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Boxing Miles

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A pretty picture, not! The image of me clasping my hands together (in pious reverence, or reverend piety for that matter) and raising my eyes so the whites are visible below the irises, is one that makes even me shudder.

On the charge of obsessive, I plead half-guilty, Your Honour.
But untrue? ’Fraid not. No mitigation, Your Honour.

Although, I am beginning to see that my appreciation of Miles Davis has, over the years, had two sides to it: a dark side; and a light side. Yin and Yang (oh, dear, here we go!). However, let it be kept in mind that any thing that has two sides to it also has a great big bulky thing in between to which the sides are only the termini and the articulated surfaces of form for the matter ’neath and ’twixt.

The dark side — how timorously I confess to it — is that Miles, because of his greatness and the sheer immensity of his output, tends to push aside other musical offerings and, moreover, that he tends to become the vantage point from which all other music is appraised. The first of these shadows means I doubtless fail to give sufficient time to other music than Miles’, which is unfortunate, and my loss; the second shadow pushes me towards that awe-ful place over the entrance to which are sculpted the words “comparisons are odious”. If the time ever arrives when the best (and worst) I can say of any piece of music is, “well, it isn’t Miles”, please shoot me.

The light side is that Miles is simply marvellous, and to have more music from this great musician 17 years after his death is just a joy.

So, when the Complete On the Corner Sessions was released late last year, I was constrained to leap on it, listen to it and, ultimately, love it. However, not without reservations.

In order to preempt any mystification on this score, I refer you to a review of the Complete Sessions by Paul Tingen, who has to his credit an entire book on Miles’ electric period;
Miles Beyond: The Electric Explorations of Miles Davis, 1967-1991.

The upshot of Tingen’s article is that somehow the time for this music has come — having been reviled when it was released in 1972 on the album On the Corner — because the likes of DJ Spooky and Brian Eno have alluded to it as having influenced them. Well, I dunno, but if I were a youngun who had not even heard so much as the name of Miles Davis, such a rap from rappers and the like would more incline me to leave Miles on the shelf than to take him down and have a listen.

To be damned with faint praise would be far less damning than to have such precarious and doubtful recommendations.

In this context, my reservations on the Complete Sessions are two. First, the recordings are not, even loosely, all related to the music that came out on the original On the Corner album either in content, personnel or, especially, date. Pieces that were recorded in 1974 and 1975 can hardly be said to belong with music recorded for an album that appeared in 1972. Anyone who has followed Miles’ career (and Paul Tingen has followed that career closely) would argue, as Tingen does in his book, that the music Miles Davis was playing by 1974 bore only the most minimal resemblance to that of On the Corner.
The piece called Ife is an excellent example, as it formed a staple for Miles’ ensembles until 1975. Of the elements of the recording made in June 1972, with Paul Buckmaster on electric cello, all that remained by 1975 was the seven-note theme put together by Buckmaster. This example merely serves as an instance of how much the music transformed over those 3½ years. So, to sell the tracks as the Complete Sessions is a loose use of language. The descriptor is defensible only insofar as Miles never went into the studio again before his 1975 retirement to produce an entire album as he did with On the Corner. He only recorded odd tracks here and there; therefore, perhaps it is defensible from a sales angle to associate those tracks with a known quantity. However, I’m not sold on it. Just give us the music; and, as Miles might have said, “call it anything”.

My second reservation is that the quality of the music is, well, disparate, and revealing of the intentions with which it was recorded. Some of the pieces sound like preliminary explorations of themes and ideas — which is just what they are — and it is certain that not all of these are great music. To wit, Big Fun/Holly-wuud will leave most listeners asking for less, and 25 minutes of Turnaround and U-Turnaround is a bit much. But, it must be kept in mind that these odds and sods are equivalent to a writer’s notebook; and we don’t rate a great poet or novelist by his random jottings: “Hmm, devil chucked out of Heaven. Must elaborate!”; “Loon kills loony killer in deep South. That might work.”; or “I want to write a play entitled On the Waterfront. Think I’ll call Stella!”

On top of that, Miles held spontaneity as a supreme musical value; hence his habit of recording what amount to practice sessions. Thank God he did that, because his intuitive sense of how to get the best out of others and himself often paid off in such accidental recordings. (Sometimes, though not often, it didn’t — hence the disparity.)

Two questions remain. First, why release all this material? For posterity. Whatever may be the integral worth of the music, it is good that it is available for a more complete picture of Miles Davis’ career. This stuff matters in all manner of ways we can only guess at at present.

Second: If you already possess On the Corner, should you hand over more cash (about $180) for music you already have and a miscellany of stuff of dubious quality (much of which Miles himself left in the can)? Yes. There be gold in them there CDs, of which I shall only mention pieces never before commercially available. From the meditative Jabali, which features some beautiful jabs from Miles that make up for its dragging, slightly corny bass line, to the unhappily named Hip-Hop with its woeful thematic reference to the Theme from MASH, the stuff is funky, dancy, exciting, and unlike anything else in the musical universe.

There is much else that will reward listening (What They Do, Peace, Minnie, The Hen); but on top of all that, a couple of pieces alone make the purchase unequivocally worth it. Chieftan is a stuttering groove held in place by staggering snare-rim shots, supported by a similarly stuttering, staccato funk guitar chord over a single repeated bass note, now in the pocket, now bouncing off the rim. Over it, Miles cries again and again, yet — how can I put it? — always putting it in a different way, to make what just might be the longest solo he recorded in his career. The only solo of comparable length comes on the Sketches of Spain album, recorded in 1959-60, when he solos for 10 minutes on Solea.

Then, there is Mr Foster, which is just beautiful. I can only describe it in terms of its effect on me: I froze and was literally enchanted. It is a pretty, song-like theme, introduced with great heart by Dave Liebman on tenor sax and then developed by Miles on wah-wah trumpet. It grips and isolates you and dares you to undertake an interior interrogation that is at once intimidating and exhilarating.

Thank you, Miles Davis!

For Paul Tingen's retrospective article about On The Corner, see this article from the Sydney Morning Herald.

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