ESP

I had to listen to some early Miles Davis this morning. By 1957 when Miles Davis started working with Gil Evans on an album called Miles Ahead for Columbia Records, he’d already had an amazing career working with some of the best artists in the business including Charlie Parker and Lester Young—the two men most responsible for shaping modern jazz and taking it places that Louis Armstrong never envisioned. The Miles Ahead sessions included an army of talent with Johnny Carisi, Bernie Glow, Taft Jordan, Louis Mucci, Ernie Royal, Miles Davis, Joe Bennett, Jimmy Cleveland, Frank Rehak, Tom Mitchell, Jim Buffington, Tony Miranda, Willie Ruff, Bill Barber, Edwin Caine, Sid Cooper, Romeo Penque, Danny Bank, Lee Konitz, Paul Chambers, Art Taylor, and of course Evans as arranger and conductor. All of this is old news, but I still like to think of this moment in the history of the music because Davis was set to embark on an excursion as important as the discovery of flight.

The Miles in the Sky sessions though are some of my favorites with Wayne Shorter (ts) Herbie Hancock (p), George Benson (el-g -3), Ron Carter (b), and Tony Williams (d) recorded at Columbia Studios in New York in 1968. I like this line-up even better than the John Coltrane mix, because Miles seems to be at his reflective best. It may be that Coltrane put him on the edge and Shorter, Hancock, Carter, and Williams allowed Miles to dig deeper into introspection because there isn’t the sense there that Davis may be overshadowed by the talent in his own band, which seemed to be the case when John Coltrane stepped up to the mic.

When I think of the Miles Davis records, tapes, and Cds I’ve owned over the years, like Kind of Blue, Bitches Brew, On the Corner, Birth of the Cool, ESP, Workin’, Sorcerer, Nefertiti, Miles in the Sky, In a Silent Way and others I’m still in awe of his output and ability to break with tradition and redefine the zeitgeist—-owning it entirely, and then throwing it back at the world and inventing new genres with such laconic gestures.

Later in his career Miles still cut groundbreaking tunes with the likes of Keith Jarrett, Herbie Hancock, John McLaughlin, and Chick Corea but it started to become obvious that R&B and rock music had cast a spell on Davis that affected his entire conception of the music. He became much more interested in jamming and much less interested in breaking new ground on a technical level. This later music sold records but didn’t satisfy many of the critics, who rightly saw that some of Davis’s new soupy concoctions were barely jazz. For whatever reason, Davis never really grasped the burgeoning free jazz phenomenon and dove straight into funk, which ironically downplayed his abilities and left a bad taste in the mouths of many listeners that lingers even still. Davis also became such a cultural icon and scenester that this aspect of his personality obscured some of his earlier musical achievements. When taken in its entirety though, it’s easy to see that the Miles Davis discography is an amazing EKG of the Twentieth Century.

Also, an interesting read: Charlie Haden on Mingus, Miles, and what jazz means.