AllOfYouMilesInEurope.mp3
AllOfYouHancockMilesInEurope.pdf
AllOfYouMilesInEurope.mp3
AllOfYouHancockMilesInEurope.pdf
June 28, 2025 : Driving home today, I was listening to the "Seven Steps:...Miles Davis 1963-1964" album. There's a version of All of You, on the section from what was originally released as "Miles Davis in Europe". This is the quintet with Miles, George Coleman, Herbie Hancock, Ron Carter, and Tony Williams, which I was somewhat obsessed with when I discovered them in 1976. Tom Hambridge had turned me onto Herbie Hancock about a year before, and then I went to the Eastman summer high school jazz camp. I got religion about straight ahead jazz, and found out about this group. Bill Dobbins was a professor who taught jazz (and a great pianist) and although he had nothing to do with the high school kids, I got my hands on some of his transcriptions. This one, I got later, when I went back there two more summers.
Listening to it today, I tried to sing the head through the solos, and it is a revelatory experience. There are some crazy chords being played, the groove is great - the piano solo is great. The recording is not as hifi as some other ones, but the playing is really nice. I thought it might be one of the transcriptions I penciled in because they were faint but it's not. I probably got this in 78.
Preparing this page, I scanned the transcription and was checking my pdf against the recording and it didn't match ! This had me scratching my head. Listening more closely, on the recording, Herbie ends the chorus several times with a sustained E 6/9 chord. It seems that when they released the LP, they edited out two choruses of his solo. The removed choruses ended so similarly to the ones they kept that it was probably very convincing. That's what I would have heard from the LP in 1976. Whoever did the edits was aware of the structure of the song. The CD version and what I made this mp3 from on Youtube include these formerly missing choruses. Wikipedia (God bless Wikipedia!) confirms that "On the original LP, some of the tenor sax and piano solos were edited". So when the transcription stops agreeing with the recording, you have to wait a chorus. Bill Dobbins did not probably know that he was working from a defaced copy of the original recording.
There could be so much to learn from this - chord substitutions, bebop lines, bluesy licks - it's really something to listen to it and try and keep the head and thus the chords of the song in mind as they venture into different territory and of course return perfectly. All the solos on this tune go into a long "turnaround" vamp of ii-V-iii-VI. Such a great feel, too.
Other tunes before this from that show are Autumn Leaves, Milestones, Joshua, I Thought About You. I got the Autumn Leaves solo transcription in 1976 and that one I penciled in, as I mentioned on transcriptions.html. Herbie was 23, Ron was 26, and Tony was 17, as the announcer says in French at the beginning of the set. Just imagine these young geniuses traveling around playing like this in 1963. They just threw off these renditions into the air, to be captured and for me to investigate now, 62 years later. I wish I had delved more into these in high school. I used to play them as best I could, but I had not connected playing jazz with singing a song like a regular person, in fact I wasn't probably able to sing a song like a normal person. Later I tried to be a guitar playing/singing kind of musician and bringing that type of appreciation to this by singing the head to these solos is really interesting. There's a lot of departure from the official chord changes, and yet they all sound together and they are always aware of the form. What great art.