Rooster_Ties

Don't think anyone's mentioned Paul Tingen's 2001 book "Miles Beyond: Electric Exporations of Miles Davis, 1967-1991", which I seem to recall also has some on-line updates via his website (been a while since I've last looked), or many some unpublished interviews, and such. Can't vouch for the veracity of all of it, but I seem to recall Tingen's book being BY FAR the best coverage of Miles post-'67 output -- light years deeper than anyone else dared venture into his electric output. Probably if push came to shove, I'd nominate the Szwed and Tingen books as my top-2 Miles books -- though the latter one clearly because of its specialized focus.

John Szwed's "So What: The Life of MIles Davis" (2002) is my go-to Miles biography. It might not be the only Miles book you'll ever need, but it's the best written one I've yet found. Szwed is perhaps better known for his definitive biography of Sun Ra, from a few years earlier (late 90's).

Not sure why, but this pic on this cover for Far Away Lands has always struck me as looking VERY much like it could have been taken yesterday -- or certainly any time in the 80's or 90's (or early 2000's) anyway. NOTHING about it says it's from the 1960's (at least not to me).

I remember it being a great read too ('great' with a lower-case 'g'). Hard to call it just 'good' -- it's a fairly wild ride, though a lot more in the delivery than what's actually being delivered (iirc). But despite the mountain of salt you gotta take with it, I still always generally recommend people read it (or I certainly wouldn't dissuade anyone from reading it). There's bound to be a lot of 'truth' in it, facts be damned.

I've only spent 5-minutes skimming the sample, but this is all both intriguing (seriously) -- but also the level of detail (some would argue "minutia") to which this document delves (with, thankfully(?) documentary evidence, in the way of images of transcripts and photos), is perhaps a bit overwhelming. We've all been hearing for years about Troupe playing loose with the facts, and perpetuating inaccuracies from prior Miles biographies. Personally, I think I must have first started hearing about that close to 20 years ago. I still think Miles' autobiography gives a fair bit of insight into what Miles must have been like, and is probably a fair study of what his "voice" (thought process) sounds like. But the thing is, any particular thing -- fact, detail, story, whatever -- has always had the (strong?) possibility of simply not being accurate (at best), or true at all (at worst). Perhaps, in a perfect world, someone could take all these transcripts and mold them into the sort of thing that Troupe should have done in the first place. Probably never happen, I realize. I've only read Miles' Autobiography twice, iirc -- back around 1992, and again sometime between 2000-2005 (no idea when). The more I've heard about it over the years, the less cause I've ever had to revisit it. EDIT: Take a look at the sample pages (about 15 pages total, by my wild guess), and I'll be curious what people's reactions are. There was a time, 20 years ago, when I would have eaten all this up. Not I'm not sure I have the time, or interest -- or at least not this level of interest.

Saw a screening of "Birth of the Cool" here in DC yesterday (AFI Documentary Film Fest). It's good, but of course left out a few things I would have like to have seen (or seen more of). 2nd quintet doesn't come up until 75 minutes into the whole 115 minute affair (so everything from 1965 and after is crammed into the last 40 minutes. Not too uprising (I think every Miles doc has done that). I could list a number of complaints (mostly having to do with omissions), and things I might have done differently -- but overall I'd still probably give it a 7.5/10 (or maybe slightly begrudgingly an 8/10). There's zero new performance footage of any note, and only a handful of footage that was new to me. LOTS of great photos though, easily 20% of which I'd not only never seen, but were from circumstances/photo-shoots I'd never seen. And there were LOTS of photos (periodically number of bursts of fast-paced editing/montages of stills). Frances Davis gets a fair bit of screen-time (not any more than she deserves), but at least 4 times her comments elicited massive groans from the packed house audience of roughly 200 people that I saw it with. Most of the usual suspects in terms of musicians with on-camera interviews. NO WYNTON, thank god, but Stanley Crouch does show up for 3 very short segments (which were honestly short enough, that he didn't totally piss me off). Santana too, but thankfully less screen-time that he got in the recent Coltrane doc. I was hoping for more, but it still didn't disappoint. It's supposed to get a general release in maybe another month or so (I think), and I'm thinking I may go back and see it again. There was enough profanity that surely the version they show (in the Fall?) on PBS will either have to have 10-12 big bleeps, or else 3-4 minutes of editing. The whole thing felt like it could have used 30 more minutes to cover some lost territory: Miles Smiles was the only 2nd quintet session touched on (and even then, no specific albums were even mentioned), and "Footprints" was the only tune from that era that got any coverage. Then straight into Bitches Brew (so no real Filles... or ...In The Sky coverage) though that music did get played in the background kind of prominently - just no mention of the context). No In a Silent Way, and no Jack Johnson soundtrack (not even in the background music, which kind of surprised me), but On The Corner got a halfway decent (extended) discussion (considering the 'general audience' nature of the doc, it was more than I was expecting). Nothing about Aura, and his post-80's comeback was essentially represented by some early 'come-back' footage (and the story of him coming back), and then they jumped into him switching labels form Columbia to Warner, and Marcus Miller talked about coming up with "Tutu" (the song specifically). No Doo-Bop. But a good dive into his visual art towards the end. I won't say the whole thing felt rushed, but when you consider the sheer volume of material they had to cover, some of the progression seemed overly sped-along more than a few times. Clearly it's easy to nitpick something like this, for a subject a bunch of us are steeped in -- and I'll repeat that I'd still give it a 7.5 (or 8) out of 10, as a general-interest sort of thing. The earliest footage was of Miles playing to scenes projected from Ascenseur pour l'échafaud -- which I guess I vaguely remember having seen before (though I remember seeing stills of him playing in front of the footage, and didn't realize there was actual footage of Miles doing that). I was kind of surprised they **DIDN'T** use any of what I think(?) is the earliest known footage of Miles, of which "Round Midnight" seems to exist almost complete, and is with a larger "Gil Evans Orchestra"-size group. There was some brief footage of him setting up before an actual broadcast of some sort, which might(?) have been related to this same footage (it's been so long since I've seen it, I can't remember what Miles was wearing, but the time-frame looked right), but no actual performance footage. http://www.plosin.com/milesahead/Sessions.aspx?s=571218 Correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't this the earliest known performance footage of Miles? - this German thing from 1957 (which I mis-remembered as being French). I'll be interested in hearing other people's impressions of this new documentary. I think they did well my Miles, but it still fell slightly short of being 'superb'. They didn't sugarcoat his treatment of women, nor his drug usage -- and I thought the coverage there was appropriate (neither topic was given short shrift. but they didn't overemphasis it to the detriment of covering other things either). There were about 4-5 friends of his, some going back to his East St. Louis days, and some who still new him in his later years. One tiny detail that was nice to hear was that the location of his father's farm (outside of East St. Louis) was south of Belleville, IL -- in (near) the tiny village of Millstadt, IL (population 4,000 currently) -- which is where my family occasionally went for fish fries when I was growing up (elsewhere in the town, NOT at Miles' father's farm - clearly). Both my parents grew up in East St. Louis (and were white), and my father and Miles were born about 1 year apart (almost to the day), and both Miles' father and my father's father were dentists in East St. Louis. But their paths likely never crossed (not even the tiniest bit, probably), given the color-divide.

Ah, well THAT I definitely know. My father was a mechanical engineer (who went to college back in the mid-to-late 40's), and he even taught me how to use one back when I was in junior high (early 80's) I can probably still do rudimentary multiplication on one, if you give me 10 minutes to play around with it until I remember the process (but I was half-lost doing division back when I was in high-school, despite my dad's best efforts to teach me). In fact, I still have both his slide rules to this day, here with me in DC. I'd rank there somewhere between simply nifty, and something I'll "cherish" (not sure which word bisects those two extremes on the scale of 'likability').

I'm 50, and have to confess I have no real specific idea what 'telex' refers to. Not a term I think I've ever heard before -- or if so, not for 20-30 years (long enough a to have completely forgotten about it). I did work on-air at a small-town commercial AM-FM pair of sister stations back in college (circa 1989-92), and they had an AP wire machine, so I'm guessing(?) it must be something like that maybe?

I never bought the RVG with the upgraded sound (the one without the "live" tracks). I'd much rather have it all on one CD, and the SQ upgrade wasn't all that critical to me (and I didn't want to have to have two CD's, with the studio-material duplicated). But since this new version seems to be the best of both/all worlds, and new liners, I'm in.

Answering my own question about the liners, this review (which is reasonably informative, given that it's Pitchfork), mentions expanded liners, and a bit about the sonic upgrade -- primarily to the studio material. Sounds like this might well actually sound better (maybe), and in any case, the new liners would be enough for me to get it on CD. https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/miles-davis-the-complete-birth-of-the-cool/ So then, I'm in, for this new reissue on CD.

I never really connected with Decoy either. I've never been too negative about 80's Miles, 'cept to say that the earlier in the 80's, the less interesting I generally found it. I know I've heard all of it, but I don't think I ever actually owned copies of Man With The Horn, We Want Miles, or Star People (though I might have had a cassette dub of We Want Miles at some point). I did own a real copy of Decoy (back in college, circa 1990) and also You're Under Arrest, but I only found the later one worth keeping (though later I finally got rid of everything but Aura. I also had about 15-18 hours of various "live" Miles VHS tapes of broadcast concerts from every year in the 80's -- tons of stuff I bought for like $8-$10 per videotape from an ad in the back of Goldmine, iirc. More damn versions of "Human Nature" and "Time After Time" than I have fingers and toes. Had about 10(?) hours of pre-80's Miles on VHS too -- 3rd, 4th, 7th generation dubs. Man, was that ever cool to have back then when NOBODY else had that stuff (nobody I knew, in any case), before you could stream all of it at the press of a button on your phone.

Just listened to the sample track again (and more closely than last time) - Yeah, it's not half-bad. Absent Miles, of course, count me out. But I think I like it better than half of Miles early-80's Columbia (pre-Tutu) output. The Man with the Horn, Star People, and even Decoy never did all that much for me. I remember sort of liking You're Under Arrest a little better, but not tons.

I remember thinking Amandla was the stronger album overall (over Tutu). But nothing on Amandla was quite as strong as the individual song "Tutu", which was probably the single strongest track Miles did in all of the 80's/90's.

What are her main reasons for opposition? - if you don't mind me asking. My dad was kind of hesitant (more than a little, actually), but after the kind of 'out-of-the-blue' blackout and fall he had -- it was a really was a huge wake-up call for him that he really needed NOT to be living all by himself, without anyone who wasn't also in their late 80's or 90's able to check on him. I don't know that he's exactly thrilled about leaving the only house he's ever lived in (his entire life, save for college and a couple years in the army). But at 92, he's ready not to have to be responsible for a fairly large house and large property, which is not getting any easier to take care of (for anyone over 80, let alone 92). The other real wake-up call for him was that (at least for 6-8 weeks), he wasn't able to drive (and none of us were sure if he'd ever drive again). It was a HUGE pain in the ass for him to have to rely on other people to help him get to the grocery store, and get to appointments, etc. And he HATED having to rely on so many other people, and so frequently too. My dad can be pretty darn set in his ways, and getting him to budge on something he's decided on is often like moving a mountain. But he's been surprisingly willing to make this move, perhaps because it didn't have to happen overnight (he's not moving until September, is the current plan).

This is disc I've thought about picking up a couple dozen times, but just never have. Probable will, next time I see it used somewhere (or at Dusty Groove, if I'm ordering other stuff).

Just ordered five (5) CD copies from Mosaic -- for a combined DC and KC contingent -- only $8 shipping total (vs. $6 for just one copy). Only four copies are actually spoken for (the 5th copy didn't bump the order up into the next level of shipping, so I thought I'd get 1 extra). So if anyone else in DC, KC, or STL wants a copy (and to save $4 on shipping), lemme know.

Four (4) copies just ordered for a combined DC and KC contingent. Really looking forward to this one!

I gots not NO problem with that. Not the kind of thing I seek out, but that didn't bother me a bit. In fact, more than a little it kind of reminds me of Joe Henderson effectively 'remixing' himself, in the way he remade "Power To The People" in 1973 (below) -- where his original 'straighter' version of "PTTP" was from 1969).

AN UPDATE... My Dad is doing really well, almost back 100% really. He hasn't really had any need to use the wheeled walker we bought for him, and certainly not the wheelchair either. He's had half a dozen tests done since the initial fall, and they can't really find anything especially definitive. And although we'll never know for sure, lots of people have suggested that there's as good a chance as any that it was DEHYDRATION that caused his initial blackout back in mid-March. For one thing, he was barely drinking more than 24 oz of liquids per day (sometimes closer to 30 oz), but almost never more than that... ...when everyone has been saying he really needs to be drinking more like 50-64oz of fluids per day. He had ALSO had the flu about 5 days before, and that had really taken it out of him (and surely some sudden dehydration there). ANYWAY, the good news is that his GP, and heart-doctor, and neurologist have all cleared him to go back to driving again (which he's been doing for about 3 weeks now). He's NOT driving on highways any more (or only very rarely, and never all the way over to St. Louis). All this has been a big wake-up call, certainly, and -- very long story, short -- *in September* he will be moving into the retirement community I was talking to you all about back in early April. My wife and I spend a whole week with him in late May, and we went around to 7-8 different retirement communities (and a couple lower-end "assisted living" places too). And in the end, the best place for what he wants in terms of location, and amenities, is the same place where his mother went (my grandmother), back about 23 years ago, when she was 99 years old. It's not fancy, but he's going to be getting a rather large 1-bedroom, 2(!)-bathroom apartment that's ~600 square feet (almost the same size as where my wife I and live here in DC). It's actually two 1-room efficiencies right next to each other, where they opened up a new doorway between the two units. Which means that my wife and I can still stay with him when we come visit (hide-a-bed sofa in his living room). And if I have to do some extended visits (which seems probable at some point longer down the road), I'll be able to be right there with him the entire time. Tons of space (relatively speaking), and only $50 more per month than their 450 sq-ft units. My wife and I will be there for about 10 days around the 4th of July, assessing what he wants to take with him, and doing some initial packing. Then I'll be back another week sometime in August (just me this time, not my wife), doing some more serious packing. And then he'll move in mid-to-late September. I can go more into our plans for how to sell the house, and deal with all the contents in another post -- but the news there is mostly really GOOD -- and a much longer story. But overall, everything's going well. My Dad is getting more repetitious in telling me stuff, and it's clear that if we weren't moving him soon, that within 1-2 more years it would be much more of a necessity. So years from now, I'm sure we'll look at this fall he had back in March as a big (and really good) wake-up call.

I at least half-concur with that. When I moved to DC 8 years ago, and had to get rid of half my CD's -- 90% of my post-70's Miles CD's didn't survive the move. I think(?) the only thing I kept was Aura, and maybe Miles & Quincy (not sure about that one). As much as I dug and still mostly dig Tutu and Amandla, I just couldn't keep so damn much stuff (because of space, having moved into a 630 sq-ft 1BR apartment, for my wife and me). I think I went from like 7,500 CD's, down to 3,500 (or something like that). I have every Miles Columbia metal-spine box, and every "bootleg series" and 20 other one-off CD's -- so I figured something had to go (yes, even Miles) -- and it was practically all of Miles 80's/90's output that done went. As often as I listened to it, I can stream it off YouTube if I really ever wanted to listen to those tunes again. I will gladly listen to this new Rubberband disc, via streaming. And if I find a cheap promo-CD of it sometime, I'll be temped. But I can't imagine keeping it more than 5-10 years -- at some point, it'll have to go to.

True, but over the weekend I realized I've listened to Ancient Dynasty (with and because of Joe Henderson) probably 5x (maybe 10x?) as many times as Keyed In (trio only). Both are really damn good, and I'd pay a bit of a premium for either one (or both) on CD -- though neither have ever been issued on CD.

I'm not wildly in disagreement with either of you. I'm not so much "moved" by the obscure Guilda date I started this whole thread about, as I am genuinely intrigued by it (in a way that makes it interesting and almost 'fun' to listen to). Guilda hasn't mastered (or at least hasn't embraced) the kind of language most jazz pianist would have been playing in 1964. In that respect, (I'm supposing) he never had to "un-learn" a lot of clichéd licks found in a lot of other pianists playing around that time. AND YET, his technique and 'touch' are really quite nice. It's like he's VERY fluent in how to handle the instrument, but he's NOT speaking his native language with it -- so he doesn't know what NOT to do, nor does he do too much of what anyone else would have done. There's a sort of very skilled but naïve authenticity about the whole thing that I kind of like.

My favorite John Patton album, and the only other CD version of it is split across two CD's (on the Mosaic).

I gave this same (obscure) Friedrich Gilda LP a couple spins over the weekend, and was reminded again what a delightful little recording this is. Not to make it out to be substantially more than it is, but it's definitely got a different sensibility about it. And I followed it up by spinning Joanne Brackeen's 1979 trio album Keyed In (never on CD, far as I know) -- which also is a bit outside the norm too, kind of in a similarly ambitious sort of way (though by 1979, such piano-trio albums were a little more the norm). My wife really enjoyed both too, I'll add.

I wish I had about 20-30 copies of both Charles Tolliver Selects -- just to give to well-deserving people over the next 20 years. Cuz it's a crime his core albums (CD's) are expensive as heck, and hard to come by. I've got both, but I can think of 3-4 people I'd gift copies to, if I had the chance.