Miles Davis - In A Silent Way

That would largely be b/c Miles took out all the chord changes, leaving only the melody...

It is a nice record. They use a Fender Rhodes and an acoustic bass in the band setup with some bass clarinet on some tracks, so the textures are very reminicient of late 60s turn of the 70s jazz.

(I also found the thread where Josh described Rush as a spiritual experience and was being hyperbolic not sarcastic. Ah, heady days.)

I don't like the self-titled Zawinul album -- better to get Weather Report's first self-titled, I think. (Don't get the second S/T!) Sextant is great, though.

The early '70s jazz-fusion band Nucleus has a disc, Elastic Rock, that might hit the spot too.

I was a little disappointed by the Isle of Wight performance.

listen a few more times to Kind of Blue

and check out A Love Supreme

Heh, you can't be a big fan of McLaughlin's own records!

Maybe this was already answered in this thread, but what's the general opinion of the three disc "sessions" sets for these albums? I know Macero did a lot of cutting and pasting for the finished albums. How do the sessions hold up?

Not that this should change your opinion of it (it either hits you or it doesn't), but Kind of Blue was actually very unique and tradition-breaking when it came out. It just also happens to be very easy to listen to and accessible, so much so that it's kind of become the definitive jazz album for many people. KOB was very much breaking with the bop tradition at the time, but most Charlie Parker probably sounds more radical to most people than KOB.

In a way maybe you could use the analogy of someone like Aaron Copland, who wrote very modern, innovative music that was also very pleasant to the ears, so that today a lot of his stuff is quintessential Americana, whereas Bartok and Stravinsky still sound avant garde.

I don't understand this reaction at all. I bought it when I was fifteen, and loved it for years, listening to it all the time. Now I don't listen to it much at all, but that's because I've got it all but memorized in my head, not because of some kind of inability to appreciate it on its own merits because it's been over-praised or some such I-read-too-many-magazines-and-believe-what-I-read-therein horseshit.

I would recommend the Silent Sessions, as it contains very little 'filler' - like 35 versions of a tossed-off vamp as in the Johnson Sessions - and it's the cheapest of the boxes.

It also does a really good job of showing how the album was edited, by including the full performances that were chopped up (something which as was mentioned above the Bitches Sessions box doesn't do).

Brakhage--thanks for the tip on the boxes.

I was actually going to post asking if anyone had some recommendations for something similar to that one, as i've still never heard anything else like it. "tauhid" by pharaoh sanders maybe comes close. doesn't need to be jazz, i just have a craving for that kind of dark, extended motif.

There's a track on Squarepusher's Budakhan Mindphone which, if it's not a straight sample, is an homage to "Circle". It's only a few minutes long, though.

-- pdf (newyorkisno...), November 9th, 2005.

Let me help you understand my reaction. I got into jazz around 1969 and the among the first jazz albums I had were IASW & BB and most of the Miles descendents mentioned upthread. But soon I got into the Chicago avant-garde: Roscoe Mitchell's Congliptious followed by the AEC material on BYG/Actuel (Reese & the Smooth Ones, A Jackson in Your House, A Message to Our Folks) and then the ESP avant material (Giuseppe Logan, New York Contemporary Five, Ayler, Heliocentric Worlds and so on). Whenever I heard KOB it was an anachronism, a bit of the past that seemed irrelavant in the light of Muhal's Things to Come from Those Now Gone, Levels and Degrees of Light and even things that had been recorded contemporaneously such as Ra's Angels & Demons at Play. For most of the twenty years from 1969 to 1989, I found it hard to listen to KOB even next to Miles's contemporaries--I loved Mingus no end, that shit swung, KOB was too down tempo for me.

I started going back though listening to the Coltrane Atlantic recordings and to Miles's classic quartets of the 60s. Sometime in the mid 80s KOB became available as a Columbia Legacy imprint and I put it on the player and played it over and over again. I think I had matured as a listener and began to appreciate the music that Miles and Evans composed as an alternative to bop.

Never was it a matter of my "inability to appreciate it on its own merits because it's been over-praised or some such I-read-too-many-magazines-and-believe-what-I-read-therein horseshit."

I have no idea where you got the idea that my not getting KOB was in any way innfluenced by such factors. It was simply a matter of slowing down and appreciating the music for what was there and not for what wasn't.

Working nearly contemporarily and forward (in jazz and jazz fusion--I'll leave the rock-fusion suggestions to those who hear those connections better than I):

John McLaughlin: Birds of Fire, and yes, Devotion
Hancock: the Mwandishi recordings up-thread and don't overlook Head Hunters
Jan Garbarek/Bobo Stenson Q-tet: Witchi-Tai-To
Soft Machine: 5
John Surman/Morning Glory: s.t.
Tony Williams Lifetime: Emergency
Khalid Yasin/larry Young: Lawrence of Newark

-- Tyler Wilcox (tywil...), November 8th, 2005.

Oh, ick! And let me assure you I am a Laswell fan. I hate what LAswell did on PPanthalassa. As in, let's imagine IASW without Tony Williams. Gack. I probably have forty or so disks by each of Miles and of Laswell and they ain't all gems, for sure, but Panthalassa is one I sold without regrets.

And he did do s sequel, sort of. It is called "Divine Light: Reconstructions and Mix Translations" in which Laswell remixes & recasts the Carlos Santana/Jonhn McLaughlin "Love Devotion & Surrender" and the Santana/Alice Coltrane "Illuminations." I have kept this one, but still prefer the original LDS. He may have improved "Illuminations" somewhat or at least offered a remix that is a little less pretentious than the original. (or am I thinking of Welcome?

As I was saying, I purchased Witchi-Tai-To about 6 months ago and it's barely left my record player. A wholly amazing album.

I hadn't listened to this in years, then put side A on the other night. I thought I had maybe fucked up my turntable because the guitars sounded kinda out of tune no matter what I did. Then I listened to a couple of iTunes clips and remembered "oh, that's just how it sounds!"

I have the Panthalassa mix of this and it really is beautiful music.

It's interesting that in both the Tim Buckley and Brian Eno biographies, both subjects got so obsessed with In A Silent Way that they listened to little else for a long period (nearly a year).

Anyone got Big Fun? Been listening to it loads lately and it's some of the best shit I've ever heard. Obv love on the corner, get up with it, and iasw. Where to next? Is dark magus good? Herbie hancock? All of you need Big Fun by the way, I listened to it on a long bus journey through Spain this week, just such end times experimentalism, about as rich as music gets.

lotsa good suggestions of similar stuff in this thread and this one: In A Similarly Silent Way

you've heard pangaea, right?

In A Silent Way is among the best albums ever.

I love Big Fun. Ife!

Dark Magus is great, Pangaea is great, Agharta is mostly great.

Herbie's solo stuff immediately following his stint with Miles is amazing too, but in a different way, not as out there. more pop hooks tho

I don't have Get Up With It, always annoyed me that this stuff is kinda hard to find on vinyl

Big Fun is also one of my favorites. Just going through this thread and thinking that it was getting the love it deserves. I should listen to it tonight.