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.

To get the 'Complete On The Corner Sessions', tell us what your favorite James Brown song is.