condition (record/cover): NM / EX
Pitman pressing.
April 1961, the Black Hawk in San Francisco, and a working band caught doing what it did five nights a week. This is the transitional quintet, with Hank Mobley in the tenor chair after Coltrane's departure, Wynton Kelly at the piano, Paul Chambers and Jimmy Cobb behind. Mobley has taken decades of unfair comparison for this gig and he is very good here: relaxed, blues-rooted, entirely uninterested in competing with a ghost. Miles Davis plays fast, hard and considerably more aggressively than the studio records of the period suggest. Kelly is the secret weapon, comping with a lightness that makes the whole band float.
Columbia pressing. Live Miles from a period that usually gets skipped, and it is a lot more fun than its reputation.
