From: mchenry@guvax.georgetown.edu
Newsgroups: rec.music.bluenote
Subject: Re: Miles' best work?
Date: 17 Aug 92 01:30:07 -0400
Distribution: world
Organization: Georgetown University

In article <1992Aug17.030324.28130@udel.edu>, bragg@pecan.cns.udel.edu (Aquatic Joe) writes:
> In article <1992Aug14.045210.7565@seas.smu.edu> quaglia@seas.smu.edu (Bruce Quaglia) writes:
>>In article <1992Aug13.104708.1@cc.helsinki.fi> mlindholm@cc.helsinki.fi writes:
>>>
>>>    I was thinking of byuing some Miles Davis records.
>>>    Which ones would you recommend?
>>

Here's some informaiton that may help you decide about Miles albums. All of 
these opinions are my own.

If you like BE-BOP, the somewhat intellectualized swing music that was 
created by Cahrlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, and others, then I recommend 
Miles & Tadd Dameron in 1949 (Columbia, maybe o.o.p.), which shows Miles at 
the height of his mastery of this genre. There are a few other CDs that 
have come out with bootlegs of him around this time that are also solid. I 
can't speak for which stuff with Parker is the better.

If you like BIG BAND music, then there are several classic to recommend:

Birth of the Cool
Miles Ahead
Porgy and Bess
Sketches of Spain

(Dingo has some moderately interested music but only but BIG FANS).
These four are all exceptionally beautiful albums and contain exquisite 
examples of Miles the ballad player, Miles of the tone that sounded like a 
man walking of eggshells, etc.

If you are into what is called HARD BOP, the return to be-bop music in the 
1950s (and now the 80s and 90s) that is characterized by a be-bop style 
with a wider variety of musical elements drawn in, then you are looking at 
a wide number of choices. Most of the Prestige catalog is good (8 CDs for 
the collected works) and the early Columbia releases such as Milestones, 
going into the early 60s. 

In the late 50s Miles made another turn, to model music, which means he 
used a scale as the basis for improvisation rather than the chord. His 
greatest classic, Kind of Blue, is from this period, and is essential 
Miles. Modal music dominated his playing from this point onwards, although 
through the first half of the 60s he continued to perform his "Hits" of the 
1950s in concert. I also recommend a Columbia release called My Funny 
Valentine from 1964 - it was just re-released on CD along with the 
companion volume Four + More from the same concert. This album again shows 
Miles at his very best. There are about 10 or more versions of Stella by 
Starlight from 1964 along, and I still think this set has the best.

Starting in about 1963-64 with the arrival of Miles' second great quintet, 
Wayne Shorter, Herbie Hancock, Tony Williams, and Ron Carter, he played a 
style that was an abstraction off the HARD BOP concept, or an incorporation 
of some of the ideas of free jazz (Ornette Coleman, Eric Dolphy, Coltrane 
and others) into the hard bop framework. The tunes became more and more 
abstract - a short theme is played and then everything else is a reaction 
to the theme in the spirit of the moment. Miles Smiles, just re-released on 
Columbia, and Nefertiti are excellent albums in this genre.

Real afficiandos should not ignore the 7-CD Live at the Plugged Nickel set 
which was released by Sony. Be prepared for a lot of repetition in the 
playlist, but a deep variety when it comes down to the way each song is 
played in any given set.

This brings us to the late 1960s. Miles was experimenting with electric 
instruments and he did want to broaden his audience, but Bitches Brew was a 
success in spite of its musical content, and a marketing triumph for 
Columbia. On Bitches Brew what Miles did was to keep the beat constant, in 
the manner of rock and at rock-like tempos, but to layer on this 
polyrhythmic and polyharmonic improvisations. Just as he choose a thematic 
"cell" in the early 60s work, he now switched over to using a rhythmic 
"cell" as the foundation of his music, shifting the balance from 
Euro-centric to Afro-centric. Just listen to Live at Fillmore East and the 
rest of the 70s albums to see how this "fusion" continued - certainly not 
in a commercially designed direction. In is hard to recommend anything rom 
this period because most people find this period as uninviting as the 
highly abstract period that preceded it. But check out Get Up With It!, 
which contains his greatest masterpiece of this period, Rated X, plus a 
etherially beautiful tribute to Duke Ellington. The early 70s continued to 
be a time of massive experimentation for Miles, and I think very few 
critics or musicians have really followed up the pathways he opened then. 
The only album I know of, for example, that follows the style of On the 
Corner is the Graham Haynes album (don't recall the name but it's his only 
one as a leader).

After his semi-retirement from 1975-1981, Miles came back with a 
combination of some of the poly-rhythmic and poly-harmonic ideas of the 70s 
plus pop music. Although they had lots of pop appeal, it really took Miles 
a few years to get his lip and sound back, and I cannot really recommend 
any of these albums until he paired up with Marcus Miller for Tutu and 
Amandla. Both put Miles into a rigid structure with all the benefits and 
problems from heavy production. It was an attempt by Miller to capture the 
glory of his big band days plus pop sensibilities.

What you can say about these pop years was that Miles failed to find any 
new pathways in music (perhaps because he now channeled more into his 
drawing and painting?), but still created an interesting body of work that 
is pleasurable to listen to.

In the early 70s Miles was mainly recording his live performances, but 
possibly because of the way they (didn't) sell, he recorded mainly studio 
albums in the 80s. This is unfortunate because he was making extremely 
interesting music live in the 80s. I heard him 5 times and was never 
dissappointed. There is a 1989 video which captures some of the spirit of 
these concerts but unfortunately Miles was not blowing particularly well 
that day. NPR did a series about 1.5 years ago of 6 shows on Miles, which 
are exceptional!, and included some snippets of live performances from the 
late 1980s.

In coming releases, there is a 
record from his Montreaux performance where he revisited the big band 
classics from the 50s, and the Paris jam session where he also looked back 
at various parts of his career. The Paris concert has now been shown on 
Bravo! and is fairly interesting. There is the new Doo-Bop album which 
makes a surprisingly good impression after a few listens.

There will also be numerous bootlegs coming out. I haven't counted lately 
but I expect there are at least 100 items in my Miles collection.

It is very hard to sum up what Miles was all about. It's like trying to 
take a few paintings by Picasso and then from them decide if you like his 
art in general. It cannot be done. Miles' performances are rarely perfect, 
and often repetitive. Nevertheless, his influence has been huge. He didn't 
necessarily think of all the innovations himself, but he brought them to 
other musicians and to the public in such a way that they were legitimized 
as new parts of the standard vocabulary of popular music.

Bill McHenry                   |Those who do not hear the past works
mchenry@guvax (bitnet)         |are condemned to recompose them....
mchenry@guvax.georgetown.edu   |                 -me


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