Behold, The Only Known Recording of Miles Davis Performing in Brooklyn

By Michael Gonik

Had he lived to this day, Miles Davis, the St. Louis-born horn player who forecasted and hugged every bend in jazz development over the course of his 65 years of material existence, would have turned 100. From pre-bop to bebop to the “cool” years to post-bop to the “blue” years to whatever “fusion” means to you to every micro-strain and permutation in between and beyond, Davis was not only present but, in many cases, stewarding their arrivals (and departures).

During his most active periods, keeping up with Davis’ myriad transformations was a fool’s errand. His runs in any particular style were famously fast and no less fierce for their brevity. But if you lived in New York—from, let’s say, the mid-1940s until some point in the 80s, when he moved to Santa Monica in an attempt to get clean after decades of substance abuse—you stood a better chance than most of catching him either entering or exiting a phase of creative discovery or dismissal. The city was his dojo, his playground, his center of gravity, and, for decades, his home, which made Miles a fixture of the live jazz scenes of Midtown, the West Village, and yes, even here in Kings County, where it wasn’t uncommon to see him top-billing a string of performances on Fulton Street (until it was).

In the late-60s, Davis was something of a regular at the Blue Coronet, a famed, long-shuttered jazz club in Bed-Stuy, where, according to a 2011 JazzTimes interview with its former owner Dickie Habersham-Bey, you could see Mt. Rushmore figures like Thelonious Monk or McCoy Tyner or Lee Morgan or Freddie Hubbard or Max Roach perform with bands comprised of stars, both modern and soon-to-be, on any given night. Davis’ relationship with the venue was a bit more fraught, though. In fact, it was after a show at the Blue Coronet that he swore off ever playing in the borough again, convinced a dispute between promoters led to his assassination attempt in the early hours of October 10, 1969.

According to Habersham-Bey, a rival promoter hoping to bulldoze their way onto a bill threatened Davis’ life for showing up to perform that night. But Miles didn’t back down, and the promoter hired people to follow him home after a gig on the night of October 9, 1969. Riding back to Manhattan with his then-girlfriend Margarette Eskridge following the performance, Miles, in his red Ferrari, stopped outside Eskridge’s apartment in the East Village to drop her off, at which point a cab pulled up alongside them, three men flooded out, and one fired five shots into Davis’ car. The New York Times reported that Eskridge was unharmed, the trumpeter was grazed on the hip by one of the shots, and both were charged with possession after police found a couple joints in the car. The remaining nights of his residency were cancelled, and Davis never played on this side of the East River again.

If there’s a recording of that final performance in October, it has yet to make its way to the internet. There is, however, a single 100-ish-minute capture, presumably from the crowd, of one night from a run of shows earlier that year (June 21-29, 1969), that’s not exactly rare but also not something to dismiss entirely. It’s exploratory in the ways Miles was known to be, full of bombast, punchiness, and high-octane riffs. And it’s an exemplary display of Miles as a band’s leader and assembler, surrounding himself with young talents from jazz’s underground that went on to be known as “the lost quintet,” including Chick Corea on electric piano, Wayne Shorter on sax, Jack DeJohnette on drums, and Dave Holland on bass. The quality of it is scratchy at best, but it remains the only recording of Miles Davis performing in Brooklyn, and it captures, for any order of Davis fan, a rare glimpse of the trailblazing trumpeter scorching yet another path on his way to discovering and honing the newly electrified sound that would define the next several years of his album output (specifically on Bitches Brew, On The Corner, and Live Evil). 

Hear it in full below.