Early last month Columbia/Legacy released an omnivorous slab of previously unheard Miles Davis recorded live on European tour in 1969. Those of us in the jazz know quickly recognised that (a) this second instalment of Columbia’s so-called Miles Davis ‘Bootleg Series’ was something very special and that (b) it was even more special than the first volume of Columbia’s Miles ‘Bootleg’ project – which, at the time, felt like the most completely indispensible record ever released.

But I hear what you’re saying. Curb your jazz enthusiasm. What has buried treasure from jazz’s yesteryear got to do with anything of interest to Gramophone readers?

In the current issue there are two articles about Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring. Geoffrey Norris reflects on ‘that’ premiere and I consider the imprint left by The Rite on the music that came later, and my conclusion – that composers who dealt with The Rite’s unavoidable presence by caricaturing its rhythms and harmonies were massively missing the point – is largely how I feel about the wider musical community’s relationship with the legacy of Miles.

It’s true, jazz never has fully recovered from the collective anaphylactic shock it suffered when Davis died in 1991. The preeminent jazz trumpeters who established their careers after his passing – Wallace Roney, Roy Hargrove, Mark Isham, Till Brönner, Nils Petter Molvær – have proved unable to free themselves from music as Miles defined it: to groove or not to groove, that is the question, whether jazz is nobler in the mind (concepts, abstractions, complex improvisational schemata) or whether it should appeal directly to the slings and arrows of the heart.

Why, if jazz has struggled to secure a convincing post-Miles future, anybody else should be any the wiser is a fair point well made.

Why today’s classical composers should have become so obsessed with Miles, as opposed to, say, Ornette Coleman, Thelonious Monk or Charles Mingus, is an equally fair point to raise even as it becomes an unavoidably loaded question.

As every fledging composer talking through their latest post-Knussen eight-minute London Sinfonietta piece feels the need to reveal they once played kit in a punk band, paying homage à Miles has become another composerly rite-of-passage. Like all those French composers who scored pale imitations of Stravinsky’s polytonal and polyrhythmic ideals, a trait Pierre Boulez would scornfully dismiss as the ‘Divertimento generation’, Miles’ achievements have been too easily reduced to one signature sound and a catalogue of dependably evocative gestures. Want make-out music tinted with reckless seduction? Ape that signature sound by placing a harmon mute inside the bell of a close-miked, ballad playing trumpeter. And job done. The itch and pace of New York City? Do the same thing, but double (or quadruple) the tempo. Any composer grappling for a notational representation of Monk’s music is probably going to need ten staves: one finger per stave counting irrational rhythmic equations that resemble a Finnissy or Ferneyhough score. Ornette’s challenges to Western thought – a notational/philosophical system he calls ‘harmolodics’, designed to provoke an impulsive group dialogue – is too dangerous, too alien, too exposing. But Miles? Write a melodic line that sounds even loosely urban and bluesy, put ‘with harmon mute’ over the top, and – bingo! – welcome to planet jazz.

Quite how such well-meaning tributes address his true spirit – summed up by musings of Miles like ‘Don’t play what’s there, play what’s not there’ or ‘When you’re creating, even the sky ain’t the limit’ – I’m not sure. And therein lies a problem with Western notation. Musical impulse and sonic imagination become frozen and set. Impulse and whim can collapse into habit and routine.

And the message of the music documented on the 'Miles Davis Quintet Live in Europe 1969: The Bootleg Series Volume 2' – 3 CDs and 1 DVD: four nights of radiant, rampantly creative music recorded in Antibes (two sets), Stockholm and Berlin? That the reality of Miles will always be grander, more startling and emotional than anyone’s half-remembered fantasy of what his music might be like.

Miles fans know the significance of 1969. In 1956 his first ‘great’ quintet, featuring John Coltrane on tenor saxophone, cut a sequence of now classic albums for the Prestige label, collections of blues and standards given titles like 'Cookin’', 'Relaxin’' and 'Steamin’'. This quintet was reborn as a sextet a year on after Miles and his men had absented themselves to deal with their narcotic problems. Cannonball Adderley joined on alto saxophone and modern-jazz gold soon flowed with a pair of game-changing albums: 'Milestones' and 'Kind of Blue'. When Coltrane decided to quit in 1960, a second ‘great’ quintet would emerge from the wreckage. Wayne Shorter was eventually chosen as his successor and Miles assembled a young, battle-readied rhythm section – Herbie Hancock (piano), Ron Carter (bass) and Tony Williams (drums). But what happened next has, for Miles aficionados, long been an enigma that threatened to turn into an obsession.

Because Davis’ third ‘great’ quintet never made any official studio recordings! Shorter remained, but the rhythm section migrated towards Chick Corea (piano, electric piano), Dave Holland (bass) and Jack DeJohnette (drums). And as Miles’ many biographers – from Ian Carr to John Szwed and Richard Cook – all agree that his musical direction changed fundamentally from hereon in, the problem was that, until last month, no recorded proof existed to prop up or refute this assertion. In jazz terms, this new release is akin to Rattle’s recording of the four-movement reconstruction of Bruckner’s Ninth Symphony, or Anthony Payne’s detective work on behalf of Elgar’s Third.

The aesthetic trajectory, the great technical learning, the prizing open of what jazz was assumed to be, the mystique of Miles – the man with the golden horn, the dark sexual allure of the man with the rasping voice, his self-cultivated Prince of Darkness persona, his relentless pursuit of the next big thing, his paranoia about retreading old pathways, 'Miles Ahead', 'Milestones', 'Miles Smiles', 'Miles In The Sky', Miles the perpetual presence in American music who began recording with Charlie Parker in 1945 and whose final record 'Doo-Bop' was overseen by hip-hop producer Easy Mo Bee, the young hopeful who was mentored by Duke Ellington’s trumpeter Clark Terry, the old sage who would trade ideas with Prince, the innovator who in 1968 began adding the tag line ‘Directions In Music’ to all his records, 'Sorcerer', 'Nefertiti', 'Filles de Kilimanjaro', the instigator of jazz/rock fusion, 'In A Silent Way', 'Bitches Brew', 'Live-Evil', 'Agharta', 'Pangaea', 'Dark Magus', the man who to a world outside jazz is jazz, the impatient improviser, the jazz figurehead who firmly rejected the word ‘jazz’, viewing it as patronising and restrictive – that journey, mapped out largely through quintets, began when 'Miles: The New Miles Davis Quintet' was released just short of his 30th birthday, and depending on your point of view, hit true liberation or a point of crisis around 1969/70 when Miles wore the quintet format out. The music documented on 'Live in Europe 1969' paved the way for his next big direction in music. 'Bitches Brew', abstracted blues forms with a rockist backbeat, multiple keyboards and percussionists and saxophonists, an epic double album that rocked – and rocked jazz to its core.

'Live in Europe' is a clarion reminder of just how reductionist and condescending it is to presume that that one sound was Miles. True enough, albums like 'Kind of Blue' and 'In A Silent Way' – and the three orchestral albums Davis recorded with arranger Gil Evans, 'Miles Ahead', 'Porgy and Bess' and 'Sketches of Spain' – had ‘classic’ classical grace and finality about them. But the Miles who stepped on various European stages in 1969 had other concerns. He hadn’t chosen his eager new rhythm section without reason. His British-born bass player Dave Holland, who Davis hired on spec after hearing him at Ronnie Scott’s in 1968, had been playing free music with top-dog UK improvisers like John Stevens, Derek Bailey and Evan Parker. Chick Corea had also been exploring free improvisation with saxophonist Anthony Braxton, his mass audience jazz/rock fusion music still for tomorrow. They made certain Davis couldn’t know the boundaries of his own music. And that’s precisely why he chose them. That’s where he felt comfortable…sort of.

In Miles: The Autobiography he discusses his uneasiness when, mid-performance, the ground would be lifted from under his feet. But he wouldn’t have wanted it any other way. On disc two, the second of the Antibes concerts, Dave Holland leads 'Miles Runs The Voodoo Down' towards pure free improv. The stylistic disjoint obliges the structure to buckle, and Miles, and his sound, bend with it as he makes sense of the moment.

People tend to forget that jazz is played in the present tense. Jazz records – and this coming from someone who loves them dearly – freeze time, allowing those who feel uncomfortable with the immediacy of jazz improvisation to cream off the sound and forget about the impetus behind it. The industry that has grown up around Miles Davis is insatiable and ever more needy. Miles is one of a handful of guaranteed jazz cash-cows left; the only other Columbia/Legacy roster musician to be honoured with officially endorsed bootlegs is Bob Dylan. When the company issued a meta-boxset of Miles – a boxset of boxsets issued inside a mock up of Miles’ own trumpet case – yours for $900, complete with replica mouthpiece – a friend who owns an independent jazz label in New York moaned that if only jazz fans could be persuaded to spent 900 bucks on current releases our music would be all the healthier.

And that’s spot on. But no jazz fan can be blamed for salivating at the thought of miles of Miles. And anyone aiming to create music in the true spirit of Miles needs to weigh up this paradox: the last thing Miles-inspired music should sound like is Miles. The sky, after all, is limitless. Sometimes it’s not even there.

'Miles Davis Quintet Live in Europe 1969: The Bootleg Series Volume 2' is available on Columbia/Legacy 88725 41853 2

Watch Miles Davis performing live in Antibes in July 1969 below: