James Brown - 'Star Time'

My parents were in the restaurant/bar business in Brooklyn, NY.  They had an Irish bar/restaurant called 'Molly Maguire’s Pub' and an Italian restaurant called 'Mario’s Trattoria'.  Neither of my parents were Irish nor for that matter Italian.  I remember my older brother cracking wise, telling my father, "You should open a Chinese joint, and call it: Sum-Dum-Fuk" to which my father replied, "Why would I name a restaurant after you?"

In 1963, when I was sixteen, my parents opened a nightclub called Bentley’s, which attracted a mixed gay/straight African-American crowd.  Mom and Dad weren’t African-American, either.  My father was a mild-mannered WASP, originally from Kennebunk Maine, and my mother was a feisty French woman, who was born in Marseille, and grew up in Québec City, Canada.

One afternoon, I was out with my father, and we stopped by Bentley’s.  Inside there was a long horseshoe shaped bar, an area with tables and a large dance floor, it had lots of lights and speakers hanging from the ceiling.  There was a table on a raised platform at the end of the dance floor, that had audio equipment on it, and the largest speakers I had ever seen on the floor.  The waitstaff were preparing to open, and setting tables. There were noises and aromas coming out of the kitchen.  Standing behind the bar was a six-foot six African-American man, who reminded me a little of Little Richard.  This was the first time I met Blue, who smiled at me and said, "You must be Babs, would you like a coca-cola, my dear?"  I nodded my head and replied, "You must be Blue, the DJ!" At home, I heard stories about what a character Blue was, so his reputation preceded him.  My father went into the kitchen, and Blue said, "Let's play some records" he put on a record, and asked, "Do you dance?" so I started dancing.  He watched me, clapped his hands, laughed and said, "What was that girl, the damn Bunny Hop?  I’m going to call you Babs Bunny!" and did so for the rest of his life.

My father came out of the kitchen with Alton who was Bentley’s manager he was also African-American, and looked like he played middle linebacker for the New York Giants.  Blue introduced me to Alton as Babs Bunny and told me, "Alton’s my roommate".  Later that evening, I told my brother about meeting Blue and Alton. My brother said, "You know what they are, right?" and I said, "Yeah, they’re Gay, so what?" this surprised my brother, and he said, "My little sis is growing up!  They’re a pisser, right?"  My brother was a world-class wise ass, but a very cool one, especially for the time.

Around this time, my parents thought it was time for me to start learning the family business, so most afternoons after school, I went to one of the businesses.  My favorite place was Bentley’s because Blue was there.  In the kitchen I leaned to do food prep, and cook.  In the main room, Blue taught me how to mix drinks, open wine bottles, set up tables and how to use the sound system.  Every afternoon, Blue gave me a dance lesson, while R&B 45s played.  He always yelled, "Let your backbone slip, girl! Let it SLIP!".  We had a dance routine, we did to James Brown’s "Night Train".  Bentley’s was known for its music, which was very much "right now" so every few weeks Blue gave me a pile of 45s he referred to as "over" and "tired".  Blue also taught me to sip cocktails and smoke cigarettes, but that was our secret.

Throughout high school on the weekends, I was waiting tables at Molly Maguire’s Pub and Mario’s Trattoria, which were all along the same subway line, as was Bentley’s which was off limits to me at night.  So one night instead of going home, I dropped by Bentley’s to see what was going on, and to see if all the stories I heard were true.  I could hear the music from a few doors away, and when I went inside the place was going wild.  At the end of the dance floor was Blue spinning records, when he saw me, he waved me towards him.  As I walked toward him, a large hand grabbed my arm, it was Alton, who told me, "You ain't supposed to be here at this time of night, in this neighborhood, Miss Babs!"  Blue said to Alton: "Just one dance."  He picked up his microphone and said, "I’m going to dance this one with my girlfriend, Babs Bunny" which caused everyone to laugh.  Blue played "Night Train", and we did our dance routine.  Afterward, while Alton was escorting me out, to put me in a cab home, a woman said to me, "That was pretty good.....yeah, for a white girl".

When I went away to college, Blue and I wrote letters to each other, and every so often a package of 45s would arrive.  During the summers when I returned to New York, Blue and I would party, only now weed entered the mix along with cocktails, Dexamyl, and cigarettes.  One magical Sunday in the summer of 1968, we dropped acid in Central Park, and on our way to The Metropolitan Museum of Art, we did our Night Train routine by Bethesda fountain to the amusement of the hippies.

In the 70s, Alton and Blue moved to San Francisco, where they opened a Disco. Whenever I hear James Brown, I think of Blue.

Star Time is a 1991 71-track, 4-CD box set by James Brown.  Its contents span most of the length of his career up to the time of its release, starting in 1956 with his first hit record, "Please, Please, Please", and ending with "Unity", his 1984 collaboration with Afrika Bambaataa.  Its title comes from the question Brown's announcer would ask concert audiences, as heard on the album 'Live at the Apollo, "Are you ready for star time?"



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Miles Davis - 'Live in Tokyo 1975'

This is Miles from the same Japanese tour that gave us the ‘Panagaea’ and ‘Agharta’ albums, and was recorded ten days before the concert that appeared on those records, but with different songs.  The music is a dark brew of funk, fusion, and some surprisingly exotic currents, thanks to wonderful work from Sonny Fortune on alto, soprano sax, and flute, working here alongside guitarist Pete Cosey, who provides plenty of the fuzzier, freakier moments of the set, as does keyboardist Reggie Lucas, Al Foster's drumming is wonderful, and Michael Henderson's bass will blow you away.  But as always, Miles is the star once he opens up his horn and steps into the darkness.

Live in Tokyo 1975' comes from a short time before Davis's retirement, at a point when the music was at its funkiest and angriest, when he would slap a wah-wah effect on any instrument in sight and no amount of fuzzy distortion was too much.  This is not recommended for the faint of heart.

This septet was well into the "deep African thing, a deep African-American groove, with a lot of emphasis on drums and rhythm" as Miles later described it, weaving earthy percussion and juiced-up rock into 80 minutes of primordial voodoo trance.  By this point he had the band running as a well-oiled machine, able to direct dynamic arrangements, segues and stop-on-a-dime changes all in the moment.  They spin out one dense churning groove after another, whether trading solos around loose structural frameworks or sometimes getting (again borrowing the Miles' words) "a lot of intricate shit … working off this one chord."  He picks and chooses spots to dart in with a simple trumpet line or the odd stray note, then punches at the organ as if trying to exorcise his osteoarthritis pain by sheer force of sound amid the haze of medication and drugs.

The ghost of Jimi Hendrix is alive and well in the wailing of Pete Cosey and Reggie Lucas, while the drum/percussion team lays down a series of staggered rhythms.  There isn't really a set list so much as a contiguous series of song sketches to explore. "Maiysha" starts out cool and airy before turning into some kind of tropical-themed nightmare; "Ife" skips the modulating bass line of the studio version and explores the more abstract sections instead, blending light flute with menacing organ before giving everyone some free space to blow.

The Tokyo show is a close sibling to those abovementioned albums and ‘Dark Magus’, but of course each one has its own character.  To my ears, ‘Live in Tokyo 1975’ is a little more tight and lean, not quite as off-the-wall crazy as ‘Pangaea’ or as loud and crowded as ‘Dark Magus’, though not terribly far off either, and a most welcomed release for those of us who find this phase endlessly fresh all these decades later. 

Along with Miles’ trumpet and organ are:
Sonny Fortune - alto & soprano sax, flute
Pete Cosey - guitar, synthesizer, kalimba, table percussion
Reggie Lucas - guitar
Michael Henderson - bass
James “Mtume” Heath (aka Foreman) - percussion, rhythm box
Al Foster - drums

CD 1:

1. Prelude & Funk
2. Maiysha
3. Ife

CD 2:

1. Mtume
2. Turnaround Phrase
3. Tune In 5
4. Untitled



For the Freeload, tell us what you were doing in 1975.

Miles Davis - Complete On The Corner Sessions

 

The Complete On The Corner Sessions is a 6CD set includes more than 6 hours of music, and twelve previously unissued tracks. Another five tracks are previously unissued in full. They cover sixteen sessions from 'On the Corner', 'Big Fun', and 'Get Up With It' until Miles' mid-seventies retirement. Miles is joined in these recordings by Chick Corea, Herbie Hancock, John McLaughlin, Jack DeJohnette, Billy Hart, Michael Henderson, and many, many others.

Miles Davis dropped what many people perceive as jazz for good in late 1971, though it's not like he'd been keeping up many appearances for the genre for several years. Though his band would still occasionally play old standards live, his main show in the early 70s was free-ish funk, openly indebted to Sly Stone and James Brown.

Since its 72 release, 'On the Corner' has attained a level of infamy outmatching any of Davis' other records, though not really for the right reasons. Downbeat's equally infamous calling-out of its tunes as "repetitious boredom" unfortunately summed up the feeling of many folks who would have preferred to only remember

Davis' music from the 50s and 60s. However, rock and experimental music fans weren't quite so dismissive.Teo Macero's (left) editing/splicing/nursing of the myriad sessions that comprised the record were no less significant to its sound than Davis' pieces, and considering how records are made today, perhaps more so. Still, it's the avant-funk and druggy ambience that lingers longest.

CD1 features unedited takes of On the Corner, "One and One", and "Helen Butte/Mr. Freedom X", all of which would appear in messed-with form on the 1972 LP. And though On the Corner's edits are a considerable part of its magic, the surprising thing with these tracks is how well they work as just jams (greatly assisted by the fact that in most cases, their signature hooks are intact, such as the hi-hat pulse in 'On the Corner', or the classic sing-song melody in "Helen Butte"). "Jabali" is a previously unissued track, featuring a slow, lurching bassline from Michael Henderson, and gradually picks up steam while simultaneously becoming more psychedelic.

CD2 begins with "Ife" which was originally issued on 'Big Fun', and adds Paul
Buckmaster on electric cello. Buckmaster's contribution to Davis' music at that time was considerable, especially via turning Miles onto Karlheinz Stockhausen, whose use of recorded and electric sound had a big impact on the recording of On the Corner. "Chieftan" is a previously unissued, agitated vamp, featuring an insistent hi-hat + rim shot beat, augmented with tabla and sitar. "Turnaround" and "U-Turnaround" are also new tracks, but whose slow, heavy grooves would have sounded very at home on, say, 'Live-Evil' or 'Dark Magus'. "Rated X" (later on 'Get Up With It') is badass with some seriously distorted production.

CD3 begins with another track from 'Get Up With It', called "Billy Preston", which Billy does not appear on featuring Billy Preston, and several unissued tracks: the somewhat raucous, wah-wah guitar-powered "The Hen", two massive mixes of "Big Fun/Holly-wuud", the skeletal, relatively restrained "Peace", and the funk dirge "Mr. Foster", which takes the basic groove of "Big Fun", and stretches it across 15 minutes of mournful vamping and uncharacteristically solemn solos from Dave Liebman and Miles.

 

CD4 contains the two epic-length tracks from 'Get Up With It', "Calypso Frelimo" and the Duke Ellington tribute, "He Loved Him Madly". The first piece begins as reverb-drenched, frantic funk, and moves into molasses-paced death groove though still laced with reverb, as if recorded in a subway tunnel.

CD5 starts off with "Maiysha", which is also from 'Get Up With It', next is "Mtume", that begins with-- you guessed it-- a conga solo by Davis'

permanent conga player Mtume, and soon turns into an up-tempo Afro-Cuban groove with cool triple-guitar wah-ing from Lucas, Cosey and Dominique Gaumont. A shorter outtake of the same track features a good soprano sax solo from Sonny Fortune. The 19-minute blues-shuffle "Hip Skip" has an organ solo by Davis, "What They Do" is reminiscent of the faster stuff on 'Dark Magus' and the brief, strangely loungy "Minnie" which is notable mostly for being recorded at Davis' last session in 1975 before his five-year retirement. All of CD5 is previously unissued.

 

CD6 has the original LP version of 'On the Corner', and the fairly straight blues on "Red China Blues" from 'Get Up With It', which has and the only harmonica solo in Miles' entire catalog, and both sides of the "Big Fun"/"Holly-wuud" single.

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