album and each performance on the tour. Tunes written by the members of the group would come between the signature Davis pieces. Then there was grumbling about which tunes would be chosen.

But by the fourth day of rehearsal, in part because of the integrative effect of the addition of trumpeter Wallace Roney, the group’s only new member, things began to lighten up in the studio, and some of the old magic began to emerge.

“Wallace fit in like a hand in a glove,” said Carter. “From the first rehearsal, it was obvious that he’s one trumpet player who knows where the beat is.”

The recording completed, the band took off on an international Tribute to Miles Tour in July, 1992, that included dates in Europe, Asia and the United States. Critical response was almost universally positive. But the tour also revived mixed memories of the ‘60s for most of the players.

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For Carter, the remembrances were good, especially in terms of camaraderie and musical connectedness. “Those were the days,” he said of the ‘60s, “when there were no limousines, we paid our own hotel bills, and we didn’t have personal managers and personal agents to step between us and whatever else.”

For him, the best aspect of the tour was the insistence of the players that they not be “stuck in this modern-day, mink-coated isolation in which everybody gets their own limousine and meets at the gig. So we’d sit in the airport lounge and talk about the last set, or what’s the best way to program the music for the following night. It was the kind of environment we grew up in, and it was good to experience it again.”

Hancock recalled the intensity of being in his 20s during the Davis years, and of working on the cutting edge with an artist who already had achieved legendary status. “We didn’t have any concept of doing anything revolutionary while we were doing it,” he said. “At the time, we were just playing. My feeling was very simple: ‘Miles is a (expletive). We better come up with some original, unique stuff or else we will fail!’ ”

Williams’ recollections of the tribute tour--he remembered only the last two nights that Carter played as “something extraordinary”--reflected his quite different experience with the ‘60s group.

“I was the smallest and the youngest when I joined the band,” he recalled. “And it’s been a difficult relationship for me, to one degree or another, with each one of them over the years. Miles was great, even though I had a few run-ins with him. But mostly I had to figure things out myself, because there was no one there, there was no one my age.”

Shorter also saw the differences between past and present, and, in typically philosophical fashion, reveled in them. “Sure, it was different from what it was like when we were playing with Miles,” he said. “Because everything that everyone has been doing since the ‘60s was showing its presence in the midst of our playing the songs that we had played at that other time. What we have been doing since then kept raising its mischievous head in there, and adding another kind of spice to it.”

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Perhaps because he was the new member in the group, perhaps because he participated in the tour with no past memories brought to bear, Roney had few complaints about the experience. The only thing that disturbed him was the occasional question regarding his difficult assignment to “replace” Davis in the ensemble.

“That’s just critics saying that,” he said with annoyance. “I think fans just want to hear good music. And if they’re picky about anything, it’s about how good you can play. I don’t think people came into the concerts like they’d just made a bet about whether or not I can play like Miles.”

The tour completed, the players expected the album to be released almost immediately. But delay after delay followed, due largely to the fact that four musicians who had been the Young Turks of jazz 30 years ago are now stars in their own right, with distancing layers of record companies, agents and managers who had something to say about almost every aspect of the release of the album.

The worst aspect of the frustrating “business difficulties,” as Hancock summed them up, surrounding the tribute album and the tour is the bittersweet aura they have created around what otherwise might simply have been viewed as an extraordinary jazz reunion.

Fortunately, none of those feelings are apparent in the recording. Despite the reported musical disconnectedness of the first rehearsals, the recorded tunes successfully achieve a goal that all the players agreed upon: a re-examination of the innovative ensemble approaches of the ‘60s from a viewpoint that reflects the individual growth and maturity that have taken place in the past three decades.

“In general,” said Hancock, “the musical roles we played were pretty much the same now as they were in the ‘60s. Except that in this incarnation, the roles are a lot more flexible from person to person. I think that’s probably our maturity.

“But it’s funny, because when we were young, there was a kind of flexibility then, too, maybe because we were too young to want to just lock ourselves into certain predictable roles. Now that we’re older, I think we more accurately sense what those roles are, and are willing to give in to allowing other individuals to explore their own roles from moment to moment.”