You can find a fair number of stage bootlegs if you know your way around the shadowlands of file sharing, but not nearly enough of it is available via normal commercial channels. So proceed to the checkout counter for Miles Davis All- Stars: Broadcast Sessions 1958-59, a new CD on Acrobat Music, a British label.
Here are chunks of four performances recorded for radio, and the bands include the pianists Bill Evans (sounding more hard-driving than his later self) and Red Garland; the drummers Philly Joe Jones and Jimmy Cobb; and in an “all- star” iteration, the brothers Nat and Cannonball Adderley on cornet and alto saxophone.
Above all, this is a “Bye Bye Blackbird” album. The two versions of the song here could show a complete novice how small jazz groups work: they represent the sum-of-its-parts philosophy in excelsior. In the first, Davis’s solo is magically shrewd and expansive, conducting rhythmic and harmonic battle with the melody, using repetition and humor and subterfuge; he’s followed by Coltrane sounding marvelous but a little rote for the phase he’s in.
In the faster second one, five months later, it’s Davis who sounds distracted; he gets out of the melody quickly and Coltrane becomes a supercollider of far- apart tones and styles. And we haven’t even gotten to Evans vs. Garland, but as I said: this music is really, really good.
