According to saxophonist Steve Potts, he was at Miles’ home one night and watched him compose the melodic theme of “Filles de Kilimanjaro” on an African thumb piano. The title wasn’t in tribute to his new girlfriend, but rather a Kenyan coffee cooperative run by Miles’ longtime friend Buddy Gist, with Miles, Lena Horne, and psychedelic-touting heiress Peggy Mellon Hitchcock serving as initial investors. A mesmerizing twelve-minute composition, it’s unhurried without feeling inert, propelled by a relatively simple bass guitar figure from Carter. Having picked up work recording jingles, commercials, and the like, Carter was well familiar with the electric bass. But he didn’t fully dig it, telling Terry Gross that he missed how an acoustic bass lets you change tone by touch: “The upright player who is really conscious of the sound choices he has at his command with his hands will miss those choices playing electric bass.” Having two young sons at home was further incentive to stay off the road, so Carter became the first quintet member to bow out.
Hancock fell ill on his honeymoon down in Brazil and missed a September studio date, so Davis fired him outright, replacing him and Carter with two young up-and-comers, Chick Corea and Dave Holland. They factor into the two pieces that bookend Filles. Opener “Brown Hornet” finds newcomer Corea filling in more space than Hancock, while Williams’ drums torrent all around, threatening to wash the whole group away.
And then there’s the 16 minutes of the closing number, named for Miles’ newest wife. Evans rejiggered three of Hendrix’s chords from “The Wind Cries Mary” in arranging “Miss Mabry,” providing an upward lilt at the end of each 18-bar chorus. This new rhythm section expertly dawdles like it’s Sunday morning; even Williams sounds relaxed. It’s three whole minutes of minimal movement between the three before Miles finally wanders in (Shorter doesn’t enter until past the halfway mark). Moving as if he’s still in his bedroom slippers, Miles takes what might be his longest, slowest solo on an album, a languid, six-minute wander through a liminal space the band opens for him, full of pauses, beautiful half-phrases, sighs.
It’s not quite a ballad, yet not quite solid. Miles’ predilection for subtraction—dropping notes, bars, melodies, even players out—gets taken to its natural endpoint here, to where the music itself became sublimated, something gaseous in the air. For the next decade or so, Miles’ subsequent music became more like what writer Michael Veal called “smudged pastels, charcoal, and watercolors…full of phantom gestures and erasure.” A sketch of a woman instead of a real woman.
At the 11th hour, Miles decided that all the song titles needed to be in French: “Miss” would now be “Mademoiselle Mabry,” “Tout de Suite,” “Petits Machins,” etc. And he gave himself a new title on the cover: “Directions in Music by Miles Davis.” When released in early 1969, critics in both jazz and rock camps loved Filles de Kilimanjaro. One review deemed Filles “a profound and mystical experience…a place where you may enter, but cannot leave without being changed.”
