Miles Davis - "Gondwana": C/D

I've seen one or two prominent ilxers pulling this one off wih some panache. Maybe it needs practice in front of the mirror first.

But what makes it an interesting c/d, what makes it particularly beautiful, I think, is the fact that it follows Side One: Zimbabwe, which fucking SMOKES AN ILL BLUNT (or something such descriptor). Gives it that blissful comedown thing. And that shit w/ the rhythm box near the end (Mtume I presume) is esp. cosmic.

"NO WE CAN'T"

oh, ok :(

Re electric Miles and fusion: the big difference is Miles was willing to play ugly music (On The Corner, "Rated X"), whereas Weather Report, for example, went straight for the pretty stuff and consequently their records (with the exception of a few moments on Mysterious Traveller) are duller than dogshit. Herbie Hancock's three albums with Mwandishi are highly, highly recommended, though. Fifty times better than the Headhunters. Believe it or not, Ronnie Montrose plays guest guitar on the first one (simply called Mwandishi). It's not some Sharrockian frenzy or anything—in fact, you can barely hear him. But a weird cameo nonetheless.

I mean, free jazz is well and good, but John Litweiler you ain't.

Anyway, if Sonny is seriously looking for suggestions, I'd definitely ask him to check out trumpeter Eddie Henderson's first two lps as a leader on the Capricorn label - Inside Out and Realization. I think they may both be compiled on a single cd..

Also, DEFINITELY check out trumpeter Woody Shaw's Blackstone Legacy, his first record as a leader and totally following the Miles blueprint.

You'd also probably dig most of anything Larry Young was involved in post-1970; the Tony Williams Lifetime record, the Lawrence of Newark record, the two Fuel records on Arista, and that archival Love Cry Want record which came out on cd a few years ago...

But anyway, "Zimbabwe" is good but didn't click as immediately or as much yet for me. I do intend to explore the rest of Miles Davis' electric records. I don't know how I ever disliked them before.

I'd be worried too!

howabout herbie hancock and his synth drenched albums from that time ? psychedelic, funky, absorbing, sessions that do not go on forever ..

the way i see it Davis was the $,$$$,$$$, man so he could pick and choose, but the sidemen who were all very good just had one or two albums they were allowed to produce at the same time, coat-tails-like, opportunity not let waste on drug-fused endless seesions in their cases

davis' success was his crew -- let's face it, he's an organiser and a poseur, and what he's best at is he putting together the latest "pop jazz" -- three "next thing in jazz" outfits in three decades, all of which sold fabulously (except the dark, mysterious, controversial electric stuff of course)

davis was jazzs most successful A&R man, organiser, but to me he's a company man, he put's pop music formula sales above music

ok some of those gigs (that have been recently re-packaged) when he was playing to filmore east type audiences rock, but 72' onwards, this guy was a loose lazy session coordinator -- he had clout, so he could get away with using other good players, and that's what he did, he _used_ then)

so i say it's the other players who helped get the mysterious electric period (that jazz fans hated, controversy, shades of Dylan does electric ..) rocking, even if it's that same damn key, same damn beat, arrrgh !!

i say Davis' "new direction in music", the mystique, the bad-ass publicity, they're marketing tactics -- he was being carried by his musos, with his loose stockhausen name dropping not translating to any of the music ( and i know both stockhausen and davis well enough to say that)

to me his electric period is boring dumb funk

(if it was not the miles davis brand on those '70-'75 records there would be no controversy, and they'd no longer be available, as they'd have justly been dismissed as cash-in stoner shit)

I worship Lee Morgan. I have his Mosaic box, as well as a half dozen or so individual CDs. Plus a bunch of Blakey, plus a shitload of Hank Mobley. Plus Grant Green, Sonny Clark, 1950s Miles and Coltrane and blahblahblah...short answer, yes, I love hard bop. There just aren't many threads about it here. So I talk about the noise-skronk jazz that I also love.

i assume this was a practice miles picked up from james brown, who also worked as a terrorist bully on his sidemen — the sonic effect a result of players aware of their own lack of power in the situation? (i can't imagine this set up was common in small-group jazz or guitar-group rock, maybe in some of the swing orcs or bigger r&b combos... maybe also when working for mingus?) (some of the other "fusion" outfits played uglified music — mahavishnu for example — but they all seemed much more healthily unified as units... miles's explorations of fucked-upness and delbierate manipulations of powertrips within collectives isn't even much explored in avant-classical => stockhausen's aus den seiben tagen maybe the obvious lone counter-example

the effective result of this kind of play — which is almost inevitably patchy and in this sense too it's very stockhausen-ish, i guess — is a Moment Form of Free Improv, loosely connected by long grooves, from players who would never have delivered anything improv-ish in "ordinary" improv circs

the ideology of free jazz was socially conscious collectivity, which i think fairly quickly steered the free jazz movement into a cul-de-sac of self-repressive moralistic narrowness (you had to play as if you were all equals; as if none of you were bastards even when some of you were); miles's route out of this is so protected, obviously, by the shtick that seems to have been its condition of possiblity, that it continues to threaten to be buried by it... oddly enough you catch the point better when you see short TV-clip extracts of some of these pieces => THEY needed the endless grooves either side to get to that state, but the same grooves distract the listener from what it was miles wanted you to listen to?

playing games with hype is always risks the problem of fans and detractors getting identically obsessed with the headfuck surface

i guess i just don't find that '70s davis sonically interesting -- it communicates laziness to me, sit back, roll, etc..

OK i admit i dislike some of stockhausen's 7 days experiments too, and have not heard all of them, and maybe that's the least listened to stockhausen i have as i do go for the more rigorous (or uh less aleatoric ?) compositions, stuff that had nothing to do with breaking up with your wife, hunger strikes or lsd)

davis a bully ? stalking your players standing right in front of them and listening to their solos at live gigs always struck me as the most obnoxious anti-group mentaility thing i've ever seen from this "genius" -- is he trying to tell the audience he's going to deal to soloist x after the show he's such a bad-ass ?

maybe i can express this idea and maybe agree with you that bullying, weird rules for players within compositions, the ego on davis by the '70s -> it all produced something negative

and stockhausen, the 7 days guys didn't get payed for their very real improvisations did they ? both of these "composers" with clout, big record labels and lwayers behind them .. it's quite sad

and i think davis' motivation was that you usually can't pull hat tricks in music, and here was a guy on top of the game from the '50s ! no new ideas ? take it out on the players .. or worse, just use those players

as for the grooves, why didn't they edit them out ? get marceo to clean them up like bitches brew, overdub bass with some imagination, don't just let the synth reproduce the scales semi-syncopated, get rid of all that auto stuff -- the more i think about this stuff (which i find very tiresome to listen to) the more i find myself agreeing with the jazz cognosenti of the times who rejected yet another double album from davis -- albums of scrawls and scetches

but no i say the grooves are there to make it stoner music (like some krautrock) -- anybody else would die of boredom after one listen to any of the electric period albums surely ?
(stoner music, at it's haight back then, davis cashes in whilst apparently bereft of musical ideas, .. they should pay those players the royalties)

And it's pretty ridiculous to call him just a great organizer (almost as ridiculously as raising that tired-ass "commercial" charge about some of the most un-market-friendly music imaginable). He was a great organizer, but he was a great musician too--he doesn't play very much on the fusion stuff, but when he does he almost always takes the music to another level; he often sounds above and apart from what everyone else is doing. That's presence, and he had it in spades. Not to mention the intellectual capacity--one of his great strengths as a musician was as a thinker--to put together free jazz+Stockhausen+Sly+world music+electronics in a way that's still pretty unique. You don't have to come up with a separate definition of fusion to like Miles and dislike Weather Report--just notice that nobody else's fusion sounded like his.

what i'm saying is that i think this way of treating yr group of players IS a new idea, esp. in jazz (haha not necessarily a nice one or — empirically in the ear of the listener — necessarily a successful one...): maybe it produce relationships and responses and play that more orthodox (more professional/more "honest"/more institutionally reactionary-cum-collegiate-cum-industry-standard) set-ups just couldn't??

the "artist-as-ringmaster" idea is much more easily tolerated in other territories, i guess (cinema, theatre, ballet, p-funk)

as to stoner listening, well i wouldn't know, i've never taken drugs in my life george!! i like these records primarily AS sketches and scratches (= deliberately anti-commodification haha) but yes, playing them through end-to-end is sometimes a bit dull -> of course the good thing abt records is that the person who made them isn't there to force to play them the way they're "supposed" to be played

miles always had an antagonistic relationship to his audience also

hitchcock is a great image -- revolving doors of dissatisfied freaked out & kicked out players ? how about martin hannett scaring joy division ? andy warhol ?

is miles as wanker, this m.o. respnonsible for that _tension_ that keeps his material just a liitle bit further out of noddy land ?

which brings us full circle -- why do the JBs quit being told what to do by James Brown only to have george clinton get all that production and writing credit and appear exactly as ringmaster ? were these guys perpetually in need of guidance ?

b.t.w.
the track at the top of this discussion is a live track taken from one of two live double albums, all from one gig, i thought ?

i.e. in this case (and like say Live-Evil) these were examples of the band stretching out live, not rehearsal, not strictly recording, and yet no splicing afterwords

i appreciate this comes before ambient music, chill out, acid jazz, blah blah
but
no edits, no, the opposite, names meaning giant sub-continental plates -- this is more stockhausen's "universal" music, his big event music (eg Proccession, Mantra) -- Miles' names are ostentatious, given that these are roughly speaking long jams -- just because miles calls them something else or sets the parameters, uh, so what ?

face it : only miles davis could have got away with this stuff when he did -- people buy on name only -- oh, _he_ was having a hard time of it with the gear, OK, save his ramblings for his editor (Teo) and the rehab people -- why does this guy get away with all this bullshit ? can you seriousley imagine anyone getting away with _launching_ a worldwide recordings career with the early '70s material ?

But dissing other people's reasons for liking it is weak argument.

except dissing miles davis, which i think is ok, given the variety of opinion on him, that melon-farmer of an autobiography, and what arose here, ie the idea that davis could and was hand picking and using people as part of the compositional process

(i do not mean to diss 'stoners' for instance, though i do think they would be better off steering clear of early '70s miles davis, in that their musical listening time would possibly be less wasted if they were not listening to stuff with the brand name miles davis, in my opinion)

it's relevence, that musics applicability in 2003 is my gripe, as it gets re-packaged for the umpteenth time -- i would like a world where 'jazz' is not automatically miles davis, yet i feel his posthumous pretentiousness still today diverts the jazz dollar away from alive and new and perhaps interesting jazz up and comers and stars
(even if 'jazz star' is oxymoron and against the cooperative approach of so many groups, groups that may have 'leaders', a term that acknowledges the team aspect to jazz, well miles davis is a 'jazz star', and this goes against the grain for me)

jazz has always seemed a bit like an old boys club -- so consumers buy in to the legendary miles davis (eg 4cds devoted to the bitches brew sessions or laswell's swing at a remix) -- the industry is holding other 'jazz' or 'music' back with this stuff

(so who am i dissing ? miles davis and the current marketing strategies of many big monolithic record companies, and Ben, critics have been making the same complaint about the biz stifling innovation for decades now -- the consumers are the victims of a stacked market and stoner or otherwise, i feel they've been mislead)

This is no different from saying teenage girls like bubblegum pop because they're stupid, or that you like free jazz (or whatever it is you like) because you're an elitist snob. It's a way of avoiding engagement with the music and people's response to it, which most of the time can't be reduced to such superficial motivations.

At any rate, most consumers have managed to remain remarkably unduped when it comes to Pangaea. They are not buying Miles' fusion. They are buying Kind of Blue. I wouldn't blame the record industry or Miles for that. The former is in the business of selling people stuff they want, and the latter is dead.

As far as C or D, I played the album a lot years ago, often along with lots of pot. It sounded great, but was usually one step in a line leading to zonk.

tell me, who uses this music, and for what ? (sean for instance has been quite candid in explaining what happened in his case)(and this is a classic/dud thread)

i may come across as an elitist snob, whereas i'd call myself an educated music lover -- i want people to avoid & sidestep stuff like controversial davis, from that period in the '70s when america had it's black smack epidemic, when davis said [he wanted to engage with the kids on the street]

remember, Hancock had several careers in parallel (ie davis group vs. his own stuff) and then of course later came "Rockit" (maybe his fourth seperate aesthetic ?)

got to shake hands with Ned which was cool, and i wish we'd had more time to get to know each other -- it's a blur, what can i say

were you doing some sort of particular dance or behavior ? because i might have footage of you

(incidentally space dust went off at the wunderbar, re-united with xoffels and w/out blues brother -- the best i've seem them & much better than their sept. 11th gig))

see duane and he might help you with vintage interesting jazz material -- force yourself on him

Pretty much everyone else in this thread has supplied a few reasons...

i want people to avoid & sidestep stuff like controversial davis

Most of what Miles did was controversial at the time, including Kind of Blue. And is the fusion stuff so controversial anymore, anyway? Critics have been reevaluating it since Greg Tate got the ball rolling in 1983. It's not as if I think that every electronic note he recorded was genius, but huffing and puffing about how awful it all is is a tad out-of-date...

Things I think a critic of 70s Miles needs to bear in mind if he wants to avoid caricature:

1. You can't just lump all the fusion together. Miles released more music at this time than at any other. And it evolved from album to album very rapidly. It's a long way from the streamlined funk of Silent Way/Jack Johnson to the endpoint blowout of Pangaea, with a number of detours on the way.

2. Fusion was a logical progression from his 60s work, not an abrupt departure or a desperate lunge for money. Listen to the 60s quintet box set. The band becomes more and more about improvising around a theme, rather than playing it; the last CD is practically fusion already. As far back as the 50s, Miles was interested in studio space, rather than live space; a lot of his 50s-early 60s stuff deliberately leaves studio conversation on tracks. And strong rhythm sections were always a feature of his bands.

3. Fusion wasn't really jazz. Accepting this helps sidestep the "decline" narrative. Miles wasn't listening to much jazz from the late 60s on. He was into rock and funk, and he wanted to absorb certain traits from them--rhythmic repetition and amplified volume. But it isn't rock either, because he factored in jazz improv. It's a weird other space that never really coalesced into a genre, even though it got a genre name.

4. For most of the fusion era, Miles wasn't in "decline" either. Actually, we was as excited and energized as at any time in his like. He played less on this music not because he lost his chops (though physical decline did set in after a car accident in I think 73) but because the nature of it didn't call for traditional trumpet playing. He would come in and play a theme at well-timed moments, but more often he was adding textures with the wah-wah or the keyboard.

PS I would call "He Loved Him Madly" something more than great background music, although it does work as that (and of course Brian Eno did say it was one of the first "ambient" pieces etc). I find it very somber, moving and elegiac (day after 9/11, it was one of the only things I could listen to).

--No, Miles probably couldn't have launched his career with the 70s stuff, but that is a completely moot point. No one else launching a career could have gotten and kept those musicians together to play that kind of music or made them play like that, i.e. simultaneously reining in and asking them to try to play beyond what they would play as 'jazz musicians'.

--as far as Miles leading his bands, I'm also not convinced of the James Brown comparison. JB was pretty much about telling his musicians exactly what to play, or at least believing he was. Miles was the opposite...from the impression I get, he would try to get his people to play beyond their standard shit but actually telling them what to play would be stifling their creativity, exactly what he was trying to avoid. It would also invalidate his choice in them...if he had to tell them what to play, then they weren't good enough to play with him. It seems to be a pretty common thing among jazz bandleaders, a reluctance to get instructional about the actual specifics of music...a lot of it is probably due to Miles' influence, but at least dates back to Monk, as plenty of stories prove.

Pangaea is great, everyone kills it but Sonny Fortune is especially great.

You were, um, listening, right?

(that first statement may or may not be true, since he did play on Cantaloupe Island, Kenny Dorham 'Una Mas', etc.)

Actually this doesn't sound to me like what Mark called the Moment Form of Free Improv... there are no zones of intensity in between the grooves, no moments when it "comes together," and the grooves--which aren't particularly groovy here, in fact--are the point, not the build-up: it's meant to be hypnotic, a quality embodied in nothing so much as Michael Henderson's bass, which abandons the funk patterns of his early 70s work with Miles in favor (mostly) of deep, dirge-like rumblings that underpin the music like the tectonic plates the title refers to and move just as slowly...

All of which is in contrast to the legend of Pangaea (And Agharta), which tells of shocking excess and confrontional noise and terminal form... and is, in a sense, "mood music," but then what music isn't "mood music," really? And how is this so different from Cecil Taylor, where (at least to my ears, which have admittedly heard only 3-4 CDs, from Nefertiti to some of the stuff from that 10CD German improv marathon set) behind all the banging and crashing that presumably makes it "difficult listening," you have a similar lack of structure, a similar aesthetic of flow interrupted occasionally by abrupt beginnings and endings, a similar focus on the textures of the instruments and not the notes they play...?

Vinko Globokar shurely?

= grooves/speed much faster & angular(all overloaded too)
= not a cross-over in musical type so much (not jazz-=>rock, more jazz-=>?)
= no boiled down versions exist today of taylor's aesthetic
= even if it is propbably "acid jazz" (if anything is)
= the berlin olympic marathon sessions lack Jimmy Lyons, Andrew Cyrille and Peacock/Silva/Graves type bassists -- the berlin sessions are the acceptable crossover of sorts themselves -- there aren't many bassists, and if there are (Wm Parker) then it's much more of a 'stuck in one key' situation (somewhat comparable to the bass grooves of the davis material)
&& too straight out striking to be 'hypnotic'

i agree both were "new directions in jazz", but one was yes a drone hypno product which davis wanted to use as 'pop music' to engage the kids

God forbid, eh?

I'd like to hear recommendations for more things like "Gondwana" with its combination of an often mellow/chill vibe along with acid guitar action. The closest other Miles seems to be "Wili Part 2" from Dark Magus and maybe some versions of "Ife" and "Maiysha". I guess Sun Ra's Lanquidity is along these lines, but it lacks the acid guitar stuff.

Try Don Cherry's Eternal Rhythm, from 1968. Lots of percussion and gamelan, vibes and piano, so it's plenty spacious and lovely, but Sonny Sharrock's there too, so it erupts at times. Fantastic record.

Check out Masabumi Kikuchi's Wishes/Kochi, which was recorded in 1976 with half of the Dark Magus/Agharta/Pangaea band. It's very much like the mellower side of mid-70s Miles.

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

Wow, that Masabumi Kikuchi even has Miles's discordant organ/synthesizer sound! And, yes, this hits the spot. I'll check out the Don Cherry after this.

I guess there are some other Miles tracks along these lines from the On the Corner boxset: "Peace" (not exactly chill or mellow, but a simmering darkness with some pretty flute on top) and "Mr. Foster" (sort of a melancholy funk). Of course, lots of portions of Agharta and Pangaea have the sort of vibe I'm looking for.

Don't sleep on John McLaughlin's Devotion, wherein McL's fellow Milesman, organist Larry Young helps to keep the roving combustion celestial. (Try for orig. vinyl, since CDs tend to leave out some of it, but grab whatever you find.)

I'm not sure that Don Cherry's Eternal Rhythm is quite what I had in mind (which was admittedly somewhat vague). But I'm glad to hear it now, because the gamelan basis for it is quite something!