Miles’s history-making albums are numerous, but today we’re focusing on a title that’s unfairly considered minor, but which, upon closer listening, reveals itself to be full of gems. Personally, it’s my favorite Miles album.
When discussing Miles Davis’s electric turn, the conversation usually immediately jumps to In a Silent Way or Bitches Brew. These are the seminal albums, the ones that redefined jazz and sparked endless debate.
But if you want to hear the precise moment when acoustic post-bop begins to blend into a new language, the album is truly Filles de Kilimanjaro. It’s the hinge: the final breath of the Second Great Quintet and the first glimpse of Miles’s electric vision.
Recorded in June and September 1968 at Columbia’s 30th Street Studio in New York and released between 1968 and 1969, Filles de Kilimanjaro sits somewhere between Miles in the Sky and In a Silent Way.
It feels like a band in transition: still rooted in the conversational post-bop the quintet had perfected, but now colored by electric instruments, new rhythmic ideas, and a different sense of space. Nothing here feels like a sudden break with the past—but nothing is entirely recognizable by the old definitions, either. For anyone interested in how jazz evolves, this tension is part of its magic.
By the time of these sessions, the Second Great Quintet—Miles Davis, Wayne Shorter, Herbie Hancock, Ron Carter, and Tony Williams—had already transformed modern small-group jazz through a series of albums ranging from E.S.P. to Miles Smiles, Nefertiti, and Miles in the Sky.
The telepathy between the musicians was almost an instrument in itself. Filles de Kilimanjaro captures the same chemistry, but with two crucial changes: electric piano and electric bass appear for the first time in a sustained manner, and the rhythm section begins to change.
The album was recorded in two blocks. In June 1968, Miles, Shorter, Hancock, Carter, and Williams created the first material, with Hancock on electric piano and Carter on electric bass. By the time the project resumed in September, Chick Corea had replaced Hancock, and Dave Holland had taken over for Carter, returning to acoustic bass but with a different timbral approach.
This means a single album documents two distinct rhythm sections: the original Hancock-Carter combination and the more recent Corea-Holland duo that would back the first electric groups. It’s a rare opportunity to hear the future unfold in real time.
The title—translated from French as “Girls of Kilimanjaro”—has been linked to Miles’ involvement in Kilimanjaro African Coffee, a Tanzanian coffee company he co-owned, as well as his interest in African imagery at the time.
But what immediately catches your eye is the cover: the photograph is of Betty Mabry, the young singer and songwriter who would briefly become Miles’ wife, and who later recorded groundbreaking funk albums under the name Betty Davis. Her presence isn’t just visual decoration. There’s a personal and musical connection that runs through the album.
In his autobiography, Miles describes how Betty introduced him to the new music exploding in the late 1960s, particularly Jimi Hendrix, Sly and the Family Stone, and James Brown. It wasn’t a one-way influence—they were part of the same scene in New York, as fashion, art, and black music collided and influenced each other. But Miles makes it clear that it was she who opened his ears to sounds beyond the world of jazz.
Betty and Miles Davis. Isle of Wight Festival, 1970. Photo by Jim Marshall.
That influence is most clearly reflected in the album’s final track, “Mademoiselle Mabry (Miss Mabry),” which takes its harmonic foundation from Hendrix’s “The Wind Cries Mary.” It’s both a recollection and a true hybrid: jazz musicians reinterpreting the language of rock through their own vocabulary.
Filles de Kilimanjaro is composed of five extended compositions:
“Frelon Brun”
“Tout de suite,”
“Petits Machins”
“Filles de Kilimanjaro”
“Mademoiselle Mabry.”
Rather than acting like five unrelated pieces, they feel like variations within a single, evolving landscape. Melodic ideas stretch across long forms, rhythmic patterns slowly shift, and the album as a whole feels like a long narrative arc.
There are moments of dense interplay that could sit comfortably alongside earlier quintet recordings, and others where the music opens up into a freer groove that hints at rock and funk without ever copying anyone.
The instruments themselves change the shape of the music. Herbie Hancock’s early experiments with electric piano create a more sustained texture and allow the harmony to float in the air rather than bouncing rhythmically like an acoustic piano.
When Chick Corea joins the project, he moves freely between acoustic and electric textures, and Dave Holland brings a very different sound and bass phrasing than Ron Carter.
But Tony Williams remains the winning force: his drumming propels the group forward with a restless intensity, breaking time into fragments and reassembling the rhythm in a way that drives the music without relying on a rigid pattern. It’s fascinating to hear him push the quintet’s rhythmic language in a new direction, without ever abandoning the inventiveness that made his previous work so important.
Critical Reception
Upon its release, Filles de Kilimanjaro received a mixture of curiosity and admiration. Some jazz critics were unsure of the album’s electric elements and the way it eschewed traditional swing in favor of repeated figures and spacious rhythms. Others sensed that something significant was happening. Publications looking beyond the jazz world recognized the album’s connection to broader shifts in black music and culture, noting that the album functioned almost as a continuous suite rather than a collection of isolated pieces.
Today, in hindsight, it’s easier to see what listeners sensed at the time: the music was opening up to a new idea of what a jazz band could be.
In the decades since, music critics have consistently returned to Filles de Kilimanjaro as the starting point of Miles’s electric journey. If In a Silent Way is the door and Bitches Brew the explosion, Filles is the moment the handle turns. It documents the end of the Second Great Quintet’s acoustic language, the arrival of new ideas and musicians, and the personal influence of Betty Mabry as Miles began to seriously absorb the new wave of funk, rock, and amplified black music.
The album still feels exploratory rather than declarative—but that’s precisely what makes it so engaging. It’s not a finished theory. It’s a laboratory.
For today’s listeners, this makes Filles de Kilimanjaro one of the richest albums in Miles Davis’s catalog. You can hear the old and the new in the same breath. The quintet’s intimacy is intact, but the atmosphere has changed. The music moves in longer lines, with a different weight and a new relationship to rhythm. And there’s something human at its heart: a portrait on the cover, a name on the tracklist, and an invisible conversation between Betty’s record collection and Miles’s imagination.
If you’ve always approached the electric period through Miles Davis’s most famous albums, revisiting Filles de Kilimanjaro reveals a different story. Innovation rarely happens in a single moment. It comes in stages. This album captures one of the most important stages of modern jazz.
