S&D: Miles Davis in the 70s & 80s

(Adam A., just those three? If nothing else you should definitely give In a Silent Way a try, and then Nefertiti and/or Miles Smiles. I mean, they're all brilliant, generally, but In a Silent Way in particular is the kind of album that...well, you just have to hear it. :-)

'Live Around the World' is a perfect summation of the 80s stuff, great tunes, performances and sound (and no crappy Marcus Miller drum programming).

I was surprised that I didn't like Black Beauty more, on the other hand -- something about the concert doesn't quite click for me, though there are plenty of moments I enjoy.

I haven't sat down to compare the two since buying the reissue but I bought it on a whim the other month despite already owning an older cd version, and it was far more exciting and less abrasive (abrasive not always being bad but in this case it caused me problems) to me than the older one. I don't think it would be an issue by this point, unless you buy used, but definitely go for the reissue.

or stay up all night manically grading student papers and listen to it repeating for hours on end. that might work with either version.

Also the In A Silent Way box is just amazing. Well worth it if you enjoy the album. It's more than just more of the same.

I've never really liked the 80s 'comeback' recs - Marcus Miller and Mike Stern don't really do it for me, although Scofield is ok, I have no prob. w/ 'Time After Time', and I did quite enjoy that late/last hip-hop rec the one time I heard it approx. 8 years ago.

But don't neglect the pre-68 stuff either! Just the other day I heard an amazing live alb recorded in France in abt 1960. Coltrane is still in the group, and he's REALLY starting to play in a most far out way, much to the horror/antipathy of the audience, who are not at all happy w/ JC blurting alongside the far 'cooler' Miles and Wynton Kelly. The tension is the same kind of feeling you get off some of those seventies live albs, that same kind of provocation.

I saw this DVD of an 80's performance once. Ewwww. He covered "Time After Time" and "Human Nature", which sounded just like the originals except there was an out-of-breath trumpet playing over them. What is Lauper without Lauper? Dismal. Anyway...

to return to your original question 'bout the '80s Miles,to my ears "Tutu" & "Amandla" sound more impressive (if certainly more 'polished' & less 'passionate' than the 70s ellectrified stuff) compared to the rest - tho' "You're Under Arrest" has it's purple patches too

"Aura" ain't bad, it's just essentially a recording where Miles mainly solos, inna impressionist stylee, over the (Miles-inspired) music written by the Norwegian trumpeter Palle Mikkelborg

wild ....fast...wild ....fast...wild ....fast...

Dark Magus is seriously fucked up. Luv it.

Also about his Human Nature cover, yeah that live video isn't that great, but the version on Live Around the World where he trades with/feeds phrases to Kenny Garrett is just fabulous.

I notice nobody stuck in a word about "In Concert: Live At Philharmonic Hall," a double-disc live set released right after "On The Corner" (which is my favorite Miles album, BTW). I think "In Concert" is a great, and very underrated, disc.

Lately I feel like 70s Miles records have everything I'm looking for in music.

I got the <I>Complete On The Corner Sessions</I> boxed set in today's mail. Six discs, at least three hours (I haven't added it all up yet) of previously unreleased studio jams from '72-74.

I saw the Sep release date at amazon!

It's amazing shit. I'm listening to "Jabali," an 11-minute previously unreleased track, right now. It has the same kind of slow, repeating bassline as "Ife," but with more crescendos from the drums.

dear unperson, I stalk now

This was posted on the jazz thread, but it's a fantastic interview with Pete Cosey, includes some bits on planned bands/records that failed to come together between 75 - 80. Also that Zigaboo Modeliste was supposed to join the band in the 70s.

Milford Graves was approached by Miles in the early '70s, too. Not sure how that would've gone -- if it would've been a typical Miles situation of, "You know that thing you do? Don't do it," or if he would've been in more of an Mtume role -- but either way, Milford turned Miles down.

Let me say that "Hopscotch" is fantastic.

i also think the portrayal of him "going commercial" in the '80s ignores that his '70s fusion work was also an attempt to "go commercial" and connect to the youth but the translation came out beguilingly weird. same thing largely happened here, imo

I agree a little, disagree a little, and/but in any case I wrote a whole book on electric Miles and it didn't stop at 1975, nor was it just about the music qua music — I talked about the Honda scooter commercial, the Miami Vice appearance, the way he started doing many, many more interviews in the 80s than he had before, and generally how he consciously attempted to become *a star* in 80s pop culture terms. And the music is definitely a big part of that, but not all of it; he wanted to be part of the pantheon. Look at the way he constantly praised Prince, in a way he never talked about Hendrix or James Brown or Sly in the 70s.

I could more readily picture a Graves/Coltrane album, though.

xp

Milford was a Latin percussionist before he became a jazz drummer; if Miles wanted him to do some Tito Puente shit, that could have been amazing.

The thought of Miles of approaching Graves is kinda of blowing my mind, just the two of them in the same room at the same time might have been too much haha

ooh have i missed the link for the cosey i/v?

new box set contains more instances of miles saying "teooooo" so it was worth releasing imo

Sorry, Cosey interview:
https://www.thelastmiles.com/interviews-pete-cosey/

ecollections is 'the one' for me on the Big Fun set. But Go Ahead is something else again. De Johnette (and Macero's treatment of him) is insane.

― The shard-borne beetle with his drowsy hums (Chinaski), Tuesday, September 4, 2018 2:13 PM (four years ago) bookmarkflaglink

I'm listening to the LP so I've not heard Recollections. I'll have to give it a listen.

― Scam jam, thank you ma’am (Sparkle Motion), Tuesday, September 4, 2018

the "obx ballad" suite is awesome, what the heck

i'm so happy

Speaking of this one, as Brad just did, I mentioned here in 2016:

I like just about all of Miles' 80s albums---The Man With The Horn could be so smoove, uh-oh---except he also had pre-tasteful Mike Stern showing up periodically with these greasy mullet licks, so it was a Miles experience after all.

Not just quotes, Miles also plays new stuff on the album.

unperson otm- he definitely *seemed* more open to pimping himself after coming out of retirement. it bugged me for a long time, but it occurs later in my own life: if he could appear on miami vice and then talk mountains of shit in interviews -just in the name of being MILES- why tf shouldn't he have?

also not trying to argue with brad, but the big difference about 70s vs 80s miles is that he was straight up playing others folks (very popular) music in the 80s. same shit he did in the bebop days, but the tech was just totally different, obviously. that just didn't happen in the late 60s/70s. he played music "inspired by" the pop stuff he liked but, well, on the corner was never gonna sound like sly or james brown. tho i do agree we want miles is a seriously undervalued recording - especially if you like that fried acid funk he was doing just before calling it quits.

new archive set is really fascinating. really glad to have the bootleg series back. hopefully this isn't the last one.

i mean i'm not trying to flatten the shift but pop music and the notion of engaging with it in the '70s vs the '80s are v different propositions to begin with. anyway my point mostly is that his commercial ambition didn't necessarily result in commercial music in either decade, e.g. how "human nature" and "time after time" get pretty exploded live, and i mostly just want to encourage people to listen to this stuff with open ears bc you will hear the same miles from the previous decades just pushing mercilessly forward. fuck if tutu and amandla sound like anything else really, even though they're critically thought of as occupying the same space as smooth jazz

i mostly just want to encourage people to listen to this stuff with open ears bc you will hear the same miles from the previous decades just pushing mercilessly forward

This I agree with 1000%. I wish the individual concerts from the giant 20CD Complete Miles At Montreux box were broken out and released separately, because all those different bands (1984, 1986, 1988, 1989) absolutely destroyed live.

excellent points all around- and i have to admit that i was one of those people who used to be very snobby re:80s miles. but you're both right: he always used his bands to build off of and that's really on display in the 80s. just because the tech changed didn't mean his chops did.

Thanks Jordan!

also not trying to argue with brad, but the big difference about 70s vs 80s miles is that he was straight up playing others folks (very popular) music in the 80s. same shit he did in the bebop days, but the tech was just totally different, obviously. that just didn't happen in the late 60s/70s. he played music "inspired by" the pop stuff he liked but, well, on the corner was never gonna sound like sly or james brown. tho i do agree we want miles is a seriously undervalued recording - especially if you like that fried acid funk he was doing just before calling it quits.

new archive set is really fascinating. really glad to have the bootleg series back. hopefully this isn't the last one.

― ミ💙🅟 🅛 🅤 🅡 🅜 🅑💙彡 (Austin), Tuesday, September 20, 2022 11:44 AM (five hours ago) bookmarkflaglink

the way he 'tried to' become a star in the 80s (was still a star...) is actually much closer to jazz's formative essence than the stuff in the 70s where he's essentially fitting into rockist formatting (70s and 90s are alike in this way, and it makes sense that his 80s music became so ignored in the 90s when ppl got very hardcore real instruments-ish). what is a song like 'time after time' 'human nature' 'whats love got to do with it' but the contemporary version of a jazz standard?

lately been really into the 1987-1988 era miles stuff when he was working with Ricky Wellman on drums. You literally have the drummer who essentially innovated Go-Go with Chuck Brown playing behind Miles Davis for like two three years?? its insane stuff, that ppl pretended working w one of the most innovative percussionists -- innovative in an all-around musical genre sense -- was 'going pop' is bonkers, no one would interpret a similar maneuver that way today

good revive, I gotta check some of this stuff out. another vote for the greatness of We Want Miles!

Also while I do appreciate this stuff on a surface textural level, for feeling like a lost sonic template that feels fresh because of how difficult it is to find today, the amazing thing is that it isn't disposable 'on trend' either...like there's real meat to it, there's prismatic depths to what's being created here, even as its begun to feel prophetic for incorporating certain sonic accents that are swinging around to Cool again, it's never one-dimensionally That (well or rarely...)

Also random but Prince evidently was a huge fan of "You're Under Arrest," which I do love but that era feels a little blunt-instrument compared to TuTu and Amanda for me

lately been really into the 1987-1988 era miles stuff when he was working with Ricky Wellman on drums. You literally have the drummer who essentially innovated Go-Go with Chuck Brown playing behind Miles Davis for like two three years?? its insane stuff, that ppl pretended working w one of the most innovative percussionists -- innovative in an all-around musical genre sense -- was 'going pop' is bonkers, no one would interpret a similar maneuver that way today

Yeah, "Big Time" from Amandla (with Wellman on drums, and Jean-Paul Bourelly on guitar) is fantastic.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C85mwkuOCy0

ever since i relented about a decade ago, i've always considered amandla top tier later miles. that stuff is super rad. i thought for sure it would see a revival with the vaporwave stuff; maybe it did, i'm not hip enough to be in the know about such things. really hope there's a bootleg series installment to coincide with it.

also xpost back to unperson re:the big montreux box- always waited for them to piece that out, but alas no.

There was also a DVD version, because all those sets were filmed, too! I never did pick that up and kinda wish I had.

stuff in the 70s where he's essentially fitting into rockist formatting fuck this: he and Macero were finding their own formats, with musicians from various traditions, subgenres, individualized specialties pulled into and changed by his playing and instructions and Macero's edits. More audacious than his and Marcus Miller's partnership, but "rockist" doesn't say it.

Wanna thank this thread revive, been blasting the new box set all afternoon. Love Tutu and Aura, the latter among the most intrusive quietly textured music I own.

stuff in the 70s where he's essentially fitting into rockist formatting fuck this: he and Macero were finding their own formats, with musicians from various traditions, subgenres, individualized specialties pulled into and changed by his playing and instructions and Macero's edits. More audacious than his and Marcus Miller's partnership, but "rockist" doesn't say it.

― dow, Tuesday, 20 September 2022 23:25 (yesterday) link

Lol relax. I’m talking about marketing — starting with bitches brew it was clear his label was banking on hippies. That’s not a slight of the music, but album oriented auteur w psychedelic packaging who plays rock festivals is undeniably a (smart) embrace of rockist angle vs what he did in the 80s

yeah i wz also gnna come and and ask "er what mean rockist here"? -- a word not used at all until the 80s and not (at first) usually deployed in ways that easily translate D-40's claim

but per his translation above i now largely agree it lol: the matrix the work was being poured into is primarily aimed at this new LP-buying market which CBS etc didn't really understand yet (it didn't understand itself yet)

stockhausen and terry riley were getting similar treatment: it's a function of evolving format and technology far more than it's a function of sound or artistic intention -- and for a few years (67-72ish?) "rock" was an exorbitantly expansive category apparently gobbling up all the other genres, with omni-embrace as its utopian (but also threatening) core

Yeah---in a way it goes back to the "songster," the travelling human jukebox, who better be ready to play whatever, in addition to his possibly famous specialty, like Robert Johnson supposedly had his covers ready to go, and if you were in the house band, as Buck Owens talked about---then The Hawks experience travelling North America with Ronnie Hawkins, hearing and playing all sorts of things, going to being The Band (with and without the similarly inclined Dylan), putting elements of different subgenres etc. in the same originals, or juxtaposing of originals; the Beatles also drawing on their club band experience, Doug Sahm and Ornette allegedly sometimes with several recombinan combos on the same stage, and certainly Elvis had that on tour in his last decade (see Elvis On Tour, also Dylan when I saw him in the late 70s, between Rolling Thunder per se and his Jesus flock, and Sun Ra with Arkestra, even Woody Herman's Herd, when I saw him and them in the early 70s. Miles said there was no point in judging what he was doing as jazz, because jazz was just one of the things he was drawing on, though I heard it as something like freeing the spirit of jazz from the letter (incl. letter of "free jazz," as that became another codified subetc.) The freedom *principle* of jazz, or whatever it was and is.
Also, on the grassroots side, this is from the 50s:

Some Saturday nights there were barn dances, way out in Elgin or Sonoita. In barns. Everybody from miles and miles would go, old people, young people, babies, dogs. Guests from dude ranches. All of the women brought things to eat. Fried chicken and potato salad, cakes and pies and punch. The men would go out in bunches and hang around their pickups, drinking. Some women too, my mother always did. High school kids got drunk and threw up, got caught necking. Old ladies danced with each other and children. Everybody danced.
Two-step mostly, but some slow dances and jitterbug. Some square dances and Mexican dances like La Varsoviana. In English it's "Put your little foot, put your little foot right there," and you skip and whirl around. They played everything from "Night and Day" to "Detour, There's a Muddy Road Ahead," "Jalisco no te Rajas" to "Do the Hucklebuck." Different bands every night but the same kind of mix.
Where did these raging wonderful musicians come from? Pachuco horns and guitar players, big-hatted country guitarists, bebop drummers, piano-players that looked like Fred Astaire. The closest I ever heard anything come close to those little bands was at the Five Spot in the late fifties. Ornette Coleman's "Ramblin'." Everybody raving how new and far-out he was. Sounded Tex-Mex to me, like a good Sonoita hoedown.

------Lucia Berlin, "Homing"

*recombinant* combos, like sometimes the drummer from one and sax player from another, just to keep it fresh, and musos on their toes. Arthur Russell might do this too, though maybe more from night to night, at the Kitchen, say.

But yeah also omni-embrace as its utopian (but also threatening) core sometimes crushed together in the context of no context, or some possibly threatening context---like the reaction (maybe now more than ever) that some listeners had and have to My Life In The Bush of Ghosts. Or the cosmic showmanship side of some jazz from the 60s-70s on (not a prob for me, if I happen to like the artist, but otherwise yeah can get too slick, while talking the talk)

Nice work quoting Lucia Berlin.

Sorry, Cosey interview:
https://www.thelastmiles.com/interviews-pete-cosey🕸/

In a previous interview, Cosey mentioned. by the by, that he used to have a recorder going onstage with Miles, kept the results in a box under his bed, sometimes kicked back and listened. Maybe some of those have gotten around, to the xpost Heat Warps blog, for inst?

There are absolutely some recordings on The Heat Warps — from the South American tour of 1973-74 IIRC — that were recorded by someone onstage; Dave Liebman, I think. They sound amazing. There's one where you can actually hear Miles' wah-wah pedal creaking when he steps on it.

I will play the Agharta version of "Maiysha" all morning.

Hell yeah. I like how that version goes back and forth between the lounge and funk sections where the studio version is just part A -> part B

The electric piano going through the wah wah pedal on Miles at the Fillmore often makes sounds that remind me of PAC Man when he is chomping up dots. It is kinda uncanny.

Listening to 'Double Image: Rare Miles from the Complete Bitches Brew Sessions' after it came up on someone's 50 album list and it's fantastic. Tbh I'm enjoying this more than Bitches Brew, it's more focused and spacious (and Billy Cobham rips).

yeah that’s a really great collection, I am all about random configurations of fusion miles

gonna put that on right now!

I also much prefer it to Bitches Brew itself

Four tracks from this were bonuses on the CD release of Big Fun, and they're probably as good as the original LP.

I disagree with all of this. Most of these tunes feature the band wandering around trying to catch a spark. Which is fine because, well, they’re the best musicians in the world, but none of the tracks is better than what was officially released around this time. Also, Yaphet sounds pretty clearly like a run at Great Expectations.

Chatter of Miles getting pissy with Teo in the studio tho is A+.

I’m still a little sad we never got an actual Complete Bitches Brew Sessions box with dry runs and whatnot. No I don’t listen to my Jack Johnson or IASW boxes all that frequently but the process of these sessions is def. almost as interesting as the results. And now Belden is dead. Oh well.

does that material exist for Bitches Brew? if so, why did it not get included in the complete sessions box?

My favorite of these compilations is Champions, which is all the tracks named after boxers from the Complete Jack Johnson Sessions box (except for "Archie Moore," for some reason). Put together, they're a seriously nasty electric blues album:

https://tidal.com/browse/album/233171325

This year's "Turnaround" had 4 tracks from the "Complete On The Corner Sessions" box. I had already cherry picked that stuff and came up with an excellent companion disc:
One And One (Unedited Master) - a completely different track!
Jabali (on "Turnaround")
The Hen (on "Turnaround")
Peace
Mr. Foster
Hip-Skip
What They Do

does that material exist for Bitches Brew?

I'm pretty sure I read that it no longer exists.