By 1963, Miles Davis needed a new band. The first great quintet had dissolved; the orchestral collaborations with Gil Evans had run their course; the modal explorations of Kind of Blue had been followed by records that were good but not transformative. Miles was looking for something and had not yet found it.

He found it in pieces. Tony Williams, a teenager from Boston who played drums with a freedom that Miles had not previously heard. Ron Carter, whose bass playing was harmonically sophisticated enough to function as a second harmonic voice in the ensemble. Herbie Hancock, twenty-two years old, already technically extraordinary. Wayne Shorter, the Jazz Messengers’ musical director, who could compose and improvise with equal authority.

The second great quintet — the band formed by Miles with these four musicians — recorded five studio albums between 1965 and 1968: E.S.P., Miles Smiles, Sorcerer, Nefertiti, and Filles de Kilimanjaro. These five records constitute the fullest expression of what acoustic jazz can be.

What Made It Different

The first great quintet — with Coltrane, Red Garland, Paul Chambers, and Philly Joe Jones — was great because its members were individually exceptional and played the music of hard bop with uncommon skill. The second great quintet was different in kind, not just degree.

The five musicians of the second quintet developed a collective approach to improvisation that had no precedent. They called aspects of it “time, no changes” — playing around a rhythmic pulse rather than over a fixed chord progression. The harmony became fluid, implied rather than stated. The rhythm became porous: Williams could displace the beat in ways that momentarily suspended the forward motion of the music without losing it, and the other musicians could follow him or work against him as the moment required.

This approach required musicians who could hear what was happening in real time and respond at the highest level of sophistication. All four of them could. The result was music that sounded improvised — because it was — and also compositionally coherent, because all five musicians understood the architecture well enough to build something within it on any given night.

The Albums

E.S.P. (1965) is the quintet’s debut and its most immediately accessible record. The material is primarily Shorter’s — “E.S.P.,” “Eighty-One,” “Little One” — and the playing is still somewhat close to the hard bop world the musicians were coming from. The departures are present but not yet dominant.

Miles Smiles (1967) is where the approach fully crystallises. The title piece — actually a minor blues — is played with a rhythmic looseness that makes the blues feel suspended rather than grounded. Williams’s drumming is the controlling element; he plays so freely that the other musicians must listen at every moment or lose the thread.

Nefertiti (1968) is widely considered the quintet’s masterpiece. The title track is unusual in jazz: the melody is stated repeatedly by Miles and Shorter in unison while the rhythm section improvises underneath — the conventional relationship between melody and rhythm inverted completely. It is one of the strangest and most beautiful things in the jazz canon.

Tony Williams

Any account of the second great quintet must return to Tony Williams. He was seventeen when he joined the band and twenty-two when it ended. In those five years he changed what jazz drumming was.

Williams played with a quality that jazz drummers had not previously exhibited: he could be simultaneously supportive and destabilising, holding the rhythm together while also pulling against it, suggesting tempos within the stated tempo, creating a rhythmic environment that was in constant motion without ever losing its pulse.

Miles hired him because nobody else was doing what Williams was doing. He was right. Nobody else was.

The End

The second great quintet ended when Miles moved decisively toward electric music in 1968-69. The musicians who formed the quintet — Shorter, Hancock, Williams, Carter — went on to distinguished careers in which the methods they had developed with Miles were extended into different contexts. Hancock and Shorter co-founded Weather Report. Williams formed the Tony Williams Lifetime. Carter became one of the most recorded bassists in history.

None of them ever made records quite like the five they made together between 1965 and 1968. The conditions for those records were specific: five musicians, at precise moments in their development, working under the direction of a leader who understood exactly what to ask of them. Those conditions cannot be replicated. The records remain.