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Miles Davis: Albums
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After recording On the Corner, Davis put together a new band, with only Michael Henderson, Carlos Garnett and percussionist Mtume returning from the previous band. It included guitarist Reggie Lucas, tabla player Badal Roy, sitarist Khalil Balakrishna and drummer Al Foster. It was unusual in that none of the sidemen were major jazz instrumentalists; as a result, the music emphasized rhythmic density and shifting textures instead of individual solos. This group, which recorded in the Philharmonic Hall for the album In Concert (1972), was unsatisfactory to Davis. Through the first half of 1973, he dropped the tabla and sitar, took over keyboard duties, and added guitarist Pete Cosey. The Davis/Cosey/Lucas/Henderson/Mtume/Foster ensemble would remain virtually intact over the next two years.
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Beginning in 1975 Davis experienced a period of inactivity and reclusiveness because of injuries suffered in an automobile accident and the subsequent onset of several illnesses. He returned to performing fusion jazz in 1980, playing with musicians such as guitarist John Scofield, bassists Darryl Jones and Marcus Miller, and saxophonists Bill Evans (not the pianist of the same name) and Branford Marsalis. Albums from this final period include The Man with the Horn (1981); Decoy (1983); and You're Under Arrest (1985), which contains recordings of the popular songs “Human Nature” by singer Michael Jackson and “Time After Time” by singer Cyndi Lauper. In 1990 Davis performed a leading role as a jazz musician in the Australian motion picture Dingo (1991). His album Doo-Bop, released the year after his death, was one of the first to fuse jazz with the hip-hop and rap music styles.
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By 1957 Davis had assembled a seminal sextet featuring a spectacular line-up, including Coltrane, Chambers, Bill Evans, Jimmy Cobb and Cannonball Adderley. Two further landmark albums during this fertile period (1957-1959), were the aptly titled Milestones, followed in 1959 by the utterly fabulous Kind Of Blue. The latter album is cited by most critics as the finest in jazz history. More than 40 years later all his albums are still available, and form an essential part of any jazz record collection, but Kind Of Blue is at the top of the list. "So What', the opening track, has been covered by dozens of artists, with recent offerings from guitarist Ronny Jordan, Larry Carlton, saxophonist Candy Dulfer and reggae star Smiley Culture, who added his own lyrics and performed it in the movie Absolute Beginners. Ian Carr, Davis" leading biographer, perceptively stated of Kind Of Blue in 1982: "The more it is listened to, the more it reveals new delights and fresh depths". Davis was finding that as Coltrane grew as a musician their egos would clash.
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In 1949 and 1950, Davis made a series of recordings with a nine-person group that appeared on the album The Birth of the Cool (1950). The terms cool and cool jazz referred to a slower, more subdued style of bebop. By the mid-1950s Davis had developed one of the most distinctive styles in all of jazz. Unlike Gillespie, the first great bebop trumpeter, Davis preferred simple, lyrical melodies to speedy, flashy ones. Using delicate pitch-bending (a slight lowering or raising of a note) and a light vibrato (a gentle and regular wavering of pitch), he created a beautiful and expressive style. Often he used the harmon mute (a metal mute) to get a pinched, quiet sound.
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With his next album, Bitches Brew, Davis turned more overtly to a jazz-rock style. Though certainly not conventional rock music, Davis' electrified sound attracted a young, non-jazz audience while putting off traditional jazz fans. Bitches Brew, released in March 1970, reached the pop Top 40 and became Davis' first album to be certified gold. It ... earned a Grammy nomination for Best Instrumental Arrangement and won the Grammy for large-group jazz performance. He followed it with such similar efforts as Miles Davis at Fillmore East (1971 Grammy nomination for Best Jazz Performance by a Group), A Tribute to Jack Johnson, Live-Evil, On the Corner, and In Concert, all of which reached the pop charts. Meanwhile, Davis' former sidemen became his disciples in a series of fusion groups: Corea formed Return to Forever, Shorter and Zawinul led Weather Report, and McLaughlin and former Davis drummer Billy Cobham organized the Mahavishu Orchestra.
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Miles continued to play and continued to record. His music was starting to bewilder the buying public, who had been confronted with a stream of 2-LP sets that didn’t conform to their expectations of what Miles Davis should be doing (namely, playing lyrical trumpet over a jazz background). Some of his sessions, like the ones which eventually came out in 1974 on Big Fun, had to wait for years before being released. Big Fun has 4 side-long pieces : "Great Expectations/Mother Laranja" which is a 27 ½ minute slice of almost prototypical Miles, based on a repeating phrase over a flowing backdrop; "Ife", a long static piece with a repetitive bassline which is really a drag (it sounds more like an experiment in audience tolerance than it does music); "Go Ahead John" which is a small-band jam featuring John McLaughlin on guitar (playing choppy strokes with wah-wah, just like Reggie Lucas & Pete Cosey would go on to do), with some nice soloing over Jack DeJohnette’s busy drumming (which is heavily phased for the sake of funkiness); and "Lonely Fire" which is a bit aimless. The music throughout this album is not Miles’ best, but Teo Macero’s production here is quite creative, and the record ends up being a decent ambient-styled listening experience thanks to the strength of Sides 1 & 3.
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