Miles Davis - Aura: Classic or Dud?

I probably haven't listened to Aura for best part of 20 years (i.e. pretty much since it came out) and I probably should again to reappraise it however my abiding memory is that it's just a lot of aimless pointless self-indulgent noodling.

The concept IIRC was that it was supposed to be about the colours in Miles' aura (although, since it includes all the colours of the rainbow anyway, I'm inclined to believe that's a load of old baloney) using a sequence of notes that were supposedly somehow derived from the letters M,I,L,E,S,D,A,V,I, and, (perhaps predictably) S....

I wonder if people have different standards for jazz/avant/'art' artists and for pop artists when it comes to production. I've never seen anyone criticize Prince or U2 or Kate Bush for using cheesy 80s production but it seems that jazz or improv artists are always attacked for going that way even if they don't go as far. (I've seen similar criticisms on this board for Sharrock's Highlife and Metheny's Zero Tolerance for Silence). I usually find it more interesting and less potentially off-putting when this type of glossy overproduction is used in an improv or electronic art music context, I think partly because there tends to be more exploration of the sonic possibilities offered by that production aesthetic. Maybe even more also because it seems like the shiny pop aesthetic is being subverted. Maybe also just because it helps offer a sort of pop reference point as a way in.

I think that's why I find it MORE unappealing in jazz than 80s pop. Some possibilities are best left unexplored.

With the Miles reissue and ECM topics seeing some revival action lately, I thought it would be interesting to see if there was any big reevaluation of this one.

For me, I normally don't think 80s Miles is my bag at all, but I've held on to my CD of Aura. I don't play it hardly ever, but whenever I do go back to it, I always really enjoy it - especially the parts that I would refer to as "dark ambient." Very soundtracky and really good.

However, it is a very long album. Perhaps that's why I don't listen to it very often; once every year or so is enough, I suppose.

Thoughts?

I'm fond of it -- one of my nighttime writing albums.

Listening to this for the first time. Some of the textures are still pretty brutal (although I guess sounding like a Sega Genesis game soundtrack has its own appeal), but after enough years of vaporwave and internet-era ambient, a lot of it has come around to sounding contemporary again, lol. And Miles sounds great.

'Red' fittingly sounds like it could be an '80s King Crimson track.

I wrote about it a few years ago.

Davis’s playing in 1984 and 1985 was very different from what it had been in previous eras. He’d passed through the bebop of the 1940s and the dispassionate, cool virtuosity of the 1950s; returned to the blues in the early 1960s and exploded song form in the second half of that decade. Then, when he began to surround himself with electric instruments in 1969, his style became fiercer, stabbing through a wall of organs and guitars; this style lasted until his disappearance in 1975. When he returned in the ’80s, his music was built on funk and rock grooves, and his phrases were appropriately sparse, anchored in the blues but also prone to digression. His solos mirrored his onstage behavior: wandering around, gaze fixed on the floor. This is the zone he’s in on Aura. He drifts in and out, seeming unmoored at times, muted but pushing hard, playing long phrases that roll out like a ball of yarn tossed down a hallway. He’s listening to what the ensemble is doing, but feels no obligation to collaborate with them. They’re not his band; they’re the scenery he’s performing in front of.

It’s not hard for me to understand why critics responded favorably to Aura when it was released. It was a Big Gesture, a piece written to honor Davis that he’d chosen to record, in the process proving that he could be flattered, that he cared what other people thought. And if you didn’t like the slick, poppy jazz-funk he was recording on albums like Decoy and You’re Under Arrest, never mind the ice cold cybernetic exercises of Tutu, this almost-big-band suite probably felt like a “return to real music.” But to me, it’s a mere curiosity. Compositionally it’s just interesting enough to keep me listening while it’s on, but the various elements — jazz-funk, semi-classical orchestration, quiet ballad sections — never add up to a single big thing. It feels like a collection of ideas stapled together and given a collective title. And I’ll listen to Decoy and You’re Under Arrest and Tutu and Amandla a hundred more times before I’ll come back to Aura.

You're right, it does seem surprising that he agreed to it. Btw what got me to listen was this Guardian interview (from after it was recorded but before it came out) that popped up on social media: https://www.theguardian.com/music/2012/nov/06/miles-davis-interview-rocks-backpages

Weird url, lol

I appreciated Aura more when I hadn't heard the other '80s work. I play Star People most these days.

I don't think of Aura as being especially extreme aesthetically, for this era of miles ... almost a bit conservative

certainly Tutu (songs like "Splatch") and Amandla feel more radical