Miles Davis's second great quintet—Shorter, Hancock, Carter, and nineteen-year-old Tony Williams—improvised through standards at the Plugged Nickel in December 1965, implying rather than stating rhythm while conversing at tempo. Columbia sat on the complete recordings until 1976 despite understanding their importance. This is intimate club music where performance dissolved into dialogue, essential listening for anyone serious about how jazz reinvented melody and time.
There are nights when the music stops being performance and starts being conversation, and this is one of those records.
Miles Davis brought his second great quintet into the Plugged Nickel in Chicago on December 22nd and 23rd, 1965, and what Columbia’s engineers captured over those two nights was something the label nearly sat on entirely. The original release — a single LP culled from hours of tape — came out in 1966. The full sessions didn’t surface until 1976, and even then the world wasn’t entirely ready to hear what had happened in that room.
The Band
The personnel here is almost unfair. Wayne Shorter on tenor saxophone, Herbie Hancock on piano, Ron Carter on bass, Tony Williams on drums. Williams was nineteen years old in 1965. Nineteen. He plays on this record like someone who had already decided what drumming was supposed to be and had moved past it.
This was a band deep in what people would later call “time, no changes” — playing inside and outside the harmonic structure simultaneously, implying rhythm without always stating it, daring each other to go further and then following. Producer Teo Macero was in the booth, but in a real sense this music was produced by the five men on the bandstand making decisions at improvisation speed.
What’s Actually Happening
The setlist that night leaned on standards — “If I Were a Bell,” “Stella by Starlight,” “My Funny Valentine,” songs Miles had played a hundred times. That’s the point. The familiarity is the canvas.
What the quintet does to these songs is not deconstruction exactly. It’s more like they’re holding the melody at arm’s length, turning it in the light, seeing what it looks like from behind. Hancock comps in places you don’t expect and disappears when you need him most. Carter anchors only what needs anchoring. Shorter plays phrases that seem to resolve somewhere you weren’t expecting to land and somehow it’s exactly right.
Miles himself sounds unhurried in a way that is actually quite frightening when you understand the tempo Williams is laying underneath him. That muted tone, the space between notes — it doesn’t sound like restraint, it sounds like confidence so complete it doesn’t need to prove anything.
The Recording
Columbia engineer Don Hunstein was the credited house photographer for many of their sessions, but the Plugged Nickel recordings were captured as live documents rather than studio productions — mixed front-of-house and fed to tape. The sound is club-warm and slightly compressed, which turns out to be exactly right. You can hear the room. You can hear the audience sitting very still.
The fact that these tapes existed in the Columbia vault for a decade before the full sessions came out is one of the more quietly maddening facts in jazz history. Teo Macero knew what he had. Sometimes the industry moves at its own pace regardless of what the music deserves.
This is not an album for background. Put it on when the house is quiet and you have forty-five minutes you’re willing to give over completely. Let “If I Were a Bell” get strange in the second chorus. Don’t skip ahead.
Ron Carter’s bass on “Stella by Starlight” alone is worth the price of the record.