The Quest for Agharta

I've been a fan of Miles Davis' fusion years for quite some time now, but i have yet to add Agharta and Pangaea to my collection. Over the last couple days I've been listening to excerpts from these two live albums I have been totally blown away by what I've heard, even better than Live Evil or Dark Magus to my ears. It's a shame Miles retired for half a decade after these two intense recordings, but history is what it is...

Yesterday I spent some time online hunting for a nice deluxe/remaster version of these recordings to purchase, but to my dismay all I could find were some ancient original CD release from 1990. There were Japanese pressings in mini-LP style packaging a decade ago, and another some 5 years ago in "Blue-Spec" audio quality (or some marketing "buzz word" like that). Those are either sold-out or so prohibitively expensive to be unobtainable for my pocketbook.

Now I know Columbia Records did a re-issue campaign of Miles' work starting in the late 90's and seemed to include nearly everything he recorded for the label except these two. I wonder why these have been neglected for re-release in the states?

Which of these two recordings do fans prefer?

I also heard there is additional music on the Japanese versions of one or both of these.

Thank you for your reply, Intruder. I was wondering where the Miles/Fusion fans had gone to.

Since the initial post I have acquired both of these on vinyl, as they have been re-released on "4 Men with Beards" label (or some similar name).  It's really cool to have these on the LP format, especially for the art. Unfortunately, particularly with Pangea, the limitations of vinyl greatly disrupts the flow of the longer tracks that continue on the flipside.

Still puzzled why Columbia has dragged their feet with these in giving these albums any re-issue treatment themselves. I think these might be the best of Miles' live recordings (officially released, anyway)

I only care about the edition if it means a quality remastering of the music. The LP versions I recently acquired sound just fine to my ears, so no complaints there.

I think for the CD format the "Colombia Contemporary Jazz Masters" is the only edition available for Agharta and Pangea, and those where pressed in the early 90's(?)

Just to be picky, Miles WAS in pretty bad shape at that time, but he didn't retreat after those gigs. Those gigs are however the last ones that were officially recorded and released before his retreat. He played a few more shows in the U.S.A. in 1975 that was bootlegged. According to the books i've read, anyway...