Live, electric, and brutal

Just read confirmation that Don Cheadle will play the Prince of Darkness in the forthcoming Miles biopic.. here's what he has to do...

The Nilpferd A-listers- Jazz

A neat stop-motion video accompaniement to Giant Steps, showing what Coltrane's solo looks like in animated sheet music form. (Not sure if there's a sax-helper clip for this one yet, but it looks simple enough on paper.)
Lionel Hampton - Flying Home
Bill Evans - Lucky to be me
John Coltrane - Giant Steps
Ornette Coleman - Free Jazz
Miles Davis - Felon Brun

I've donned my turtle neck sweater to wind up the retrospective Nilpferd A-list series in chin-stroking splendour with the jazz picks. Each of these tracks- besides being very niiiice- has some historical significance.
Flying Home features the famous high energy "honking" Illinois Jacquet tenor sax solo which every subsequent saxophone player in Hampton's band had to learn off by heart, and which also influenced a generation of rock 'n roll sax breaks.
Giant Steps was John Coltrane's own breathtaking stride into the league of legendary tenor saxophonists, and a short-lived attempt to develop an entirely new scalar based language for jazz. But besides that, it also happens to be an incredibly fun piece of music.
Bill Evan's Lucky to be me develops Bernstein's song into an expressive, ambiguous meditation and was one of his first forays into "ambient" improvisation, while Ornette Coleman's double quartet produces a dazzling array of sound in the genre defining Free Jazz, but still manages to sound like the sort of party you can't quite bring yourself to leave. Admittedly many of you might not even have wanted to be dragged along in the first place, but I do recommend setting your expectations to one side and dipping in for a quick listen with an open mind. Comments welcome, though you probably don't need to tell me you think it is chaotic nonsense- I'll just assume that as the default position.
Felon Brun sits on the cusp of Miles Davis' move into rock- Tony Williams is explosive here and produces one of my all-time favourite drum performances. And there's a tie in with my opening post in this series- the self confident face double-exposed on the album cover belongs to Betty Mabry, shortly before she married Miles and became known as Betty Davis.

Revenge of the horn Nr. 3

The third and final part of my Miles Davis trilogy.. many thanks to those of you who've provided such entertaining commentary to the last two instalments, I've enjoyed it a lot. I've stayed in the sixties for number three, in an attempt to give the series a sense of coherence, although it has to be said I'm leaving out a huge body of work both before and after the ten years I've covered here.

I've picked a slower track this time, and one with a particular resonance for Miles Davis: "Mademoiselle Mabry" is named for Betty Mabry, who married Miles in 1968 and whose image was printed on the cover of the album, Filles de Kilimanjaro.
The marriage was short lived, however; following their divorce a year later Betty retained the surname Davis and began her own musical career.

She knew Jimi Hendrix and introduced Miles to rock and R&B, as well as changing his wardrobe, his style, and his musical taste. Excited by the new music he was hearing, and having more or less exhausted his excursions into jazz abstraction after 4 years of relentless exploration, Miles gradually began introducing electric instruments to the lineup.

Davis had been aware of Joe Zawinul's work on Fender Rhodes for the highly successful Cannonball Adderley quintet, as well as admiring Hendrix's band, and wanted to introduce more of a contemporary, R&B sound to his own band. He was also motivated by the desire to attract young, African-American fans, who had been increasingly absent from his concerts in the mid- to late sixties.
Contemporary critics who saw his experimentation with electric instruments as a "sell out" were wide of the mark- Miles was simply seeking new ground to break, having gone as far as he could with acoustic instruments.

"M. Mabry" begins with the rhythm instruments, electric piano, bass and drums repeating a written score three times, while the horns remain silent; this is already quite different to the standard jazz structure, where the horns carry the melody and the rhythm instruments perform a backing role.

Davis begins his solo without any reference to the theme; his playing is enormously expressive and playful, the tone of the horn as varied as a human voice.
Wayne Shorter continues with his characteristic arpeggios, developing an appealing vulnerability as his melodic lines take him into the upper registers of the horn.
Chick Corea, on electric piano, gets a chance to break out of his proscribed role as the piece develops into a long, languid, R&B tinged jam. The backing is sparse, with subtle tempo variations and the recurring three note motif offering enough time and space for the soloists to develop their ideas into extremely lyrical statements.

The music has a wonderfully relaxed feel: the rhythm section is far more constrained and quiet than it was in Freedom Jazz Dance- rather than spontaneous interaction, this piece is more about establishing a mood and making an emotional statement, although there is still room for some very fine, responsive drumming by Tony Williams in the second half of the piece.

Looking back to the two earlier pieces, perhaps "Milestones" and "Freedom Jazz Dance" can be best appreciated in terms of their complexity, balance, and contrast, rather in the sense of a seashell, or a city; they are probably quite difficult to comprehend at first listen.
In comparison, "Mademoiselle Mabry" is more sensual and evocative, like the caress of a lover, or the feel of water on your skin- it leaves a more immediate impression, although repeated listening is also rewarding.

Miles went on to produce the ethereal perfection of "In a silent way", before the band switched tack and charged into the occult, funky rawness of "Bitches Brew". In 1970 his band played the Isle of Wight festival, and the transformation was complete- until shortly before his death, he would never revisit his acoustic period.

Mademoiselle Mabry

As an aside, the theme of Mademoiselle Mabry has a certain affinity with
The Wind Cries Mary, by Jimi Hendrix.

Historical horns Nr. 2

Time for number two in my limited series of three Miles Davis tracks..

Next up is Freedom Jazz Dance, recorded in 1966 for the album Miles Smiles, eight years after Milestones. There was a new, young band behind the trumpeter and it was pushing outwards, experimenting with rock rhythms, starting to take melodies to pieces and explore the resulting fragments, and developing an unparalleled rapport.

Bassist Ron Carter, with his immense technique, took over time-keeping duties, letting mercurial, 20 yr. old drummer Tony Williams off the leash to provide the energy and the impulses, drive the soloists and spark mood changes. Pianist Herbie Hancock and saxophonist Wayne Shorter were continually spurred on by Miles to "play what they didn't know"; both were innovative composers and each was forging their own career separately with Blue Note records, but Miles' strength was always that he could provoke or inspire his band members to produce their best work with him, regardless of their side projects.
The album "Miles Smiles" is a wonderfully spontaneous, joyous recording, with numerous fluffs, false starts, and fooling around, as evidenced by the numerous ad-libs and humorous remarks left on the recording by producer Teo Macero. It also contains some of the most compelling jazz ever recorded.

Freedom Jazz Dance is a reworking of a funky track written by Eddie Harris, but is given a completely different rhythmic workover to make it a lot more abstract. On top of a rolling drum intro the horns play a complex melodic line, ending in a dramatic crescendo. The tentative beginning, sounding like a false start, with Miles testing the waters before Wayne Shorter joins him, only heightens the decisiveness of the crashing chord Hancock plays at the top of the theme.
During the solos Williams switches to a loose, stuttering, ever changing backbeat, while Ron Carter subtley manipulates the pulse with a breathtaking range of phrases. But neither of them is really keeping time, despite Williams' metronomic hi-hat: instead the focus of the pulse is shifted back and forth almost telepathically between drummer, bass player and pianist. After Davis' spare, punchy solo, Wayne Shorter continues, building more coherent chains, sinously turning the melody on its head, followed by Hancock's deconstruction of the piece into almost oriental themes. Contrasting this to "Milestones" the constraints of the earlier piece become apparent; in "Freedom Jazz Dance" everything is much more intimate, while at the same time much looser than on Milestones.
Listen to Tony Williams' drumming during the horn solos; how towards the end of the solos he starts to "complete" phrases the horns hint at, and opens up space for them by tilting the emphasis of the rhythm. Miles never embraced "free" jazz, but within the apparently tight groove there's a looseness, spontaneity and reciprocity in this piece which has seldom been carried out with such virtuousity.

Freedom Jazz Dance

Otherwise, check out the (also brilliant)
Eddie Harris original

Heroic horns Nr. 1

Given this week's topic and Toffeeboy's promised Go-betweens retrospective I'm reminded that I made a rash statement a while ago to post an overview of 3 Miles Davis tracks.

At the time I was trying to quell the natural inclination to go off on a rave about my favourite artist, list 50+ tracks and, in doing so, rapidly end up somewhere no-one's particularly keen to follow. So three it is; I'll post them in instalments.

I'm not claiming these are his three best tracks; however, they are among my favourites and are not so well known, so may offer some perspective for anyone interested in getting into his work.

First up, Milestones, from the eponymous 1958 album. This has the distinction of being the only album I have ever bought in the U.K. incidentally, from Mole Jazz in north London. Milestones is a deceptively simple piece; the theme is stated in two parts, once with all three horns in unison, and once with the trumpet setting a counterpart and "slurring" slightly to establish tension with the two saxophonists; this tension is then released by a return to the more up-beat part of the theme.

The solos are played by Cannonball Adderley, followed by Miles, who darkens the tone, and then John Coltrane on tenor, just starting to develop his "sheets of sound" style. Drummer Philly Joe Jones plays his famous "rimshots" throughout, hitting the rim of the drums to keep a snapping pulse going.

The theme of the piece is quietly carried by the pianist Red Garland, while the mood is set by bassist Paul Chambers, who alternates between "walking" the bass and sitting on a repeated riff during the second part of the theme to create tension.

The solos look forward to the famous "Kind of Blue" album in that the players are starting to create their own melodic or "modal" lines based on the chords of the theme, rather than just "playing around" the individual notes bebop-style, although the harmony remains static and each of the rhythm players has quite a constrained role.

A perfectly balanced piece of music, glowing with freshness, clarity and invention.

Milestones