December 2024
I spent 1964 obsessed with becoming a drummer. Unfortunately, my inspiration was Dave Clark when it should have been Tony Williams. While Clark was already a veteran at 24 when his quintet caught the big wave the Beatles had started, Williams was a mere 17 when he burst out as the new drummer in Miles Davis’s quintet around the same time.
As the novelty of the British Invasion wore off, my practice time became occupied not with music but with Little League Baseball, and it would be another few years before Williams came to my attention through his musical relationship with guitarist John McLaughlin. I only discovered Williams’s youthful genius when, around 1975, I began to reach back through Davis’s catalog.
A Chicago native, Williams turned professional in 1959 when he was just 13, joining established saxophonist Sam Rivers in Boston. Two years later he briefly worked with saxophonist Jackie McLean before Davis came calling.
In the trumpeter’s characteristically salty words, when he first encountered the teenaged wunderkind, “I could definitely hear right away that this was going to be one of the baddest motherfuckers who had ever played a set of drums. . . . He just lit a big fire under everyone in [my] group. . . . He was always the center that the group’s sound revolved around.”
A somewhat more sanguine take on the young Williams comes from Davis biographer John Szwed: “Tony Williams could make you hear what wasn’t there rhythmically, or feel the incremental pulse of rock inside the pliancy of swing. . . . He could accelerate within the beat, scatter the pulse across the drum set, stomp down on every beat with the high hat, shift gears in mid-phrase, and send the band flying off into any number of new rhythmic worlds.”
What’s more, Williams was a serious young man who had learned band dynamics firsthand from two of the masters, and Davis quickly came to rely on his new drummer to be his straw boss. Williams was overjoyed with Davis’s existing bassist, the erudite Ron Carter, and rapidly bonded with incoming pianist Herbie Hancock. The young drummer was less thrilled by the presence of George Coleman, the reliably flexible tenor saxophonist who had come to Davis on the recommendation of John Coltrane himself, when he was leaving Davis to start his own band. Although only 28, Coleman seemed a generation older than Williams, Carter, and Hancock, regardless of the fact that the latter two were only a couple of years younger. As Dylan was singing just then, the times they were a-changin’.
Davis, pushing 40 in the early ’60s, was in on the youth movement. It would prove to be his pattern for the remaining 25 years of his life. For him, Coleman was merely a stopgap, albeit a highly skilled one. Davis already had his eye on Newark native Wayne Shorter as the final element in his next major evolutionary step, but the young saxophonist was committed to drummer Art Blakey.
Williams began a campaign to undermine Coleman, and the saxophonist told Szwed—for the latter’s essential biography So What: The Life of Miles Davis—that he wasn’t happy with the leader’s lifestyle choices around that time. What Coleman, who continues to tour and play majestically, likely didn’t know at the time was that Davis was relying on increasing amounts of cocaine to dull the pain of a degenerating hip, and he was pursuing various other vices to mask the distress of his foundering marriage to dancer Frances Taylor.
Despite those diversions, through a very active touring period—from May 17, 1963, to mid-October 1964, Davis’s last live show until late 1965—the trumpeter was performing exceptionally well, bursting with new harmonic ideas and playing with enormous style and sensitivity. He loved the fire and creativity his young hires brought to his music, and welcomed the growing number of opportunities to show them off, particularly at the burgeoning European jazz festivals.
One of the notable features of those early festivals in Switzerland, France, Norway, and elsewhere on the continent was the interest they attracted from state and national broadcasters, some of whose radio programs have found their way onto various bootlegs over the years. Finally, this important transitional period in Davis’s development is getting the kind of official release the music deserves, and the team behind it is impressive: the late Michael Cuscuna, the king of the jazz reissue; Steve Berkowitz; and Richard Seidel.
The latest enormous windfall from Columbia/Legacy’s 13-year-old “Bootleg Series” of Davis’s work, Miles in France 1963 & 1964: The Bootleg Series, Vol. 8, is available in a number of formats, including either six CDs or eight LPs, or as a two-LP set of the ’64 shows with Shorter. I had the 16-bit/44.1kHz WAV files for review.
On hand to assist me with a few days’ immersion in this exceptional music were the same Totem Loon Monitor standmount loudspeakers ($1299/pair, all prices USD) that Dennis Burger reviewed on November 1 on SoundStage! Access.
Immediately, I was struck by their diminutive size, just 10.75″H × 6″W × 8″D and 8.5 pounds apiece. Impressive, too, is their sleek appearance and walnut real-wood veneer. They look like they should cost well north of the grand-plus they’ll set you back, but can they punch that far above their size? In short, yes, but as Dennis noted, the cost may reflect the amount of personality the Loon brings to your listening and leave you wanting a bit more bass extension, depending on your preferences.
Each handsome enclosure contains a 5.75″ woofer with a copper-clad voice coil and a 1″ soft-dome tweeter. Unlike Dennis, I didn’t add a subwoofer, thinking that many consumers who stretch their wallets this far for small speakers may be in a compact space like my attic office and looking for speakers that can cover a broad range of music without the need for low-end reinforcement.
The remainder of my sound chain was my 16″ MacBook Pro, the Dayton Audio HTA200 integrated amplifier I reviewed in June or the NAD D 3045 I own, and a pair of AudioQuest Type 5 cables, terminated with spade plugs. As Dennis pointed out, Totem includes a second pair of binding posts so users can biwire or biamp them.
If you’ve read Dennis’s review, you’ll be aware that the Loon Monitors don’t deliver a neutral sound. They have personality. Reading his description, you could be fooled into thinking he’s writing about driving a twitchy sportscar rather than listening to a pair of diminutive speakers. His review left me wanting to hear how a pair of Loons would serve up music that was recorded as neutrally as possible with what one imagines was top-notch gear belonging to those European public broadcasters.
I’ll save the suspense: the Loons delivered the sort of detailed listening experience one would expect at their price point. Bearing in mind that the setup in each recording venue was most likely a combination of six microphones, there are some inherent sound issues. Davis occasionally moves away from his mike, unless he’s using his iconic Harmon mute, and the engineers applied what I’ve perceived to be a European preference for a very open soundstage, which can sacrifice rhythmic intimacy for overall clarity and a sense of space. The audience can only be heard when they applaud.
The 31 pieces the two bands performed represent a broad cross-section of Davis’s catalog, stretching from “If I Were a Bell” (first recorded by Davis in 1957) to “Seven Steps to Heaven,” the title piece from the only LP the quintet recorded with Coleman in the tenor chair. While Davis called a song like “Milestones” or “No Blues” only occasionally, the sets included four versions of the song known as “Walkin’,” usually credited to someone called Richard Carpenter but recently determined to be a Jimmy Mundy composition. It’s enlightening to compare two versions in particular: the 18-minute performance from Antibes/Juan-les-Pins from July 28, 1963, and a version almost exactly half as long recorded October 1, 1964, at the Paris Jazz Festival.
The ’63 version begins with Davis playing as aggressively as you’ll ever hear him. As noted, his creativity was elevated, his embouchure and lungs were in top shape, and his spirits were high. Likewise, Williams explodes out of the gate, and the leader steps aside for a uniquely placed drum solo. Following an opening barrage like that, it’s no surprise that Coleman comes in blazing and reels through a long series of progressively more urgent-sounding choruses. What is surprising is that Williams doesn’t engage much with the high-flying saxophonist; he simply lays back and keeps the rhythm moving. From there, solos are traded around the band, the whole unit sounding more like Art Blakey’s Jazz Messengers than a Davis quintet.
There’s no little irony in the fact that the same band—except for Shorter, having finally been poached from Blakey to replace Coleman—sounds completely different performing the same song just 14 months later. It’s as if abstract expressionism had supplanted impressionism overnight.
Performing the main theme, Davis sounds playful and his delivery is pointillistic, spraying some tonal colors around rather than drawing out the melody. Shorter enters in the same mood, sprinting through a series of flurries as Williams splashes accents behind him. Following Hancock’s typically arch solo, Davis and Williams briefly exchange ideas. The entire piece seems like a train careering down a steep grade.
Despite how well these recordings captured the shifting dynamics of the two quintets across the five concerts, I felt I needed some additional context to take the full measure of the Loon speakers. Niggling at me, in addition to Dennis’s comments, was the way I was hearing Carter’s bass. The tonal interplay between Carter and Hancock was one of the pillars of this band, and I felt like I might be missing some low-frequency depth.
Indeed, once I played the same tracks through my Q Acoustics 3050i floorstanding speakers, I gained a better appreciation of Carter’s role and the way he integrated himself into the quintet. Despite the fact that my 3050i speakers retail for $300 less than the Loons, some might think this comparison between floorstanders and diminutive bookshelf speakers should be classified under apples-versus-oranges. Point taken. So, I shifted locations in my office and channeled the music from my MacBook Pro to my iFi Audio Zen DAC V2 and on to my Focal Alpha 50 Evo speakers, which retail for $598/pair. Again, the bottom part of the audioband seemed to open up a bit compared to what I heard through the Loons. But was the sound better? After some back-and-forth, I determined that I was balancing on a point between transparency and sonic clout, which led me to consider another question: Could the Loons impress me at a level commensurate with their price point if I tried a different piece of music?
To answer that question, I decided to return to the Loons and pull up a recording that is a reliable test for the bottom end. It even has a Miles Davis connection; recorded in 2019, Another Land (24/96 WAV, Edition Records / Dare2 Records EDN1172) was released under the name of bassist Dave Holland, the British musician who replaced Carter in Davis’s band in 1968. Recorded and mixed at the estimable Sear Sound in New York City, the recording, which features Kevin Eubanks on guitar and Obed Calvaire on drums, has become one of my yardsticks to assess bass depth, clarity, and texture.
As it turned out, Another Land sounded spectacular from top to bottom, like it was a bespoke match for the little Loons. It certainly sounds no better on any of the other setups I’ve paired with it. Again, if you’ve read Dennis’s piece, this is reinforcement to his conclusion. These may not be speakers for everyone.
High-end desktop speakers? Sure. Paired with a sub? Absolutely. But as a standalone choice for everyday listening to a wide range of recordings, there are cheaper ways to go.
. . . James Hale
jamesh@soundstagenetwork.com
