Miles Davis - In A Silent Way

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.

I always thought it was weird that Ife was the one eletric-period Davis piece that hip hpo guys sampled (offhand I can think of at least two - Digital Underground and New Kingdom)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UCO79Y1eQvI

speaking of Miles, am I a complete chump for sort of wanting this?
http://feature.legacyrecordings.com/milesdavis/images/Miles-CompleteAlbums-01.jpg
Miles Davis - Complete Columbia Album Collection

No more than any of the Beatles chumps.

seriously. tho u probably have at least half those albums already

i do. and unlike the Beatles things, these aren't new remasterings or anything, I don't think ... AND YET.

The 97-onwards Miles remasterings are all fine to my ears anyway.

oh yeah, I don't think there's any particular need to remaster those records again. They sound great!

i think i just occasionally get box set fever

nah I totally want that box set

there are a lot of box sets I would like to have tbf

The box sounds cool though kinda inessential since I already have 5 of the 7 Columbia sets (still gotta get the Gil Evans box and the Seven Steps box).

However this sounds cool: "The release of the MILES DAVIS COLUMBIA box set coincides with a three-month exhibition at the Museé de la Musique in Paris (October 16, 2009, through January 17, 2010) entitled "We Want Miles." The exhibition follows the evolution of the artist from his birth (May 26, 1926) and childhood in East Saint Louis to his final Paris concert in July, two months before his death on September 28, 1991."

I hope it's better than the jazz museum in KC, though, which is sadly kinda silly.

I always wonder if the "Complete Sessions" box-sets are worth it. I've got the studio albums of In A Silent Way, Jack Johnson, Bitches Brew, and others, but there are these huge three-disc sets that I sort of want.

oh they're worth it. Jack Johnson esp., imo

in recent months i have struggled to listen to anything other than miles davis (post IASW stuff basically).
guess that means Big Fun is now on my list as i had given that one a miss.
oh, and the remasters sound fantastic, excellently packaged (no digipack nonsense), and are reasonably priced now for us cheapskates.
a good example of how to do a reissue program.

Can't nab the Jack Johnson complete sessions on eMusic, since it's like 1000 credits. But my local used disc store has it.

Jack Johnson, IASW, and BB boxes are all really good.

So are the On The Corner and Cellar Door boxes! Do you have $500 to spare.

Columbia House did me right on these boxes (like $30 a pop), except the On the Corner one which was a Christmas gift b/c otherwise it was like $120 for 6 disks and it's tough to justify that (though the packaging is gorgeous).

yeah you can actually find pretty good deals on some of them. Bitches Brew I think I got new from amazon for $25.

exactly, I got the three I mentioned for around 25 each. Still haven't seen the OTC box for less than 100 though.

The Miles + Gil Evans box is really nice, probably my favorite pre-IASW Miles stuff.

As I understand it, those boxes end up compiling most (if not all) of stuff like Big Fun, Water Babies, Get Up With It & Milestones (the wierdest one of them all)...

The Silent Way box takes some getting used to, the way it splits up Filles de Kilamanjaro.

The Sixties Quintet box is fucking amazing and was real eye-opening for me as I was already pretty conversant with the electric stuff.

I am seriously thinking about buying that massive Miles box (70 CDs and a DVD). It includes his Isle of Wight performance on CD, which is nice, but the down side is that the versions of Agharta and Pangaea are the U.S. versions, not the Japanese versions (which have much better sound and more music). But I might just spend the $300 Amazon is asking for it, since my birthday is less than a month after its street date...

i've been digging around on the net to see if I could find downloads of the Japanese versions of Agharta/Pangaea. I've already bought the US versions. Can anyone help me out. :'(

god damn it i didn't want to know this :(

What are the differences between the Japanese and US versions?

xpost, never mind, I read upthread

someone hook us up, don't make me beg. i have a newborn baby, i can't afford japanese imports are you kidding me.

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

Are you talking about the stuff he did from Head Hunters on? Because the three albums he did with the Mwandishi band (Mwandishi, Crossings, and Sextant) after leaving Miles but before moving to jazz-funk with Head Hunters are certainly as "out there" as Miles' records of the era. And, like I said upthread, they're great stuff and certainly worth checking out if you like In a Silent Way.

yeah I was ref'ing the Headhunters (and post Headhunters) stuff, I haven't heard the Mwandishi band albums

Sextant is fantastic, still never heard the others.

You should. They're awesomely experimental and groovy and trippy and cosmic stuff, especially Sextant, which I think the best album Herbie has ever made.

(x-post)

All three of the Mwandishi albums are fantastic, and so is the live Headhunters album Flood. Of course, that one's a Japanese import, too, but it's totally worth it.

The other two are less synth-y as Sextant (Mwandishi has no synths at all, I think), but they're pretty similar otherwise: trancey extended grooves combined with bursts of free playing and cosmic noise. The last tune on Crossings has one of the weirdest, most disorienting use of vocals I've ever heard on a jazz record.

That was x-post to Nick B.

Most of the Mwandishi band (including Herbie) also appears on Eddie Henderson's Realization and Inside Out, which were reissued as a two-disc comp a few years ago. They're mostly quite good, though I think compositionally they're a bit weaker than the Herbie albums, and the lack of Julian Priester hurts the sound of the band. Certainly worth getting anyway, if you like the Mwandishi era Herbie.

Yeah, those Henderson albums are quite good. A bunch of the Mwandishi members released albums under their own names in the early '70s that are worth checking out, including Julian Priester's Love, Love and Buster Williams' Pinnacle.

Got Pangaea, been listening a lot. I actually am more excited about this music than I have been about any records for a long time. Can't get enough of it.

You should. They're awesomely experimental and groovy and trippy and cosmic stuff, especially Sextant, which I think the best album Herbie has ever made.

Yeah. I think the band changed drummers for Sextant, to pretty amazing results.

They didn't change drummers, Billy Hart was the drummer on all three albums. Sextant has an added percussionist (whose name escapes me) though, maybe that's what you're referring to?

You're right. I was thinking of Thrust. From the Rolling Stone review:

Yet where Headhunters was undergirded by the capable, facile drummer Harvey Mason, Thrust's drummer was jazz-funk genius Mike Clark, a scrawny little fiend who'd rather play music than eat. On extended jams like "Palm Grease" and "Actual Proof," Clark and bassist Paul Jackson are a two-headed computer disgorging off-kilter but irresistibly fat-bottomed licks; Hancock's Fender Rhodes and Bennie Maupin's reeds, meanwhile, dance on the ceiling. Thrust is a great album: brave, risky music making.

i'm trying to think of other artists who i fall back on so regularly and easily -- if the 'what record should i put on next' thought process goes on longer than 5 minutes for me, i feel like i end up putting on miles. his records pretty much never leave the 'recently played' stack next to my stereo, and they haven't since i've bought em

this one especially

Tried finding it myself, cos I'm sure I've seen you guys talk about it before somewhere on here, but couldn't:

Agharta & Pangaea - is there bonus material on the Japanese versions, or is it just better sound quality?

No bonus, just an altered tracklisting ('Prelude' is one track, not two, the second disc is one track, not two). I hear the 2006 Japanese remaster is pretty incredible sonicwise (it's released on the 'Blu-Spec' $50–60 CD).

Er, I was speaking of Agharta specifically there