Around this time last year it became hard not to see the Miles Davis reissue juggernaut as a snake swallowing its own tail. What cinched the impression was the arrival of "The Genius of Miles Davis," encompassing all of Davis' output for Columbia.

It was a stockpile of the eight multidisc sets released by Columbia/Legacy over the last 15 years. It came housed in a reproduction of Davis' trumpet case, along with a reproduction of his mouthpiece, a lithograph of one of his paintings, and a T-shirt. Original retail: $1,199.

No jazz musician has been more diligently organized or effectively monetized in the afterlife than Miles Davis, who died in 1991.

Yet here comes "Live in Europe 1967: The Bootleg Series Vol. 1" on three CDs and a DVD. It captures Davis' finest working band at its apogee, straining at the limits of post-bop refinement.

As the subtitle suggests, some material has circulated in bootleg form; the DVD footage, from Germany and Sweden, was featured in one of the Legacy doorstoppers. But "Live in Europe 1967," as an objet d'art, still feels momentous. The music sounds contemporary, pointing toward some crucial attributes of our present jazz era even as it ratifies, more firmly than ever, the singular dynamism of Davis' 1960s quintet.

And as the first release in a series of previously unsanctioned music - the plan is to put out at least one a year for the next several years - it answers the question of what we could possibly hope for from a Miles Davis estate that has already exhausted the catalog.

Davis was a bandleader whose resourcefulness was matched only by his restlessness.

There are more distinct phases in Davis' career than in most artists of his stature, and a lot of the evolution took place onstage, at the hands of some of the most gifted American musicians of the 20th century.

Among them were the members of Davis' second great quintet: the pianist Herbie Hancock, the saxophonist Wayne Shorter, the bassist Ron Carter and the drummer Tony Williams. With the exception of Williams, who died in 1997, these are all still major figures in jazz, shapers of the language. (Williams was one of those, too.) By the end of 1967 they had been a working unit for more than three years and had recorded four albums, all gleaming with intrigue. Among their cohesive trademarks were a slippery, open-ended approach to harmony and a magically elastic way with rhythm.

The Miles Davis Quintet had basically just completed liftoff at the end of 1965. By the end of 1967 it was hurtling through the thermosphere.

"Live in Europe 1967" - briskly covering five countries in just over a week's time - captures a band more radically sure of itself, with a freer, more combustible interplay.

While "Live in Europe 1967" is wilder at every turn, Davis maintains a clearer authority, a firmer hand at the wheel. He's no longer playing with a mute, that last vestige of his cool period, and his tone is ripe and tart, capable of cutting through the churn.

It's humbling to think that a release like "Live in Europe 1967" might help illuminate jazz's present as well as its past, but that's what great archival work can do.