Reprise again

...continued from front page

And yet, for any of those earlier periods, you will also find apologists. I am one. My sole independent and idiosyncratic point of difference, is that I don’t apologise. My other sole independent and idiosyncratic point of difference is that I disagree that any of Miles’ earlier periods — barring perhaps his novitiate under Charlie Parker — are in any way, except merely in temporal terms, earlier.
Is your head beginning to spin like an old 78rpm? Go back to the top, and start reading again.
These confusing, but by no means confused reflections, were occasioned by the release of the complete Cellar Door Sessions 1970 in December 2005. Over four nights in December 1970, Miles’ band of the time (Gary Bartz on saxes, Keith Jarrett on electric piano, Michael Henderson on electric bass, Jack DeJohnette on drums and Airto Moreira on percussion, with the addition of John McLaughlin on guitar on the Saturday night) played a Washington DC club to a less than ardent crowd, presenting each night a suite of continuous music fashioned from five heads and as many basic grooves.
The word “suite” is chosen deliberately to invoke the “serious” music of the Western canon; a music that is in large part just as much grounded in popular dance forms of the past as Miles’ is on popular dance forms of the present (I almost wrote “future”, but then I would be getting ahead of myself!). And Miles’ music is meant to be taken similarly seriously; that is, listened to intently, danced to, enjoyed with a passion.
So, what is new in these recordings, released from the can after 35 years? For a start, any listener who was alive then and continues alive now who had taken the selection from those concerts as definitive, would need to revise that take. The selection I refer to is available on the album Live Evil — and hidden under cover art of some repugnance and behind track names of reflective silliness (Selim and Sivad being Miles and Davis backwards) — although it was always evident that several of the tracks had been cut back and at least one segue fabricated (the one about a third of the way through Selim).
Our hypothetical listener will be incredulous to find that the thing called Selim is made up of parts of the Miles staple overture of the time, Joe Zawinul’s Directions, and Honky Tonk. At least, this listener believes such would be the response of our hypothetical listener. The result is that Live Evil begins to sound like a spaceman’s culling of the straightest funk parts of the pieces. For, in reality, the full versions now available are in some ways more traditional — intro, head, solo, solo, solo, outro — and in other ways more “free” — sections of defiant squealing sax over continuous sections of rubato drum solos behind pulsating popping bass notes, fully improvised piano sallies.
It is, on the face of it, full understandable why the Live Evil album featured only the Saturday night during which McLaughlin sat in with the band. The playing from that night is nervier, rawer, forward reaching in a way that makes the earlier nights sound a little staid and comfortable. However, without McLaughlin, the band does display more evidently qualities of subtle excitement and rhythmic and harmonic richness that get lost a little behind the guitar. Jarrett shows his blues and funk roots to delightful effect, and Henderson’s bass is by no means robotic or merely repetitive even in the most repetitive lines; to wit, What I Say. Meanwhile, Jack DeJohnette creates the whirlwind in which all else in swept up; he is a hurricane, a cyclone, a tornado.

Then there is Bartz’s often beautiful sound on alto, none of which I believe, was heard on Live Evil; and his playing on soprano reminds our hypothetical listener of Kenny Garrett of a later era (or, was it an earlier era?).
Miles, as always, is always just superlative and is always dominant and dominating. His wah-wah trumpet is astonishingly lyrical — at times I have wondered why other trumpeters haven’t plugged in; our hypothetical listener suspects that it is because in other hands it would inevitably either sound like Miles, or it would sound like nothing at all, probably the latter — enabling a vast range of effects and emotions and makes you yearn for the unplugged sound. Then it comes, and you thank God for Miles Davis, no disrespect intended.
Even from the grave, Miles Davis continues to contribute in fresh ways to the future of music and forces us to reassess what has gone before in terms of what we have only come to hear afterwards.

Thank you, Miles.

Home

The purpole prose of Gill Wills

...continued from front page

Similarly reviewers review…a performance. The performance should be the focus. This does not mean that a fine literary style cannot be employed. It does mean that if style dominates the review to the exclusion of the performance then the reviewer has failed. Ms. Wills' literary largesse fills this review to bursting point, leaving very little room for the actual performance.

Regular readers of Media Critique are well aware that this Dues reviewer has no enthusiasm for what has been termed “purple prose”. This review contains more of this Patterson's Curse of the wordfields than one could ever hope to avoid, along with exquisite examples of the unexamined expressions that are often entangled in its rank growth. Mixed metaphors, confusion between metaphor and reality with (presumably unintended) humorous result, excessive use of incompatible modifiers, unsupported contentious assertions hidden behind a wall of verbiage… all of these appear so frequently that the reader is lost in the jungle and, rather than seeking out something to take away from the review, eventually succumbs with a choking cry of “enough!”. The style has obscured the performance and the piece has failed in its primary objective: to review the event.

Your Dues reviewer writes this in sadness rather than anger. I plead with you of the reviewing fraternity to exercise modesty and restraint. Evaluate your work not on its bravura (to use a favourite purple modifier) literary achievement but on its success in actually communicating something of the experience of the performance. This attitude of reconciliation is, however, insufficient to stop me quoting to the reader one excerpt from the mauve marvel under discussion. I consider this quote to be perhaps the finest example of the excesses of the purple style ever encountered in Australia; its erotic subtext absolutely without peer:

“Exchanges between the deeply immersed soloist and orchestra were fluid and warm”

On that note, adieu.

Read Gillian Wills' original review (subscription payable).

Home