Miles Davis (1926-1991)

[San Antone]

Live Evil had been entirely off my radar, but I am very much digging the longer tracks.

Cool.  I am glad you are enjoying that record. 

[Octave]

Man, this poll is just totally unfair.   
I'm going to say "post-bop" because it's such a way-station for the features of the music before and after.....looooong after.  After Miles' death, even. 
Still too hard for me to favor one period over another.

I think it was Jim O'Rourke who mentioned that you can hear the exact same bass clarinet solo snaking through two different segments of BITCHES BREW, a couple sides apart from one another, like Macero et al just decided to drop it back into the mix for the fun of it.  Like a slight return of memory doubling back on itself.  It's been a long time since I listened to the record, and I can't remember if I fact-checked that assertion.

Does anyone like the Yo Miles! seventies-fusion tribute project mounted by Henry Kaiser and Wadada Leo Smith, with Kaiser and Smith getting to indulge their Cosey/Davis rockstar fantasies?  I remember that first record (there have been at least a couple) being a blow-out, with a wild cast of allstars, including the Rova sax quartet (giving a Fela vibe to at least one of the tracks).  It's been a long time since I heard it, but as tributes go, it seemed fresher than most coattail-hopping glom-a-thons and quite in the spirit of those 70s Miles records....though cleaner and not as distressed and oneiric and the originals, of course.

[Octave]

From an essay (1982/86) by Brian Eno on his recording ON LAND:

In using the term landscape I am thinking of places, times, climates and the moods that they evoke. And of expanded moments of memory too... One of the inspirations for this record was Fellini's "Amarcord" ("I Remember"), a presumably unfaithful reconstruction of childhood moments. Watching that film, I imagined an aural counterpart to it, and that became one of the threads woven into the fabric of the music.[....]
Shortly after I returned from Ghana, Robert Quine gave me a copy of Miles Davis' "He Loved Him Madly". Teo Macero's revolutionary production on that piece seemed to me to have the "spacious" quality I was after, and like "Amarcord", it too became a touchstone to which I returned frequently.

from the essay reproduced at Rootblog*

("He Loved Him Madly" originally from the double album GET UP WITH IT, iirc)

* also loads of treats at that blog, including the occasional upload of OOP Mississippi Records tape comps (archeological marvels), great videos (I once saw a 1980s Stevie Wonder drum solo from Japan that made my week), etc

[Octave]

I don't want to get too OT with this, but if it's okay to discuss the further range of Miles Davis' influence (outside of recognizably-jazz music proper), as well as that of Teo Macero---reaching into not just "ambient" music but "generative" music and sound-art---this longer discussion 1996 from Brian Eno might be of interest.  I thought the whole interview was quite substantial, back when I read it; and I am not even a big Eno devotee.   He's a sharp guy, a gentleman.

Michael Engelbrecht: Some of my colleagues call the music of the Paul Motian Trio 'Ambient Jazz', because sometimes this trio brings the music to such a level of subtlety, it's really just one or two notes lingering around in the air. I understand that there are a few classic jazz productions that had a big influence on you, like for example Teo Macero's production of Miles Davis' 'He Loved Him Madly'.

Brian Eno: Well, you know how that record and one or two others from that period were made? I read an interview with Teo Macero, and it was very very interesting, because I was so fascinated by these records. I really wanted to know how they were made. I don't often read interviews with musicians or producers, cause they're usually so uninteresting. There's nothing worth reading. But Teo Macero was very very interesting. He told the story of how those records were made. Which is that Miles Davis would put together a group of people often, who hadn't played together before, take them into the studio, and there was just playing for a day, for hours and hours on end. And then off they go, and Teo Macero would then be left with hours of tapes, and he would go through and find little pieces, often repeat little pieces, which is very radical in jazz to use the same section a couple of times over. I mean, I don't think anybody had ever thought of doing that before. And it's a very interesting idea, to take something that is all accidents and chance events, and then make it all happen again. So suddenly you think 'Hold on - we've been here before.' It's like a strange deja-vu thing.

But what really interested me in those things: he did something that was extremely modern, something you can only do on records, which is, he took the performance to pieces, spatially. Now, those things were done across by a group of musicians in a room, all sitting quite close to another, like we are. But they were all close-miked, which meant that their sounds were quite separate from one another. And when Teo Macero mixed the record, he put them miles apart. So this is very very interesting to listen to a music, where you have the conga player three streets down the road here, you have the trumpet player on a mountain over there, the guitar player - you have to look through binoculars to see him, you know! Everybody is far away, and so the impression that you have immediately, is not that you are in a little place with a group of people playing, but that you're on a huge plateau, and all of these things are going on sort of almost on the horizon, I think. And there's no attempt made by Teo Macero to make them connect with one another. In fact he deliberately disconnects them form one another.

This is a very modern feeling for me in music, where you think of the music as a place where a lot of things can go on. They don't have to be going on together, in the sense that they don't have to be locked to one another. And the thing I've most disliked about a lot of recent music, particularly music done on sequencers, is that it's totally locked. Do you know what I mean? Every single thing is not only locked, but bolted and nailed and hammered together. So the music is so tight, there's no drift in it at all. And one of the things that one likes about live music, I think, is the fact that things drift apart and then come back together. And when they come back together, it's very very dramatic. It's fantastic. And then they drift again apart in their own worlds, and then suddenly they join again.

Well, in most sequencer based music, that dynamic is completely unexplored. Everything is always locked together. And for a listener, this is very uninteresting. It's like being on a... instead of going for a walk in a fantastic forest, it's like being on a railway line. You only have one way to go, you know. And of course, as you know, I've always liked music that allowed me some freedom to explore inside it.

So, my work for the last year and a half has nearly all been with sequencers, actually, but I have been trying to think of a new way of using those machines to create the kind of music that has the kind of openness and lack of lockedness (this is a very awkward English word), lack of lock should we say, that for instance those Teo Macero productions had. And in fact, the piece you've heard on the end of Spinner was completely a sequencer piece. And I think it doesn't sound like it, which is what I like. One of the reasons it doesn't sound like it, is because there are several loops in there, for instance the kick-drum part is a loop which is 7 bars long, the cymbal part is a loop which is something like 23 bars long, the piano melody is in 3 sections, which are all at different lengths. So, in fact, things keep falling in and out of sync with one another. It's exactly what I have done with Ambient Music, but this time it is done in something with rhythm, you know. And, I was very pleased with that piece in fact. Of course, because of the nature of it, it's a generative piece in the sense that once you start all those loops going, it is constantly falling into different patterns. You can have it on for hours and it still keeps going and making slightly different versions.

http://music.hyperreal.org/artists/brian_eno/interviews/me_intr4.html#Madly

[Octave]

More to the point, even though those paragraphs above are descriptors of Eno's own (ongoing) interests, they give me a frame of reference for thinking about quite a bit more of the ~1969-1975 Davis musics---not just the studio creations with Macero's collaboration---and the freakish, stormcloud quality of those records and bands.  Even "mad digital scramble" of jazz-proper's "playerly" technical compulsiveness (to freak a couple Roland Barthes expressions) are compromised, folded into a particular group dynamic, interrupted in the live shows in a way that seems to mimic tape slicing and moreover frustrates the usual climactic arc and buildup of the rhythm-solo scheme.  It's strange music.  It's extremely strange music if you think of it as jazz.  Or not, when I compare it to some earlier jazz like Bennie Moten.....it's a natural outgrowth.  Those early fusion groups of Miles' are like a territory band soundtracking DECASIA.  I mean this quite directly: a break will happen, and instead of the maximum-presence, exposed solo cadenza, we get (in some cases) Peter Cosey's guitar set-up eating itself alive, just a big open wound out into cold space, as though the guitar solo was erased, leaving only the amplification and mutual defeat of pedals.
Or Miles' trumpet playing totally compromised by wah/effects, becoming something primordial, a monstrous, smeared shadow or parody of the bygone icy Harmon-muted cool. 

It's all strange and bold.  I don't even know if I like it, but what's like it?  Some of the "post-rock' bands, like Tortoise, did easy-listening versions of it.  (Literally: they were listening a bunch of exotica and lounge music too.)  If memory serves, both Tortoise's guitarist Jeff Parker and Peter Cosey were AACM members.

[HIPster]

Does anyone like the Yo Miles! seventies-fusion tribute project mounted by Henry Kaiser and Wadada Leo Smith, with Kaiser and Smith getting to indulge their Cosey/Davis rockstar fantasies?  I remember that first record (their have been at least a couple) being a blow-out, with a wild cast of allstars, including the Rova sax quartet.  It's been a long time since I heard it, but as tributes go, it seemed fresher than most coattail-hopping tributes and quite in the spirit of those 70s Miles records....though cleaner and not as distressed and oneiric and the originals, of course.

<raises hand>

I totally dig that band, Octave!  Caught two of their live shows too. . .

10-21-99 w/Nels Cline and Zakir Hussain, etc.

http://archive.org/details/ym1999-10-21.shnf

3-04-00 w/Steve Kimock, Tom Coster, Steve Smith, etc.

http://archive.org/details/ym2000-03-04.shnf

Great shows and totally worth the  free D/L!

Their first release was on the Shanachie label.  The 34 minute Ife on that one is incredible!  Nels Cline is en fuego here. . .  Lotsa highlights.  Definitely an "all star" feel to the album:
[asin]B000009PZP[/asin]

I also like Sky Garden too.  Has more of a "band" feel to it and less of an ad hoc session.  Ultimately, perhaps not quite as many sparks fly however; the music is on slow burn throughout:
[asin]B00022FWG8[/asin]

Mike Keneally,Greg Osby and Zakir Hussain really shine on this one. . .

The same group also recorded another one, Up River, which I find to be the least interesting of the three.  Harder to find and goes for some high $$$ too.

Better yet is Wadada Leo Smith's recent Heart's Reflections set:
[asin]B004TB6G4A[/asin]

Re: The Poll - Kind of Blue is my favorite Miles album, but my favorite Miles era is from 1969 - 1975.

[San Antone]

Man, this poll is just totally unfair.   
I'm going to say "post-bop" because it's such a way-station for the features of the music before and after.....looooong after.  After Miles' death, even. 
Still too hard for me to favor one period over another.

Yeh, I know.  It is hard to not vote for the First Quintet and Kind of Blue, probably the best jazz album ever made.  And the '70s bands made some great music, no doubt.  I guess if I had to put numbers on them it'd be come out like this -

2Q 10
1Q 9.5
70s 9
Bebop 8
80s+ 7

I don't know any of those Wadada Leo Smith records, but Bill Laswell made a good one, really a remix effort using music from In a Silent Way and other of the 70s records.

[asin]B0000062GA[/asin]

[HIPster]

I don't know any of those Wadada Leo Smith records, but Bill Laswell made a good one, really a remix effort using music from In a Silent Way and other of the 70s records.

[asin]B0000062GA[/asin]

Check those downloads I posted, sanantonio!

+10 on Panthalasa too. . .  Great electric Miles compilation any way you slice it.

[San Antone]

I created a playlist which I called "Definitive Miles" and included these records:

Birth of the Cool
Round About Midnight
Kind of Blue
E.S.P.
Bitches Brew

I set it to random play and am listening right now. 

These five are somewhat arbitrary; I could have substituted one of the Prestige records of the First Quintet for RBM, and Nefertiti for ESP, and Jack Johnson for Bitches Brew and still been happy, but JJ with two long tracks would not be as good for random play as BB. 

But these five will produce the desired effect, which is a sampling from Miles's career peaks.

[Mirror Image]

I'm really, really getting into Sorcerer. What an outstanding recording. I would say it's his best of the Second Great Quintet period IMHO.

Front cover -



Back cover -

[San Antone]

I'm really, really getting into Sorcerer. What an outstanding recording. I would say it's his best of the Second Great Quintet period IMHO.

Front cover -



Back cover -

You're right, it is a great.  The only blemish, IMO, is Bob Dorough.

[Mirror Image]

You're right, it is a great.  The only blemish, IMO, is Bob Dorough.

I've ripped that album to my iPod not too long ago and I edited the track with Dorough out of it. Now it's a 5-star album.

[Mirror Image]

It's interesting how on the Bags' Groove album how Miles didn't want Monk comping for him. Anyone know the story to this?

[San Antone]

It's interesting how on the Bags' Groove album how Miles didn't want Monk comping for him. Anyone know the story to this?

What I have read is that while Miles really liked Monk and loved his music, he did not like his style of playing behind him when he was soloing.  There are some exaggerated stories out there about how they almost came to blows, but both Miles and Monk have denied that and both always spoke very highly of the other.  Monk was not even Miles's choice for that date, he was asked to join in by Bob Weinstock who thought it was be good band to promote.

[toledobass]

Man, this is tough...

[Mirror Image]

What I have read is that while Miles really liked Monk and loved his music, he did not like his style of playing behind him when he was soloing.  There are some exaggerated stories out there about how they almost came to blows, but both Miles and Monk have denied that and both always spoke very highly of the other.  Monk was not even Miles's choice for that date, he was asked to join in by Bob Weinstock who thought it was be good band to promote.

This is pretty much what I read, too. I don't believe those over-the-top stories either. Monk seemed like he didn't have a 'mean' bone in his body and Miles even said of Monk, if I recall correctly, that he was a 'sweet man.'

[toledobass]

I remember watching an interview with Herbie about how Miles didn't particularly like so much harmony underneath him, especially very dense harmony.   The reason if you compared his playing during Miles' solos with his playing during Wayne's solos you'd hear him even completely dropped out at times.  Maybe that preference of Miles has it's roots in his playing with Monk.

[San Antone]

Just got this; and it is one Miles's greatest bands.  Had they only stayed together and done more recording, especially a studio date, this group could have been the Third Great Quintet.

Miles
Wayne Shorter
Jack DeJohnette
Dave Holland
Chick Corea



This 4-CD 3-CD (and one DVD) live set has performances from 1969 in Antibes, Stockholm, and Berlin.  The music generally comes from the Bitches Brew material, and  there's also some songs from the Second Quintet's book - but played with much more fire.

Sound is not perfect, but highly recommended.

[San Antone]

Some more new Miles just released:

[asin]B00CTNKXEO[/asin]

All tracks recorded live at The North Sea Jazz Festival, 1985, Tuinpaviljoen, The Hague, The Netherlands.

Bass Guitar – Darryl Jones
Drums – Vincent Wilburn
Electric Guitar – John Scofield
Keyboards – Robert Irving III
Percussion – Steve Thornton
Saxophone – Bob Berg
Trumpet – Miles Davis

1       Street Scenes   13:12   
2       Star People   6:34   
3       Maze   9:17   
4       Human Nature   5:53   
5       Something's On Your Mind   13:17   
6       Time After Time   8:10   
7       Ms. Morrisine   6:10   
8       Code M.D.  10:58

Miles is great form, playing all over the horn with command.  The band is good, too, coming out of the Star People period.

[HIPster]

Miles Mono Albums boxed set to be released soon!
[asin]B00ESEYE60[/asin]

Pretty stoked for this!