This set could well be the most important of the Miles Davis Bootleg Series that began in 2011 with Live in Europe 1967. The Davis/Coleman quintet fell inbetween the end of the Kind of Blue band and the beginning of the Second Great Quintet, making their work easy to gloss over, pay lip-service to or completely ignore, most of which has happened up to now.

Columbia only put out three albums by the band in the 1960s, Miles in Europe (taken from the 27 July 1963 concert of Miles in France), My Funny Valentine and ‘Four’ and More, both from a Lincoln Center concert on 12 February 1964. The former was released just after Coleman left the band in 1964 and the latter two in 1966, so even these releases were overshadowed by what Davis was getting up to with his quintet, now with Wayne Shorter on tenor sax, which was attracting considerable attention in the jazz world.

Interestingly, CDs four and five of the Miles in France set make for strained continuity with the previously released Live in Europe 1967, in that they represent the first beginnings of what would become known as ‘The Second Great Quintet’ (with Shorter), which is captured a couple of years later in full flower on Volume 1.

What the Miles in France set demonstrates is that the Coleman/Davis collaboration is not quite so easy to gloss over as most people think. Firstly, Davis, for the first time since Coltrane’s departure, had in Coleman a tenor saxophonist with a strong, robust tone and original ideas of his own which provided a perfect contrast to his trumpet style (something neither Hank Mobley or Sam Rivers achieved); and secondly, we have the first stirring of experimentation with form and structure and a move to time-no-changes perfected by the group with Shorter.

A row with Teo Macero meant Davis refused to go into the studio with the producer, so all the Coleman band releases by Columbia are from live recordings.

The Miles in France set does contain a number of track duplicates, but this does not detract from the energetic thrust and the feeling that Miles now had a group with a powerful personality of its own, revealing more of themselves with each new concert and listening session.