Agitation: The Miles Davis Quintet with Herbie Hancock, Wayne Shorter, Ron Carter and Tony Williams

John Damellos - The Greek Courier

Before Fusion and "Bitches Brew" Miles Davis created the Quintet with Herbie Hancock, Wayne Shorter, Ron Carter, and Tony Williams. It is my humble opinion that in all fairness, regarding how important they were for the cultural history of the United States, their faces should be carved next to George Washington's, Thomas Jefferson's, Theodore Roosevelt's, and Abraham Lincoln's at Mount Rushmore.

The song is called Agitation and it was performed in Stockholm in 1963.

This is a tumultuous period for American Jazz, the twilight of an Era that soon was pummeled by Pop and Rock, the Beatles and the Stones. It was a period when American jazz icons had to flee to Europe to find work because one after the other, the American jazz clubs were closing; By1969, the Newport Jazz Festival had invited Sly and the Family Stone and Led Zeppelin to play on stage. Coltrane had died early leaving an empty space that free jazz could not easily fill; in a few years, Armstrong and Ellington were dead too. Miles Davis proclaimed jazz dead.
Then, in the seventies, Davis turned to fusion, to stay popular with the younger generations. Electronic instruments replaced the acoustic. And it took almost ten years of exile for Dexter Gordon to return to New York from Paris and play his old style jazz in front of a new audience.

John Damellos