VIA PRESS RELEASE | Six decades later, the music still wows, baffles, and inspires.
What happened over two nights in a tiny, unassuming Chicago club under a bakery was a fascinating and unplanned documentation of a pivotal moment in the evolution of Miles Davis’s leadership and sound. Columbia Records and Legacy Recordings, the catalog division of Sony Music Entertainment, today announce the reissue of these legendary recordings: The Complete Live at the Plugged Nickel 1965. Arriving January 30, 2026, as a cornerstone moment in the year-long celebration of Miles Davis’ Centennial to come next year, this comprehensive collection will be available as a 10LP or 8CD box set. Pre-orders are available now.
As a preview of the larger collection, a standalone 2LP set, Live At The Plugged Nickel: December 23, 1965 – Second Set, will be released for RSD Black Friday on November 28.
The recordings capture Miles Davis’s Second Great Quintet—featuring Wayne Shorter, Herbie Hancock, Ron Carter, and Tony Williams—at an inflection point. Wayne Shorter was just over a year into his tenure, and the group, fresh off of recording E.S.P., was solidifying into what would become the most transformative small group in jazz. What unfolded on the stage of the Chicago club was not just a performance, but a provocation.
Sparked by a pact instigated by drummer Tony Williams to play “anti-music,” the band actively subverted expectations, turning their well-tread setlist inside out. As Miles would later put it, “We found ways to make the old music sound as new as the new music we were recording.” It is the sound of the Second Great Quintet becoming itself—alive, unstable, and always mid-mutation.
Originally released in 1995 as a Mosaic Records limited-edition LP box set, The Complete Live at the Plugged Nickel has been out of print for nearly three decades. The new 10LP edition recreates the Mosaic musical presentation and offers the complete performances—over seven hours of music—in a newly designed slipcase featuring ten individual jackets and a 40-page booklet. An 8CD edition will also be available. Both formats feature new liner notes by Syd Schwartz, who unpacks the radical spirit of the performances, as well as classic material by jazz historian Bob Blumenthal.
“The Plugged Nickel tapes don’t just capture great performances. They document a band revolutionizing improvisation in real time, welcoming surprise, discarding certainty, and turning ‘wrong’ notes into revelations,” remarks Schwartz in the new liner notes. “What unfolded on that stage has become one of the most mythologized stretches in post-bop history.”
The release has only grown in stature since its initial issue. The Guardian hailed it as “Maybe the best-ever representation of ‘the second great quintet’ at work…reinventing small-band jazz with an all-but-psychic flexibility of timing and on-the-fly harmonising.”
Sixty years later, The Complete Live at the Plugged Nickel 1965 returns, humming like a live wire and daring a new generation of listeners to rethink what’s possible.
