Miles Davis - In A Silent Way

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.

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.