just went with it. And he was brilliant!" At the conclusion of the concerts, according to Shorter, "we were raising so much hell [musically] that when we came off we couldn't say nothing to each other. We were lethargic in a princely way. We weren't trying to put on airs... it was like, 'let's not touch this.' You were in the royalty of the moment, and such royalty need never be tampered with." Hancock wrote that when he finally mustered the courage to listen to the recordings, he was surprised: "There was so much going on, and it sounded so little like what I remembered, that I was shocked. I really liked it, but I'm not even sure I could explain why. I would call it profound, except that the word 'profound,' to me, implies something that's deep and elegant. This was not elegant. This was naked and had guts. It was raw. To this day, when I hear recordings from the Plugged Nickel, I'm knocked out by their sheer raw intensity and honesty." Content Each disc of the box set of 8 discs presents one complete set, with the exception of the second set on the first night of December 22, which is split onto two discs, with the discs in a slimline case and internally numbered accordingly as 2a and 2b. The reasoning for this on the part of Legacy is unclear, since the total timing of the music on discs 2a and 2b is under the 80-minute single disc limit. The original Japanese 7 disc release combined the same tracks onto a single disc 2. Reception The box set has been awarded a rare crown by the Penguin Guide to Jazz, concluding that "these are genuinely historic recordings." AllMusic reviewer Scott Yanow awarded the album 5 stars, calling the music "continually fascinating" and "[o]ne of the top releases of 1995". Writing for All About Jazz, C. Michael Bailey stated: "All of the pieces performed at the Plugged Nickel were a look at the old stuff through radically different glasses". He wrote that the performances "represent Davis' effort to return to the classics and recast them in the new mode he was creating. The results were—and are-fantastic." Don Heckman, in a review for the Los Angeles Times, wrote "What makes this collection... arresting is the manner in which Davis and his sidemen reached into such expansive improvisational areas