The Complete Live at the Plugged Nickel 1965 is a compact disc box set of the Miles Davis Quintet, recorded on December 22 and 23, 1965. First released in Japan in March 1992 by Sony Records as a 7 disc set (catalogue SRCS 5766~5772), it was re-released on Legacy Records in July 1995 as an 8 disc set (catalogue CK 66955). In conjunction with Legacy, Mosaic Records released a 10 LP set (catalogue MQ10-158). It comprises recordings of seven performance sets over the two nights by the second great Davis quintet at the now-defunct Plugged Nickel nightclub in Chicago. A single-disc sampler, Highlights from the Plugged Nickel (catalogue CK 67377) was released by Legacy on November 14, 1995, and was reissued on February 1, 2008. Some tracks were available on Miles Davis compilations, but the full recordings were not released until the appearance of this box set. A 1982 double album was released as part of the Contemporary Masters Series on Columbia; this appeared also as At Plugged Nickel, Chicago (Album No. 25 / Discs 30 & 31) in the box set Miles Davis: The Complete Columbia Album Collection. The ten tracks are the same that together made up the 1976 Japanese releases, At Plugged Nickel, Chicago, Vol. 1 and At Plugged Nickel, Chicago, Vol. 2, but some durations are longer. Background The Plugged Nickel concerts came at the end of a difficult year for Davis. In April 1965, roughly three months after the recording of E.S.P., he underwent hip surgery, and was hospitalized until July. In August, while wrestling with one of his sons, he broke his leg, which required further hospitalization followed by the implantation of a plastic hip joint. By late fall, the quintet was finally back together, playing gigs in Philadelphia, Detroit, New York, and Washington, D.C., then travelling to Chicago for a 2 week engagement (December 21 to January 2) at the Plugged Nickel. According to Wayne Shorter, by this point the group had "settle[d] back into a groove," causing the musicians to become restless and dissatisfied. Herbie Hancock stated: "we'd gotten so cohesive as a band that it had become easy to play together. We had figured out a formula for making it work, but of course playing by formula was exactly the opposite of what we wanted to do. We needed to put the challenge back in, to figure out ways to take