Camie Davis

That’s What Happened 1982-1985: Bootleg Volume 7 is the next installment in the celebrated, award-winning archival series that began in 2011, shining an in-depth light onto different eras of the legendary career of Miles Davis. In the 1980s, popular music had moved to a smoother, electronic-based sound that traded the steam of previous years for subdued arrangements meant to elicit peace and deep reflection. Miles Davis embraced this era, pulling inspiration from FM radio and an upstart music video channel called MTV. He was searching for the next frontier, letting his creativity roam. This music on The Bootleg Series Vol. 7 captures that exploration, and finds Miles beginning to re-emerge in a creative landscape far different than the one he left in 1975.

A monumental innovator, icon, and maverick, trumpeter Miles Davis helped define the course of jazz as well as popular culture in the 20th century, bridging the gap between bebop, modal music, funk, and fusion. Throughout most of his 50-year career, Davis played the trumpet in a lyrical, introspective style, often employing a stemless Harmon mute to make his sound more personal and intimate. It was a style that, along with his brooding stage persona, earned him the nickname "Prince of Darkness." However, Davis proved to be a dazzlingly protean artist, moving into fiery modal jazz in the '60s and electrified funk and fusion in the '70s, drenching his trumpet in wah-wah pedal effects along the way.

Among the main protagonists credited with linking the big band era with the soul jazz scene that emerged during the late 1950s, Eddie Lockjaw Davis remains a notable influence on jazz saxophonists to this day. While perhaps not always displaying the finesse of his contemporaries, Davis produced a tone that was wholly unique and capable of emitting an aggressive, bluesy sound alongside lines of great tenderness and sensitivity. The flexibility of his playing lent itself to rhythm and blues, swing, hard bop and Latin jazz over the years, and while his early career featured Davis supporting some of the finest artists of the period, his greatest records came when he took up the role of bandleader, notably during his tenancy with the Prestige label. This collection features the eight albums by Eddie Lockjaw Davis as leader released on the Prestige label between 1958 and 1961.