Five years without the horn

On 1 February 1975, at the Festival Hall in Osaka, the band recorded two concerts, released as Agharta and Pangaea. That September Miles played the Schaefer Music Festival in New York. It was his last concert for years.

The silence

He was ill, exhausted and taking too much: painkillers, cocaine and alcohol. A hip operation followed in December 1975. In the autobiography he gives the length of it plainly.

From 1975 until early 1980 I didn’t pick up my horn; for over four years, didn’t pick it up once.

The return

In 1981 he released The Man with the Horn, and in June he played ten minutes as a guest with Mel Lewis’s orchestra at the Village Vanguard. In 1986, for Warner Bros., with Marcus Miller, he made Tutu.