Rather than derail our daily albums thread with discussion, I’m bringing the Miles stuff here.
Miles Davis is my favorite jazz artist. I started exploring jazz in the late 1990s and quickly found, to my surprise, that it was my cup of tea
way more than I expected it to be. Considering I gravitate towards noisy rock and sprawling ambiance, that was a bit surprising.
Though I enjoy tons of artists and have read several biographies and watch documentaries and have many dozens of jazz records in my library and all that, I don’t know if I can call myself a true aficionado – as with so many things, I appear knowledgeable to people who don’t know their stuff, but am still a rookie to people who are true experts – but I do have a great love for the genre in all its permutations. Jazz is a regular part of my listening (as my album lists can attest to).
That is perhaps why I’m such a big Miles Davis fans. He has not only dabbled in just about every type of jazz movement from hard bop forward, he flat-out
pioneered several of them himself. His career was one of constant reinvention.
The guy was a fantastic bop trumpeter with Charlie Parker; invented so-called “cool jazz” in the early 1950s (actually, in 1949) and then quickly moved on from it; broke the lid open on modal jazz with his first great quintet (in my estimation the greatest jazz band ever assembled, a band which gave the equally amazing John Coltrane his career); had a series of lush and theatrical collaborations with Gil Evans (“Sketches of Spain” is one of the most beautiful albums ever recorded); in the early to mid 1960s had a second great quintet that took an angular, off-centered approach to the modal jazz he had already pioneered, even incorporating aspects of rock into their later works; set the standard for jazz fusion with the wonderfully ambient “In A Silent Way” and the densely layered “Bitches Brew”; explored a free-roaming, sometimes abrasive blend of rock, jazz, funk, and world music in the 1970s; and in his final years in the 1980s, toyed around with fusions of electro-pop, hip hop, and post-punk in jazz form.
The man was amazing.
I think it’s the restless nature of his work that most draws me to it. I’m easily bored. I need a constant flow of new stimuli in my entertainment or I go a bit crazy. The same holds true for my own artistic expression. If I’m not constantly doing something new, working on something, trying to create something I hadn’t created before, I begin to go a bit stir crazy.
So the wildly veering nature of his career appeals to me.
(And no, not for a MOMENT am I comparing myself to Miles Davis. Jesus fuck, no! Just saying his explorations fit well with what I like.)
For the last couple of months I’ve been doing a marathon through all of (or most of) his studio albums, usually 2-3 a day.
He recorded a LOT of albums, between 50 to 80 or so studio albums depending on what you define as an “album.” (His record labels released a load of compilation records that, while not technically true albums that Miles himself intended to release, brought together unreleased songs that made them unique collections of music in their own right.
Circle in the Round, for example, which includes the sprawling, 26-minute title track, is a work of art itself, “true” album or not.)
Which means even now, as I listen to his mid 1970s work, I have a long way to go.
Skipped a good bit of his early to mid 1950s work during this marathon, too, about five or six collections that I didn’t have when I started.
Anyway, when I started this post I only intended to talk about revisiting the 1970s work that I had previously found unappealing (see
this post), but I got off on a tangent, so I’ll probably make a few posts here and there about various Miles stuff, then I’ll appropriate it all for a blog post or something.
Not that you care.
So yeah, this is the Miles Davis thread.