Did Miles Davis release any bad albums before 1975?

He's definitely released albums in that period I don't listen to so much.

Miles made a ton of records, so if you look, it's pretty easy to find ones that aren't that gripping.

I guess he did raise the bar pretty high.

I don't know how someone can talk shit about his recording of Porgy & Bess.

Woah Big Fun is kind of hit or miss, but not liking Get Up With It?!?! For "He Loved Him Madly" alone that's one of my favorite Miles records.

yeah, it seems like I'm the only one who hasn't fallen for this record yet

I like both of these pretty well, although I don't rank them quite as high as other shit before (Miles Smiles) or after (Jack Johnson)

Only Miles records I actually pull out these days: Miles Smiles, Workin', and Live Around the World (which is underrated as hell).

Generally because I consider tuneless thrash even worse when played on acoustic instruments than when played on electric ones.

the 60s 2nd classic quintet stuff is the miles that I listen to most these days, ESP, Miles Smiles etc, up til the fusion shit.

Mark, I think that's the trick here - superficially, these kinds of musicians are trained not to make "bad" music. Of course, depending on where you're coming from, you can still claim (as my old trumpet professor did in college) that Miles Davis wasn't any good -- and it's true that by the methods of classical trumpet playing, MD didn't have a good tone, articulation, all the shit classical guys want to hear in good performance. I thought he was crazy, but oh well.

A lot of "critiquing" jazz to me comes down to talking about what happened, like a travelogue, in improvs -- they went here, they did this, it seemed like they disagreed on this point, and then half of them went another way, while the others seemed content to tolerate the rest of the trip. I mean, it's not really a "this is good because x" analysis.

does this make them bad? which ones?

"He made some sort of blah albums for Prestige in the '50s."

name one.

"can't say, haven't heard 'em all. there's probably some stinkers somewhere."

how do you know?

"There are a bunch of oop/lesser known albums and live albums from back in the day that are probably unremarkable."

how do you know? which ones?

"I hate the Gil Evans material, except for Sketches Of Spain."

why?

"and i can't stand the gil evans stuff"

why?

"some of the cool stuff is waaaaaay boring."

which stuff?

No it doesn't, which is a point I made earlier, and I don't know which ones off the top

how do you know?"

the law of averages?

how do you know? which ones?

Because he's been lionized to such an extent that I would think if, I don't know, this album or this one were that hot then they would have been reissued/talked about more. Or maybe I just haven't noticed.

I don't even like his trumpet playing that much, so if the band and the tunes aren't on point then I can think of lots of other straight-ahead I'd listen to before obscure or transitional Miles records.

Also thought the same thing as Jordan

second great quintet is my favourite miles. which hasn't always been the case, and maybe won't be forever.

Miles's questionable records happened only when he'd sober up for a couple days, so there aren't many.

i love "tuneless thrash" as a descriptor of the second great quintet, thanks geir

i found this thread bc i was looking to see if there were any good posts about birth of the cool (very few). nate chinen's pfork review today is great

Miles's questionable records happened only when he'd sober up for a couple days, so there aren't many.

― Sassy Boutonnière (ledriver), Wednesday, June 19, 2019 1:35 PM (twenty-two minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

??? at the time of whats widely seen as his creative peak he was clean. His heroin addiction days were the late 40s/ early 50s stuff most ppl are dismissive of (birth of the cool excepted)

??? at the time of whats widely seen as his creative peak he was clean. His heroin addiction days were the late 40s/ early 50s stuff most ppl are dismissive of (birth of the cool excepted)

Miles was a heavy user of one drug or another for almost all his adult life, right up until his death.

he was never fully clean from heroin after kicking it (he says as much in the autobio, which is otherwise very dishonest about his drug use - he claims he wasn't addicted to heroin in the late 70s when he took his hiatus), still an occasional user, but wasn't active in his addiction, using every day from when he kicked it in the early 50s by going cold turkey at his parent's place

he kicked heroin in the early 50s & was known for doing a ton of coke in the late 60s but my understanding from most sources is its kind of impossible to be a successful jazz musician & consistently heavy drug user over the multi decade career he had

so he was often sober or thereabouts while making his classic material

He never stopped drinking and smoking, and was a massive cokehead from the 60s/70s on. He was almost never "clean," and he wasn't subtle about it; listen to the first few seconds of the opening track from "You're Under Arrest":

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2IpaeTAdtac

how is one a casual heroin user lol

you're using a skit on an album as evidence? lol

this is bs romanticizing but ok

xp. lots of people are? kids that take a few percs when partying etc. was a casual opiate user of all kinds in my late 20s

my understanding from most sources is its kind of impossible to be a successful jazz musician & consistently heavy drug user over the multi decade career he had

Ha ha, if anything his career success (and general celebrity) made it easier - at a certain point, people just start handing you drugs. Also, people have all kinds of shit going on that you just don't hear much about - there's a longstanding rumor that most of Cecil Taylor's MacArthur money went straight up his nose, and Brad Mehldau was a junkie for years.

you're using a skit on an album as evidence? lol

I'm just saying he was comfortable joking about this stuff, where a lot of other musicians would have tried to hide it or deny it.

From about 67 onwards he was taking a whole range of opiates to deal with his dodgy hip (partly congenital, partly brought on by his boxing obsession). There was the odd decent album in that period.

to be fair though i mean Miles took an extended break starting in his late forties and even before that when you see the recording dates of a lot of his mid-'70s, it comes from a few years earlier.

There's a lot of evidence that Miles used both coke and to a lesser degree, opiates until his death, and he was almost always fucked up on something.

Ha ha, if anything his career success (and general celebrity) made it easier - at a certain point, people just start handing you drugs. Also, people have all kinds of shit going on that you just don't hear much about - there's a longstanding rumor that most of Cecil Taylor's MacArthur money went straight up his nose, and Brad Mehldau was a junkie for years.

― shared unit of analysis (unperson), Wednesday, June 19, 2019 2:13 PM (seven minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

im aware that there are drug using musicians lol im just saying that the jokey "lol miles only bad records are when he sobered up for a few days lol lol" shit is probably the opposite of the truth & a romanticization of his drug use which yes happened but was almost inversely heavy compared w the quality of the work he was putting out at a given time

There's a lot of evidence that Miles used both coke and to a lesser degree, opiates until his death, and he was almost always fucked up on something.

― Sassy Boutonnière (ledriver), Wednesday, June 19, 2019 2:21 PM (three minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

there's a lot of evidence of this in the 70s & 80s yes

It's a bit of a myth that an artist can't put out high-quality work when under the influence. Many, many artists have done so. It's simply a matter of practice.

i kind of wish the pitchfork review had gone a little deeper into what was meant by 'the cool' & it treats the racial politics sort of glibly ... ppl widely credited bix beiderbecke w being the kind of proto-cool jazz trumpeter, and Lester Young was a direct influence on Miles in this style iirc

xp i think its a bit of a myth that jazz artists are drug fuelled auteurs ... charlie parker (who was a career-long addict) was notoriously remembered for doing shit like nodding off at the stand & similar

i think the truth that most jazz fans i know realize is that a lot of legends were drug-derailed auteurs. i mean when you consider how much music was lost, even by guys who kicked it in the end...

An addiction isn't "fuel", per se. It's an obstacle, but one that can be overcome to a certain limited extent.

You don't get to be an addict if you don't develop a certain number of coping-while-high skills, even if these skills ultimately prove insufficient for yr life in general.

I would never argue that any musician was fueled by drugs (except Aerosmith, whose creative decline is 100% attributable to sobering up). I think perhaps being fucked up causes certain musicians to push that much harder to express what's in them, and that's why you get breakthroughs made under the influence of drugs. Not because the drugs are inspirational, but because like ledriver says, they're obstacles, and sometimes when you leap over an obstacle you find yourself among the stars.

i think the truth that most jazz fans i know realize is that a lot of legends were drug-derailed auteurs

the stories of parker dealing w his addiction are so sad and terrifying

probably worth taking into account the historically specific social and institutional exclusion of jazz musicians, and the kinds of communities + coping mechanisms that engendered when you talk miles and addiction

then you have undiagnosed ptsd + probably other mental health stuff going on, lots of evidence that he was a very angry guy, but also deeply sensitive and under immense pressure to perform at a very high level

all of which to say i think addiction is correlated with a lot of circumstances that made miles who he was and were essential contexts of his creative process — not fuel, not obstacle, that’s too reductive

I saw 'Round Midnight' a few weeks back, and a lot of that film really hits the sadness of a great artist letting himself be stopped by addiction.

As well as the ptsd and trauma and anger that goes into it, yes.

I think what you mean is that addiction wasn't Miles's only obstacle.

what i mean is that it’s more accurate, and imo more interesting, to talk about his addiction as an indeterminate function of a broader constellation of forces and structures within which he pursued his career and created his music

which is another way of saying it’s worth asking why he was an addict in the first place before you start going around proclaiming whether drugs had a beneficial or deleterious effect on his life or career

and in turn i’d say that asking that question opens a lot of unpleasant doors but also leads to lines of inquiry that i think are more humanizing in one’s attempt to understand the life of an artist

nicely said

Brad Mehldau was a junkie for years.

― shared unit of analysis (unperson), Wednesday, June 19, 2019 2:13 PM (three hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Woah ok that is a surprise

agreed xp

By the mid- to late 1990s Mehldau was regarded by some as one of the leading jazz musicians:[1] critic John Fordham described him as "the next great keyboard star of jazz".[24] The appreciation was not universal: some of the pianist's self-penned liner notes and interview comments, which included philosophical musings and complaints about comparisons with pianist Bill Evans, engendered dislike in some, thereby, in critic Nate Chinen's words, "leaving Mehldau with a lingering reputation for pretentiousness and self-indulgence."[9] Many critics did, though, reassess their judgment of his main influences, which previously had often been given as Evans,[13][25] an assessment that was perhaps attributable more to race than to music.[26] Another, non-musical, similarity with Evans that was commented on was Mehldau's struggle with an addiction to heroin during the 1990s, up to 1998.[8][25] Around 1996 he moved to Los Angeles, to try to overcome this drug problem.[27][28] Mehldau later stated that "Once I stopped using heroin, it was like a rush of creativity that had been held in check came out".[29]

xp i think its a bit of a myth that jazz artists are drug fuelled auteurs ... charlie parker (who was a career-long addict) was notoriously remembered for doing shit like nodding off at the stand & similar

― ILX’s bad boy (D-40)

ok but goddamn i love that july 1946 recording of "lover man", i really do

unfortunately being a fucked up human being very often does make for great art

i do also really love the benedetti recordings, made when he was "clean", by which i mean "drunk"

"being a fucked up human being very often does make for great art" is glib imo

https://www.thestranger.com/features/2019/05/08/40131179/miles-davis-doc-birth-of-the-cool-toots-the-horn-of-a-jazz-iconoclast

Miles Davis doc is making the rounds at film fests. It was in Seattle, now showing in DC today and Saturday

It's pretty frustrating that a film on Miles isn't getting the miniseries/multipart treatment. All the complaints about "they left out ____" could easily be solved by a four (or more) hour film.

it is kinda weird that no one's made a huge doc about him. afaik there's just that Isle of Wight/1968 one, right?

There's that -- which for me is far-and-away the best Miles doc -- plus one called The Miles Davis Story, which looks like it originated as a UK tv special. There are brief interesting bits, but it's really thin.

yeah I love that '68, Herbie is the business

'68 doc

i found this thread bc i was looking to see if there were any good posts about birth of the cool

p sure i have one of these in me, i will keep drinking and get back to you maybe

Come on, the best Miles movie is surely that Don Cheadle / Ewan MacGregor buddy-crime-caper thing from a few years ago. Car chases, shoot-outs, what more do you want?

Ugh, I actually watched that thing. My partner, who was vaguely familiar with Miles' career trajectory, asked a few times during the movie, "Wait, did that actually happen?" Depending on the scene, my response was, "No," "Yes, but decades earlier/later," "No, that actually happened to another musician," or "Technically yes, but not remotely like it's being portrayed."

Frustratingly, the direction was solid, and Cheadle's performance was great. I'd rather watch it again than see Whiplash.