Miles Davis @ 100 - A Celebration Through Albums (5)

Day four of our celebration of Miles Davis at 100. See day one, two and three. 

Pangaea (Columbia, 1975)

The influence that Bitches Brew had on jazz and music in general is impossible to overstate, a monumental album that set the course for generations of musicians to come and made waves so huge their ripples are still being felt today. But Bitches was only the beginning and the aesthetic that Davis started developing on it and later expanded on On the Corner only finally found its real apex with Pangaea.

Like all the best jazz albums, Pangaea was recorded live (on the same day as the also excellent Agartha) and, to me, it's the gold standard for what a live album should be. The music is ecstatic and full of life, the interplay is unmatched, the rhythm section is relentless, the solos blistering. The two long improvisations are expertly developed, not a second goes to waste and the whole band is in a state of grace and ferocious intensity. We could call what the musicians are doing here Fusion, but with none of the cheese, empty virtuosity, plasticky lack of teeth and all other negative connotations that the genre has accrued through the years. This record has plenty of teeth, it's true, unadulterated black music. It's a long, heavy journey that's sometimes straight ahead rocking, sometimes funky and, at the end, even swinging, almost as if going full circle on a career that redefined what jazz could be many times.

Davis spent his entire life searching and evolving, uncaring of the opinions of critics and listeners, and nowhere is that attitude more obvious than on this record. It's yet another testament to Davis' vision and ability as bandleader. Unapologetic, self-indulgent (in the best way), raw and expressive, it feels as vital and visceral today as it must have felt 51 years ago. Most of all, it's a really good time. 

 

- William Rossi 

 

 

Agartha (Columbia, 1975)

Grew up with it. It was the first and for a long time the only Miles Davis album I was exposed to, recorded (live in Japan) and released the year of my birth. Along with just as cryptic to my Southern rural France ears Herbie Hancock's Thrust and Sun Ra's Atlantis – it opened my listening vistas and shaped my aesthetic compass to a considerable degree, in spite of or because it took forever to « get it ». With a sense of danger as if the black discs would burn my fingers, unlock an ancient curse, I regularly extracted the double LP from my stepfather's record collection, cautiously positioned one side on the turntable and, sitting on the floor, would lose myself in its unfathomable, esoteric mysteries, that began even before the music (side length jams that already felt like a transgression – with the whole of side A titled « Prelude »... which, as it that wasn't enough, continued on part of side B!) resounded. The inner sleeve had winged angels or devils perched on stairs next to temple pillars. The front cover showed a megacity possibly shrouded in smog or/and enduring a heatwave, surrounded by tropical vegetation and Polynesian women – while a variant on the back had sea lifeforms instead of palm trees and a spaceship in the middle, an idea which must have been in the air since a celestial vehicle also adorned Parliament's Mothership Connection that year. Hendrixian guitars on the loose, hard-driving beats, simple and unrelenting electric bass lines, wild organ outbursts (I later linked Miles' haphazard-yet-awesome organ playing to that of Fela Kuti and James Brown) made up the ingredients of the stew, while the jazz elements mostly came from Sonny Fortune's saxophones and flute solos; meanwhile, Miles' plugged trumpet seemed more interested in being an element of the textural and rhythmical whole than in occupying the front spot for too long. This music didn't make sense, as far as what I had been told about the artform. Sprawled over the whole of side C, « Interlude » (!) was propelled by a rapid-fire riff that Miles re-used a decade later on You're Under Arrest's « Street Scenes » (aka « Theme from Jack Johnson / Intro » on the 2022-revealed version without overdubs on That's What Happened - The Bootleg Series vol.7). Funkier than a fish market. Odd, disquieting percussion noises gave the relatively gentler but no less befuddling side D its peculiar mood. Back in the day, I didn't think of looking up the musicians' names nor had the slighest idea where they came from, what their lives and experiences were like. Somehow this alien music was telling me something about them on a deeper level, which I'm still sensitive to, to this day.

- David Cristol

 

Inner gatefold

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Cookin’ (Prestige, 1957)

My first conscious encounter with jazz came through two records: John Coltrane’s Blue Train and Miles Davis’s Ballads & Blues . These two CDs were part of a magazine collection sold at newsstands, for a reasonable price. The Ballads & Blues compilation brings together tracks from different sessions and, while not especially coherent, its warm sound and velvety ballads still fascinate me. I gradually explored Miles’ discography and eventually arrived at the records Cookin’, Relaxin’, Steamin’, Workin ’. Of these, Cookin’ grabbed my attention the most. The sleeve design, simple and perfect. Just four tracks: opener “My Funny Valentine”, eternally beautiful, here made even more so by the sharp-edged trumpet; “Blues by Five”, which bluesy piano won me over on first listen and opened the way for the trumpet, which seemed to enter timidly before fully asserting itself; “Airegin”, with its supersonic rhythm and the horns in unison; “Tune Up / When Lights Are Low”: after the drums came in, the uplifting momentum of the tune swept me away. The sequence, flawless, stayed on repeat for a very long time.

In a Silent Way (Columbia, 1969)

Later, I reached the electric phase. Like everyone else, I became fascinated by almost everything from Bitches Brew onwards, notably the albums On the Corner and Jack Johnson. But the one that impacted me the most was In a Silent Way. First of all, the stellar line-up: Wayne Shorter, John McLaughlin, Herbie Hancock, Chick Corea, Joe Zawinul, Dave Holland, Tony Williams. Everything sounded new and different. The overlapping keyboards, the drifting sounds. In its atmospheric character, I could feel the musicians searching. I could hear the exploration, the discovery, the musicians locking into a perfect groove on “It’s About That Time”. The trumpet, soaring above everything else, expansive and radiant. On first listen, Teo Macero’s cut-and-splice editing sounded somewhat strange, but the album quickly became an all-time favorite. Our connection to music passes through emotional territory, and these records belong to that landscape. 

- Nuno Catarino 

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You’re Under Arrest (Columbia, 1985)

At age 14 in 1970 Miles Davis entered my life with the magical Bitches Brew . At 15, my heroes – unlike my schoolmates, all rock fans – were Black : Ornette, Bird, Miles, and Jimi Hendrix, who for me belonged to jazz too. In1971, I attended the Milan jazz festival: Ornette, Gato Barbieri, and Miles with Jarrett on keyboards. In the autumn of 1973, I witnessed, at the Bologna jazz festival, one of the Miles’ visionary dark funk sets. Shortly thereafter, he retired. At the beginning of the eighties he was back. Just after his return, I attended a concert of his in Rome; I introduced and reviewed it enthusiastically in the extreme Left wing newspaper Lotta Continua (“ongoing struggle”). Indeed Miles’ resurrection felt like more than a musical event, and in 1985 he participated in the track “The Struggle Continues” on the anti-apartheid record Sun City… From 1984 onward, Miles started to tour Europe every summer, sometimes twice a year and turned out to be something of a “familiar” presence. I loved The Man with the Horn, We Want Miles, Star People, Decoy, but You’re Under Arrest was my album of choice, from the first seconds of the opening track, with the sublime, pressing rhythm of “One Phone Call/Street Scenes”, to the wonderful lyricism of “Human Nature”, “MD1/Something’s On Your Mind” and “Time After Time”. The album was released in 1985, the year I started to work as program chief editor of the independent/community station Radio Popolare: I chose “Human Nature” as the end theme song of a daily music program. During Miles’ last decade, his music was full of a life-affirming energy, with a magnificent vein of melancholy, and subtly hendrixian traits; he was not only superbly managing rhythms and colours, but deeply digging into the rhythm and the colour, the feeling of the times, exactly like Prince. His stage bands were ready to answer his impulses, giving endless new versions of the material. I saw him as the Duke Ellington of the 80s. Only Prince and Cecil Taylor were as exciting as Miles, and attending their concerts was as emotionally charged as attending those of Miles. 

- Marcello Lorrai

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Nuno Catarino is editorial coordinator of jazz.pt since 2022. He contributes to the national newspaper Público, where he has written since 2007. He is the author, with Márcia Lessa, of the book Improvisando (2019). 

Marcello Lorrai produces & presents the weekly radio program Jazz Anthology on Radio Popolare (Mondays at 11 pm); publishes festival reports and artists interviews in the daily newspaper Il Manifesto, and is an author of books such as Africana (reviewing modern music from the African continent, Casanova & Chianura Edizioni) and William Parker - Conversazioni Sul Jazz (Auditorium Edizioni). He also writes liner notes, notably for albums by the Italian Instabile Orchestra since 1995.