Monday, July 13, 2015

Songs / Things Heard on the Radio # 68 Miles Davis


Midway through an afternoon of admin on a Monday morning while listening to a remarkable couple of hours of music hosted by Sparks yesterday through the catch-up facility on the BBC. Pretty much everything they played over two hours could easily be posted up here but I've gone for this. A selection from On the Corner, a Miles Davis album I'd never heard anything from previously. It stopped me in my tracks. It's the West Side Story gangs, relocated to Harlem in the early seventies. Running drugs. Check out those hand claps. Will have to catch up on the rest of the record and no doubt one day own it. After all my credibility has taken a potentially fatal body blow through posting Duran Duran earlier on in the day. In the meantime, here's a Guardian article about the enormous, initially hugely negative reputation of the record.









The most hated album in jazz

At the time, everyone loathed Miles Davis's On the Corner - even the people who played on it. But now, reports Paul Tingen, some of the coolest names in music are proud to name it as a major influence.

Within weeks of its release in 1972, Miles Davis's On the Corner had become the most vilified and controversial album in the history of jazz. "Repetitious crap," wrote one critic. "An insult to the intellect of the people," remarked another. Even the musicians who played on the album were bewildered. "I didn't think much of it," recalls saxophonist Dave Liebman. "It was my least favourite Miles album," says Paul Buckmaster, the British composer and arranger who supplied musical sketches for the sessions, and turned Davis on to the music and method of Karlheinz Stockhausen.
The history of music is full of works that were derided on first public exposure - Stravinsky's Rite of Spring (1910), Ornette Coleman's Free Jazz: A Collective Improvisation (1960), the Sex Pistols' Never Mind the Bollocks (1977) - but within a few years enjoyed a critical rehabilitation. By contrast, On the Corner remained shunned, if not forgotten, for decades. All the more striking, then, that 35 years after its first release it is hailed by many outside the jazz community as a visionary musical statement that was way ahead of its time



Jamie Morrison, drummer with post-punk band the Noisettes, is one of them. "On the Corner is a huge influence on us," he says. "I love the rhythm section, and the way you're just thrown into the music at the beginning. It's really punk in its attitude. It's so offensive, and pushes boundaries at the same time."
He is echoed by Paul Miller, aka electronic and hip-hop musician and producer DJ Spooky. "I'm highly influenced by the collage process producer Teo Macero applied on the album," he says.
Bassist Jah Wobble chips in: "On the Corner is fantastic, because this same riff comes back to you again and again. You can't do it with any old riff." And New York guitarist Gary Lucas, who has come through the Captain Beefheart school of warped aesthetics, loves the "ominous, dense, swampy jungle of urban desperation its dub-like grooves conveyed".
So it seems On the Corner simply went underground, only to emerge again when the world was ready for it. The release this week of The Complete On the Corner Sessions, a six-CD box set, is timely. It's worth pointing out, though, that the re-evaluation of On the Corner has been going on since the early 1990s, when hip-hop artists began quoting it as an influence. "It was the first hip-hop/house/drum'n'bass/breakbeat album I'd ever heard," explains American musician and longtime Village Voice writer Greg Tate.



Since then, the list of musicians who have namechecked Miles Davis's electric music in general, and On the Corner in particular, has become seemingly endless; knowing and liking the album appears to have become indispensable in the hipness stakes. On the Corner's influence can be heard in the music of such varied artists as Underworld, Radiohead, Sonic Youth, Red Hot Chili Peppers, David Byrne and Squarepusher.
Yet, the mainstream jazz community still won't touch On the Corner with a barge pole. And whatever remains of jazz-rock continues to be too deeply in thrall of the pyrotechnics aspect of such 1970s bands as Mahavishnu Orchestra to take any notice of On the Corner's repetitive funk, which was the antithesis of virtuosity.




So what is this most mysterious and outrĂ© of albums? The culmination of Davis's two-decade-long quest for the African roots of his music, On the Corner has a huge, extended rhythm section rotating around circular, one-chord bass riffs. But there were a number of other things that set the album apart. First there were the influences of Stockhausen, Paul Buckmaster, and Ornette Coleman's atonal "harmolodics". These were superimposed over grooves and bass riffs that were more tightly circumscribed than ever before. On the opening track, the bass plays the same few notes for 20 minutes. Inundated by an ocean of rhythm instruments, including sitar, tabla and three electric keyboards (played by Chick Corea and Herbie Hancock, among others), and without any harmonic development, the soloists had very little space, and became merely strands in a tangle of groove and colours. 
In addition, producer Teo Macero did his wild cut-and-paste thing, which he had pioneered on Miles Davis's In a Silent Way and Bitches Brew. Here, he went deeper than before into overdubbing and studio effects territory. According to The Complete On the Corner Sessions producer Bob Belden: "The original album version was an effect. In essence, it's compression in a narrow stereo field to make the music work on AM radio."



Why go to such trouble for AM radio? The answer lies in what the more anti-commercial members of the jazz community considered to be Davis's biggest sin: having already been accused of "selling out" for incorporating rock influences, he asserted that On the Corner was his effort to go mainstream and reach the kids in the streets. Predictably, this impenetrable and almost tuneless concoction of avant-garde classical, free jazz, African, Indian and acid funk bombed spectacularly, leading to decades in the wilderness. As far as the jazzers were concerned, it completed Davis's journey from icon to fallen idol.



But the story doesn't end there. In the three years following On the Corner's release, Davis managed to take a few more steps in the same direction. In the spring of 1973, seemingly tired of the constraints imposed by huge rhythm sections, he trimmed his band down to seven players and fronted it with Pete Cosey, a fearsome electric guitarist whose jaw-dropping exploits still sound advanced today. The band were at their best live, and their ferocious acid-funk improvisations can be heard on the staggering live double albums Dark Magus, Agharta and Pangaea.
Most of the 1973-75 material on The Complete On the Corner Sessions sounds tame by comparison to those three albums.But the box set also contains Davis's acid-funk band's only studio album, Get Up With It, which includes a meditational homage to Duke Ellington, He Loved Him Madly - a half-hour-long track that Brian Eno has quoted as a major influence on his ambient direction.



In the past few years, there have been signs that this 1973-75 output is also heading for a radical reappraisal. Julian Cope aptly wondered, "Are there any others who took up the baton from Miles after his funk ensemble collapsed? I hear the influence in post-punk but that's about it." Barring a few tributes, this music still appears to be buried in a time capsule of its own, waiting to be discovered.
·Paul Tingen is the author of Miles Beyond: The Electric Explorations of Miles Davis, 1967-1991. The Complete On the Corner Sessions is out on Sony Legacy on Monday.

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