Everyone thinks Miles Davis’ electric era begins with the explosion… But if ‘Bitches Brew’ is the blast, and ‘In a Silent Way’ is the fuse slowly burning… then Filles de Kilimanjaro is the spark.
When people talk about Miles Davis going electric, the conversation usually jumps straight to In a Silent Way or Bitches Brew. They’re the monumental statements, the ones that redefined jazz and triggered endless debate.
But if you want to hear the precise moment when acoustic post-bop begins to stretch into a new language, the album to begin with is Filles de Kilimanjaro. It’s the hinge: the final breath of the Second Great Quintet and the first glimmer of Miles’ electric vision.
Recorded in June and September 1968 at Columbia’s 30th Street Studio in New York and released at the turn of 1968–69, Filles de Kilimanjaro sits between Miles in the Sky and In a Silent Way in the discography.
It sounds like a band in transit: still rooted in the conversational post-bop the quintet had perfected, but now coloured by electric instruments, new rhythmic ideas and a different sense of space. Nothing here feels like a sudden break with the past — but nothing feels entirely comfortable within old definitions either. For anyone interested in how jazz evolves, that 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 run of albums that stretched from E.S.P. to Miles Smiles, Nefertiti and Miles in the Sky.
The telepathy between the musicians was almost its own instrument. Filles de Kilimanjaro captures that same chemistry, but with two crucial changes: electric piano and electric bass appear for the first time in a sustained way, and the rhythm section begins to shift toward a different lineup.
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. When the project resumed in September, Chick Corea had replaced Hancock and Dave Holland had stepped into the bass chair, returning to acoustic bass but with a different approach to pulse and tone.
That means a single album documents two different rhythm sections: the original Hancock-Carter combination and the newer Corea-Holland pairing that would underpin the early electric groups. It is a rare opportunity to hear the future arriving 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 partly owned, as well as to his interest in African imagery during that period.
But what catches the eye immediately 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 is not a visual decoration. There is a personal and musical connection running through the album.
In his autobiography, Miles describes how Betty introduced him to new music exploding in the late 1960s, especially Jimi Hendrix, Sly and the Family Stone and James Brown. It was not a one-way influence — they were part of the same scene in New York, as fashion, art and Black music collided. But Miles makes it clear she was the one opening his ears to sounds beyond the jazz world.
That influence is reflected most clearly in the closing piece of the album, “Mademoiselle Mabry (Miss Mabry),” which takes its harmonic foundation from Hendrix’s “The Wind Cries Mary.” It is both a dedication and a genuine hybrid: jazz musicians re-voicing rock language through their own vocabulary.
Filles de Kilimanjaro consists of five extended compositions:
- “Frelon Brun (Brown Hornet)”
- “Tout de Suite,”
- “Petits Machins (Little Stuff),”
- “Filles de Kilimanjaro”
- “Mademoiselle Mabry.”
Rather than behaving like five unrelated pieces, they feel like variations within one developing landscape. Melodic ideas stretch across long forms, rhythmic patterns mutate slowly, and the album as a whole has the sensation of a long arc.
There are moments of dense interaction that could sit comfortably alongside earlier quintet recordings, and others where the music opens into a looser groove that hints at rock and funk without ever copying either.
The instruments themselves change the music’s shape. Herbie Hancock’s early experiments with electric piano create a more sustained texture and allow harmony to hover in the air rather than bounce 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 kind of bass sound and phrasing than Ron Carter.
But Tony Williams remains the binding force: his drumming pushes the group forward with a restless intensity, breaking time into fragments and re-assembling pulse in a way that drives the music without relying on a strict pattern. It is fascinating to hear him tilt the quintet’s rhythmic language towards a new direction while never abandoning the inventiveness that made his earlier work so important.
Critical Reception
At the time of its release, Filles de Kilimanjaro received a mixture of curiosity and admiration. Some jazz critics were unsure what to make of the electric elements and the way the record avoided traditional swing in favour of repeated figures and spacious rhythm. Others understood that something significant was happening. Publications that looked beyond the jazz world recognised the record’s connection to broader changes in Black music and culture, noting that the album worked almost as a continuous suite rather than a set of isolated pieces.
Today, with the benefit of hindsight, it is easier to see what listeners sensed at the time: the music was stretching towards a new idea of what a jazz band could be.
In later decades, writers have consistently returned to Filles de Kilimanjaro as the starting point of Miles’ electric journey. If In a Silent Way is the doorway and Bitches Brew the explosion, Filles is the moment where the handle turns. It documents the end of the Second Great Quintet’s acoustic language, the arrival of new textures and musicians, and the personal influence of Betty Mabry at the moment Miles began seriously absorbing the new wave of funk, rock and amplified Black music.
The album still feels exploratory rather than declarative — but that is what makes it so compelling. It is not a finished theory. It is a laboratory.
For listeners today, this makes Filles de Kilimanjaro one of the richest records in Miles Davis’ catalogue. You can hear the old and the new in the same breath. The intimacy of the quintet is intact, but the atmosphere has changed. The music moves in longer lines, with different weight and a new relationship to rhythm. And there is something human at the centre of it: a portrait on the cover, a name in the track list, and an invisible conversation between Betty’s record collection and Miles’ imagination.
If you have always approached his electric period through the most famous Miles Davis albums, revisiting Filles de Kilimanjaro reveals a different story. Innovation rarely happens as a single moment. It arrives in stages. This album captures one of the most important stages in modern jazz.
Looking for more Miles? Check out our pick of his greatest tunes here.