Miles' "On the Corner"

These two artists have very dissimilar approaches. Apples and oranges. This looks like the ol' 'let-me-pull-a-couple-names-out-of-a-hat' trick to me.

what if art ensemble of chicago had a funk rhythm section

Have you ever heard their music? Was there a more versatile double-bassist than Malachi Favors? They're quite capable of playing in just about any style they wish, as needs arise. But what about their very singular music do you find unsatisfactory? i.e. why would you ask them to blithely gesture when they've spent lifetimes cultivating a sound that is very much their own ( hint: they don't sound like "coltrone/coleman" either)

Anyway, On the Corner is a definite top-5 Miles disc. Used to consider it my all-time fave, but I'm not so sure now. Yes, handclaps! ALso sitar and cowbell.

Ha! Same here. One of those records you instinctively understand (or not ;) even if it's like nothing you've ever heard before. First jazz (or should that be "jazz"?) record I ever bought and still my favorite of his (together with Bitches Brew, never can decide which is my fave/fave).

(ok i can really, but it's just so... not quite funky, but... maybe jess is otm.)

...okay, I'll dig it out and have another listen.

they [coltrane and coleman] are different but their innovations are fundamental to what cutting edge jazz is today: they established harmonic freedom in the solo, melodic freedom in the scale including microtones, and popularized songless improvisation.

in the 70s and 80s, jazz was no longer making money like it did before. so there was a huge split between purist/avant jazz typified by aeoc and million-selling lite fusion typified by grover wash. jr. a representative 80s performer, wynton marsalis, regularly ventured into coltrane and coleman territory in his solos and occasionally in his composition style too. their style had been absorbed into the main stream, if less comfortably than that of the boppers. that of 70s miles had not, and perhaps has not even today.

i didn't say i didn't like aeoc: i was imagining a world where those players of the 70s i esteem had chosen to get down with a vengeance. i would like that even better.

hint: they don't sound like "coltrone/coleman" either

in terms of the nuts and bolts of their solos, i guess i disagree. from a music theory standpoint, i would contend, free jazz is free jazz, just like blues is blues and chromatic composition is chromatic composition. you can say ligeti is way different from schoenberg, and so too aeoc was way different from ornette, but the difference is of degree not of kind. [strange, i feel like geir talking in this way... am i wrong about all this?]

--

interesting to see on this thread that lots of people pick out different choices for the album that does nothing for them... for me, it's "it's about that time"

Sounds great.

who in the post punk world was avowedly influenced by this stuff?

Contortions and Voidoids (though don't know if I'd call 'em "post"). (Quine r.i.p., poor fellow.)

while light on the electric guitar...

From my self-centered view it's an incredible guitar album, since it flipped how I thought of the instrument. Guitars not used for outfront solos, more for darts and jabs and laying down barbed wire, shooting nails in your wheels, suckering you into the ditch.

actually this is a crucial point I've been curious about for a while. how many of us love 'sketches of spain' as much as we love the 70's stuff? how many of us love 'kind of blue' as much? 'birth of the cool'?

I kind of actively hate 'sketches of spain'.
'kind of blue' & 'cool' I like on occasion, but with a certain detachment.

we now raise an eyebrow at the violent critical reception of 70's miles, but how many modern fans of those albums are just as passionate about the earlier stuff?

i'll second ascensceur pour lechefaud.

Considering some of the music that Gil Evans made in the 70s like his arrangement of Hendrix tunes and 'Svengali', it is a shame that nothing between him and Miles never happened in that time period. I wonder what a Gil Evans arrangement for a big band like the one used on Bitches Brew would have sounded like. It seems to me that Evans was also there in spirit on the arrangement for "He Loved Him Madly".

All this time I've thought I thought I was all alone [sob]!

Fwiw, I'm rather fond of the "atrocious" Sly & Robbie cover of Black Satin too (it's on the '85 album Language Barrier btw Gaz!).

why is [reputedly difficult album/book/film of choice] considered difficult, I got it straight away

But this genuinely was my experience with OTC - I was expecting something that would need repeat listening before it sounded like music, and instead got a dense but immediately enjoyable slab of energetic funk that doesn't seem any more difficult than, say, James Brown's more abstract live stuff. I'm still baffled by its reputation as Miles's least accessible album.

Crap things about You're Under Arrest:
Sting

It's not in the same league as Tutu 'though, my love for which is enormous and probably irrational on account of it being the first jazz album I ever bought.

I like Sketches Of Spain, but I hate all the other Gil Evans albums, especially Porgy & Bess. Soundtracks to naptime if ever there were any.

Should note, btw, that Language Barrier was produced by noted On the Corner champion and Panthalassa "Conceiver," Bill Laswell...

I have a very nice Japanese CD of Agartha. It really sounds better than other re-releases. There are some truly sublime moments on Agartha, right up there with some of the spooky and for me incredibly evocative bits on "Calpyso Frelimo" off of "Get Up With It."

As far as liking '50s/'60s Miles better than the '70s...well, I relate more to the '70s stuff since it's closer to my era, I suppose. But there are great performances from the period when he had Bill Evans and Adderley in the band, I'm thinking of an amazing version of "Love for Sale" from '58 on which Evans is so fucking cool. I also don't love the Gil Evans soundscapes (except for the great, great "Miles Ahead"). The '60s stuff is actually somewhat like the "process" music of the '70s, just minimal "heads" and then out, with Tony Williams basically the main reason for listening. I have heard a boot of a '67 performance with Shorter/Carter/Williams/Hancock that for me blows pretty much everything else Miles did in the '60s away, completely intuitive long medleys of various tunes. It's called "No Blues."

But I think Davis did some incredible music during all his periods--I love "Aura," for example. I do prefer Monk and Rollins to Davis during the '50s and '60s, for the most part, and I like Wayne Shorter's '60s solo stuff better as well. So in the end, I do listen to the electric stuff way more than anything else by Miles.

(Love Pangaea, never heard Agharta, find Magus a little tiresome at bits but great at others.)

"Like a great hip-hop mix, every sound disorients you, suprises you, but somehow every sound fits so perfectly that you couldn't imagine it anywhere else (it's the Miles Davis effect, in other words, but the sounds themselves are the least Miles-like the group had ever come up with)."

On the other hand when the sitar and bells come out a bit more and the groove seems to be disrupted I kind of like it. Caught me by surprise.

'I didn't get this album until after I had gotten into Can and a lot of electronic dance music'

Did Macero and Miles know abt Can?

'To describe this album as "funky" seems odd as it I don't think it is very funky and I don't think it's supposed to be either. He was listening almost exclusively to Sly Stone and Stockhausen when he made it and it shows'

hey dada, what albs would you describe as 'funky'? I haven't got very far into funk so i'm interested. Not sure I'm hearing on Stockhausen either but its only on first listen.

Funky, to start: Bar-Kays, Meters, Lee Dorsey, Mer-Da...

thanks eddie.

I think I love Workin', Kind of Blue, Four + More, Miles Smiles, Jack Johnson, Pangaea, and Live Around the World all exactly the same.

Btw, I finally got around to get Art Taylor's book of musician-to-musician interviews Notes and Tones, and it's fantastic. It seems they were mostly done around the late 60s with Miles, Tony Williams, Richard Davis, etc. so there's a lot of great of-the-moment talk about the music, changing times, etc.

Also, he took most of the pictures included himself so there are all these brilliant candid shots, like "here's Art Blakey walking a small dog" and "here's John Coltrane crashed out on the couch".

except that fresh came out a year later

That's because Sly tended to get lost in a drug haze, and consequently worked a lot slower than Miles did. Miles was listening to advance tapes of "In Time" before recording On The Corner; when I interviewed Dave Liebman, he told me a bunch of stories of how Miles used to make him listen to Sly's newest stuff at the house all the time.

I like On the Corner a lot but it's probably pretty low on my favorites list of the period--I just always dug the live stuff a bit more. my 1-2-3 is In a Silent Way, Jack Johnson, and Dark Magus, probably in that order. the first 10 minutes of Magus is just jaw-droppingly ferocious, maybe the most GALVANIZING thing I've heard from anyone, damn near. but "Black Satin" is some kinda masterpiece for sure.

Fantastic article, you highlighted a lot of the little details that have enthralled me. And the story about the car crash, damn!

yeah that was great, thanks

50 years ago this eve, Miles began a 6-night stay at Marvelous Marv's in Denver, CO - a venue that would become Ebbet's Field the following year.

"On the Corner" was released during the residency and though no tapes circulate, all accounts suggest the band boogied hard. 1/4 pic.twitter.com/Z3peVj2C9N

— Jeremy Erwin (@theheatwarps) October 10, 2022

hink he means "legendary"? Milesologists think it did happen:

In a 2020 interview, Mtume spoke of a mythical 3-hour set the band played during this run, with Miles collapsing in the elevator post-gig (that portion begins around 12-minutes in). 2/4https://t.co/bbNgxBeTjA

— Jeremy Erwin (@theheatwarps) October 10, 2022

also from that thread:

Yep. Here’s the full lineup:

Miles Davis (trumpet)⁰Carlos Garnett (soprano sax)⁰Reggie Lucas (guitar)⁰Khalil Balakrishna (electric sitar)⁰Cedric Lawson (organ)⁰Michael Henderson (electric bass)⁰Al Foster (drums)⁰Mtume (conga, percussion)⁰Badal Roy (tabla)

— Jeremy Erwin (@theheatwarps) October 10, 2022

super good, unperson. thanks!

I don't remember a lot of the box having much to do with the album or sessions for it---mainly an unnecessary reminder of how fast he was moving in those days---but worth hearing, sure, as long as you're not expecting any OTC revelations.

I wrote about it for my weekly email newsletter.

― but also fuck you (unperson), Thursday, October 13, 2022 11:24 AM (yesterday) bookmarkflaglink

Fantastic article, you highlighted a lot of the little details that have enthralled me. And the story about the car crash, damn!

― Gerald McBoing-Boing, Thursday, October 13, 2022 2:22 PM (yesterday) bookmarkflaglink

until Robocop verifies it happened, i can't believe it.

Speaking of how fast Miles was moving, as awesome as the Dark Magus/Agartha two-guitar thing was, I'm a big fan of the rather less-documented OTC-era version of this band. AFAIK, In Concert at the Philharmonic is among the only real documents where we hear what On the Corner might've sounded like live. The version of "Rated X" that kicks off the record--with its ever-so-slow build and introduction of different elements and the bass groove not entering until about six minutes in--has always felt to me more like a proper extension than its studio counterpart (which is insane and amazing).

I believe I've seen clips of a video of this band, but, yeah, if there's some three hour bootleg of this lineup kicking around, sign me the fuck up.

https://theheatwarps.com/category/1972/

for your live electric miles needs