Miles Davis on Columbia/Legacy

[marcello]

I've been listening to a lot of bootlegs of the '73 - '75 band lately.

Either that music has been given a good listen by the majority of the hip hop / funksters, or Miles was way, way ahead of the curve.

I think it's the later.

I just sent a couple of cdrs to Terreon Gully with a note that I could just hear him as a good fit in those bands.

We're takling about music that's more than 30 years old here!

[JSngry]

I've been listening to a lot of bootlegs of the '73 - '75 band lately.

Either that music has been given a good listen by the majority of the hip hop / funksters, or Miles was way, way ahead of the curve.

I think it's the later.

Truthfully, it's both.

[JSngry]

Well, ok, I doubt that the majority of hip hop / funksters practitioneers have given this music a good listen, but I'm more than a little sure that the majority of the producers have. And that's where the creative action is in that music, with the producers.

Now, if you're talking drum'n bass, beatcraft, remixology, etc., that's a whole 'nother thing. I've got no doubt whatsoever that those cats probably know this shit inside & out. No way they couldn't.

Find a copy of this & tell me that this cat hasn't totally absorbed On The Corner:

And this, I'm finding out, is just the tip of the iceberg.

[Rooster_Ties]

Find a copy of this & tell me that this cat hasn't totally absorbed On The Corner:

And this, I'm finding out, is just the tip of the iceberg.

The "this cat" link got screwed up (at least for me). Here's one, unscrewed...

Grooverider

Edited October 14, 2006 by Rooster_Ties

[JSngry]

two things--

1. all firesign theatre jokes welcome here _______

2. i don't care about 'the sancity' of Miles, let it flow in every direction & see what happens

1. you'd think the $$$ are there for all archival as well as licensing things so, eventually...

2. but isn't Bob Belden semi-officially permanently off the case?

1. not that other's can't do it

2. Tex, with all respect for the argument, it's my feeling the DIRECT influence OTC, etc. is overstated

1. maybe Brandon can pop up but more often than not it's parallel development

2. whitey has been touting all this heavily since mid-'80s at least-- ROCK whitey

1. some of whom moved into techno, etc. beginning in the early-mid '90s, following mostly Af-Am leads

2. it's a v-a-s-t, V-A-S-T field & i myself rank verbal acuity as important as production

1. as do most hardcore New York heads (& fans of the style)

2. this is NOT a universally shared opinion: Southern Soul #1, New York hardcore #1

1. Tex, do you know DJ Premier, RZA, Pete Rock... Autechre, Aphex Twin, Pan Sonic

2. I just question many folks needed Miles to get from there to here

1. even if there are all sortsa interesing 'clues' thanks to Miles & Teo

2. i could be wrong

1. [Allah Mathematics] [drum & jungle] [acid techno] [wombat ambient] [etc]

2. but between Euro avant classical, electronic weirdos, punk, funk, dub, eary hip-hop...

1. Jordan am a hard road to travel but there are lotsa ways to git there

2. tho' surely some have taken inspiration, given respect to OTC, "We Loved Him Madly," etc.

1. re: Vince, not that anyone I know was dying for it but where's that Warner/Rhino box?

2. precisely!

############################################################...c

Points well taken all about how it got there, but I still think that OTC & GUWI form a "crystalization point" for much of what came after, especially in terms of basic pulse. There's Euro-pulse & there's Afro-pulse, & the shit that I'm talking about has Afro-pulse. If anybody else was doing Afro-pulsed ambientloopybrokebeattrippycutnpaste shit like OTC at the time, I'm unaware of it. Correct me if I'm wrong. Dub? Nope, that was that, and this was this.

Would it have happened w/o Miles? Sure, probably, eventually, in some form or another. The currents were already there waiting to cross. The point is that Miles (and Teo) did it. It might well be a matter of indirect influence at this point, but that's life in the cultual vacuum. Indirect influence is still real (quick, no peeking - who invented the internal combustion engine? Hell if I know, but I drive every day anyway.) Indirect is just direct that nobody knows enough to look at.

And yeah, there's been a lot of noise for OTC from downtown for quite a while now. But downtown is downtown. It's relevant to all this the same way that a boat dock is relevant to the life in a lake. Anybody remember the quote from the Tingen book from one of the 70s band members about who their audience for the live gigs was? It wasn't Whitey, and is wasn't rock.

I have a strong suspicion that the reason why contemporaneous history paints the music of OTC & GUWI as not really reaching any audience in particular is that the people writing that history didn't know where to look. And they still don't, other than where they get called to by people who want to call attention to themselves. But who am I going to believe, them or my ears?

[JSngry]

Find a copy of this & tell me that this cat hasn't totally absorbed On The Corner:

And this, I'm finding out, is just the tip of the iceberg.

The "this cat" link got screwed up (at least for me). Here's one, unscrewed...

Grooverider

Sorry about the screwing. Can I buy you a bottle of syrup for the inconvenience?

[medjuck]

1. re: Vince, not that anyone I know was dying for it but where's that Warner/Rhino box?

############################################################...c

I think I read that it was Prince who vetoed the Warners box and Warners didn't want to do a box without the stuff on which The Artist Formerly Known As played.

[JSngry]

All I'm saying is that no matter what anybody knows or doesn't know (or says they do or don't), I don't see how you can trace the stuff backwards w/o eventually hitting up against OTC. And before that, what?

Somebody(s) heard it, and somebody(s) passed it along. The similarities are too many and too frequent to be accidental and/or parallel. Shit just don't work that way. Bottom line for me is this - OTC happened, and then so did everything else in its own sweet time.

Now whether or not who it got passed on to and whether or not they passed it on to etcetcetc knew/knows the source is an interesting academic question, but so is whether or not it's going to rain tomorrow. Tomorrow we'll know, and not before.

So let's look at yesterday's forecasts and ask ourselves this - what would all this sound like if OTC hadn't happened? Your guess is as good or better as mine, but I'm having a hard time seeing (much less hearing) how it would sound like it does today. And that matters as far as it matters.

Which is all I'm saying.

[jazzbo]

1. re: Vince, not that anyone I know was dying for it but where's that Warner/Rhino box?

############################################################...c

I think I read that it was Prince who vetoed the Warners box and Warners didn't want to do a box without the stuff on which The Artist Formerly Known As played.

Four cd version WAS released promotionally and didn't have any Prince material thereon.

Too bad it didn't happen in the marketplace, but we didn't miss TOO much as the contents weren't that thrilling (imo). It would have been interesting to hear the Prince stuff, I'm sure that is out there in bootlegland.

[jazzbo]

OTC and GUWI are da schitte. I remember hearing resonances of these lps in music percolating here and there in the eighties and nineties. Your ears prick up and recognize bits of what you love.

They totally stand the test of time for me. I've lived with these since they came out! I can't imagine life without them!

Here's one more prayer along with Jim's for an OTC box set eventually.

[JSngry]

All I'm saying is that no matter what anybody knows or doesn't know (or says they do or don't), I don't see how you can trace the stuff backwards w/o eventually hitting up against OTC. And before that, what?...this isn't to diminish the achievement of Miles/Teo but as armchair anthropologist, i think it's influence is not as widespread as we might think...

oh i agree but that's a question for Titans & musicologists. i could be wrong but at present my instinctive feeling is OTC dead-ended in its time & the various elements therein kept pushing forward like the river across a shipwreck... meeting up again later in different, sometimes similar sounding forms.

So, what - it came out, nobody heard it in its time, or if they did they just blew it off only to later look back and say, "Oh. Now I get it!" I can go for that a fairly high percentage of the time, but nowhere near 100% Somebody was listenening and getting it. Hell, I even remember listening to K104 ca. 1978 and thinking to myself that I was beginning to hear hints of Miles's shit popping up in the mix. Had a conversation w/Dave Liebman ca. 1979 where he said (complained, actually) that the only cats around paying attention to OTC were the funk bands. Liebman was not necessarily my go-to guy on the State Of Funk Today , but it kinda confirmed what I thought I was already beginning to hear. Now, like I implied earlier, it might have been the producers, not the players, who were hearing it, but the point is that somebody was hearing it and acting on it, even if it was only circuitously.

Now, I also do think that "ahead of its time" applies here as far as direct influence goes, that maybe/probably there's a lot of retro-archeology going on. But I also do think that that's paid off with some direct influences, some clarifying/refining of visions that already existed w/o ever having heard it (for all the BeeBopperz 4ever, think Dexter Gordon being influenced by Trane or Luke finding out that Darth ws his dad). Like I said, I hear too much similarity for it to be accidental. And in my book, that's still "influence", although of a different kind than you are talking about. But something, anything, that changes you is still an influence, and when it's an "ancestor" doing it, hey, attention must be paid.

[JSngry]

i could be wrong but at present my instinctive feeling is OTC dead-ended in its time & the various elements therein kept pushing forward like the river across a shipwreck... meeting up again later in different, sometimes similar sounding forms.

My personal history w/that music suggests otherwise. It took me a good 6-7 years to fully figure out just what the hell was going on with that album, just because the shit was so dense. I first heard it in high school, not too long after its release. A buddy who was a Maynard freak (gotta love the irony there) bought a bootleg 8-track copy at some East Texas gas station and let me have it because he thought it was garbage. Well, the sound quality was pretty muddled (you know how bootleg East Texas gas station 8-tracks can be), so all I could hear was a part of the whole. And even then, it was a part that sounded vaguely familiar, but not really. Hadn't heard anything exactly like that before, other than some implications in JB & Sly. This was 72-73, remember. In my neck of the woods (and in most of America's necks), we hadn't heard Fela yet, and the whole Euro-tronic thing was just getting underway (and didn't sound anything like this anyway, we now know).

But I heard enough of the music to be grabbed by it anyway, and I kept listening in a state of fascinated befuddlement. When I went away to college in 74, I heard OTC on a good stereo (this was the era when college students placed more status on quality sound systems that anything else except the quality of the herb they could score), and it was like, WHOA! Now it starts to make sense. And then, little pieces of info from all over the world started popping up & in that sounded not unfamiliar in the context of OTC, which just pulled me back to it for further digging, more & more as time passed, it seemed. The first thing I heard that really screamed OTC to me was Remain In Light & ...Bush Of Ghosts. I can't prove it statistically, but I'm pretty confident that Eno must have bumped up against OTC at some point. And then the floodgates began to open.

Dude, if you weren't "there", you can't fully imagine how totally freakin' out of left field OTC sounded at the time. Immediate, widespread, & obvious "influence" would have been all but impossible just because it was so unlike anything else. None of the other Miles music from this time was as impenetrable as this one, nothing even came close, not even "Rated X", which had the distinct advantage of the irresistable groinoverridingbrain factor. I'll not argue that the "elements" kept pushing ahead on their own, that makes perfect sense to me both logically & experientially, but I'm not about to concede that OTC itself just landed stillborn and laid there unnoticed for 10 years or so. My experience sugggests otherwise, & I know enough people who've had similar experiences with it to do that. We all kept going back to it & it made more and more sense (or more accurately, we gathered more external context to understand it) as the years passed.

The question are these - would I have been as inclined to pay attention to those unfolding contexts if I hadn't heard OTC first? Maybe, maybe not, and to what degree I have no idea. Would the way I internalized & then acted on those contexts have been the same if I hadn't heard OTC first? Little more surer answer there - most likely not. And finally - is my experience unique to any degree? Most likely not.

Sometimes "influence" is obvious & immediately apparent. But sometimes it's stealth. Something happens and just sort of time-releases itself into the bloodstream w/o anybody really noticing it until the transformative effect has been achieved. With OTC, I definitley think it's the latter.

[jazzbo]

Jim, you and I are nearly the same age within months, and I had a similar experience. I came to On the Corner after digesting Filles, In A Silent, Miles at Fillmore and Bitches in an eleventh grade frenzy after returning from Swaziland and being totally totally weirded out by antyhing that was on the radio or in the cars and livingrooms of the Ohio town I had been jammed squarepeg into round hole.

The Africanness you mention before was the thing that drew me deep in. I kept playing this over and over and over and the onion layers came out and cleansed my senses. Hell, I don't understand it per se still but I learned stuff about this recording. When I picked up an electric guitar a few years later and drums a bit after that I kept trying to get the rythmic layers in there to sort of osmosate into me. It influenced me in a number of ways.

I do feel it had a behind the scenes influence on some of the more popular (than OTC and most jazz) music of the eighties and nineties, I dont really hear/didn't really hear any earlier. Eno has said that GUWI (esp "He Loved Him Madly") was an important influence on his work from '81 on, so I bet OTC was in the mix, YOU KNOW he would have checked it out. Regardless of whether OTC or later recorded and unrecorded 'lectric Miles this stuff had an impact. A bass player named King Wilson I worked with briefly at the close of the eighties was into this, he was looking for Al Foster and Mtume to form his less complex darkgroove stuff he though he wanted to do in '88. I had fun listening and talking to him about this Miles stuff because I didn't see many people into it.

Anyway, my life is richer for OTC and GUWI, I've never quite been the same since I found them in high school then college.

[Quincy]

The first thing I heard that really screamed OTC to me was Remain In Light & ...Bush Of Ghosts. I can't prove it statistically, but I'm pretty confident that Eno must have bumped up against OTC at some point. And then the floodgates began to open.

And as you noted, its kissing cousin Get Up With It.

From an interview in 1980 Eno The Electric Boogaloo:

"One direction is forming that is at an awkward, clumsy early stage. The main influence on it was a Mile Davis track called 'He Loved Him Madly', on 'Get Up With It', which has a very strange atmosphere, as if you are standing in a clearing hearing different instruments at different distances from you. It was mixed with that feeling of distance, and that interests me a great deal."

Click here for loads of Eno interviews & stuff

The one entitled Eno On Miles Davis may not be what you hope for, though it's an interesting point.

Edited October 15, 2006 by Quincy

[rostasi]

I'm in a Springfield VA hotel room confused as shit.

I'm gonna have to think about this some...

[Chuck Nessa]

I'm in a Springfield VA hotel room confused as shit.

I'm gonna have to think about this some...

Not me. I set up blockers 30 years ago.

[Chuck Nessa]

side question: why am i listening to the Prokofiev flute sonata now? hmmmmmm to the c

Transcription of a violin sonata? Galway? Shame.

[Chuck Nessa]

Kool, Clinton, JB, Sly (to some extent) etc nailed this shit. MD was a pale wannabe at the time. He brought a bunch of "sophistication" to the deal but was ultimately lame.

[JSngry]

the other thing is whenever i say Miles wrt studio recordings, sides as issued i mean Miles <----> Teo.

No argument there whatsumever.

[rostasi]

Complete Ligeti piano too (on BIS).

[Chuck Nessa]

Kool, Clinton, JB, Sly (to some extent) etc nailed this shit. MD was a pale wannabe at the time. He brought a bunch of "sophistication" to the deal but was ultimately lame.

This post was half in jest, but nobody came back. Did I hit a nerve?

Just trying to discover everybody's POD.

[JSngry]

No, I figured as much, knowing your genreal lack of enthusiasm for electric Miles.

Besides, all of those cats were into beats/rhythms that were quite danceable in their time. The beat that runs throughout the second side of OTC is one that "nobody" knew how to dance to in 1972. But they sure do now. I hear variants of that beat everywhere I turn.

[Rooster_Ties]

Kool, Clinton, JB, Sly (to some extent) etc nailed this shit. MD was a pale wannabe at the time. He brought a bunch of "sophistication" to the deal but was ultimately lame.

This post was half in jest, but nobody came back. Did I hit a nerve?

Just trying to discover everybody's POD.

Serious question for you, Chuck...

What "post Wayne Shorter" 70's Miles Davis albums do you like??

Any of them??

Edit: And what's your general opinion of the value of Mile's 70's output??

Edited October 17, 2006 by Rooster_Ties

[Chuck Nessa]

Some of Cellar Door and some of Agartha. A few other spots too. My problem is how thin the music became, meaning I have to listen to a bunch of shit to get to stuff I care for. This was not a problem with Miles earlier.

Don't have to do with style but with content.

[Rooster_Ties]

Fair enough. I have that trouble with some 70's Miles myself too.