page_title: Agharta (album)
section_title: Soloists
hierarchical_section_title: Agharta (album) / Composition and performance / Soloists
caption_attribution_description: English: Sonny Fortune in April, 2007
context_page_description: Agharta is a 1975 live double album by American jazz trumpeter, composer, and bandleader Miles Davis. By the time he recorded the album, Davis was 48 years old and had alienated many in the jazz community while attracting younger rock audiences with his radical electric fusion music. After experimenting with different line-ups, he established a stable live band in 1973 and toured constantly for the next two years, despite physical pain from worsening health and emotional instability brought on by substance abuse. During a three-week tour of Japan in 1975, the trumpeter performed two concerts at the Festival Hall in Osaka on February 1; the afternoon show produced Agharta and the evening show was released as Pangaea the following year.
  Davis led a septet at the concert; saxophonist Sonny Fortune, bassist Michael Henderson, and guitarist Pete Cosey were given space to improvise against a dense backdrop of riffs, electronic effects, cross-beats, and funk grooves from the rhythm section – drummer Al Foster, guitarist Reggie Lucas, and percussionist James Mtume.
context_section_description: Unlike Davis' previous recordings, the cadenzas throughout Agharta were mostly played by Fortune and Cosey. Fortune alternated between soprano and alto saxophones and the flute, performing with a "substance and structure" Gilmore believed was very much indebted to John Coltrane during his A Love Supreme (1965) period. In his estimation of Fortune's solos on the album, Gilmore said the saxophonist "floats over formidable rhythmic density, taking long and graceful breaks that wing off into a private reverie". Fortune performed his longest alto saxophone solo on "Right Off", which opened the record's second disc in a "propulsive" segment Gilmore said "flies by like a train ride in a dream, where scenes flash past the window in a fascinating and illusive dream".
  Cosey played a Guild S-100 electric guitar and heavily employed chromaticism, dissonance, and feedback in his improvisations on Agharta. He alternated between several effects pedals set up underneath his table of percussion instruments, including a fuzzbox for distorting guitar sounds and two different wah-wah pedals he used during solos or when playing more mellow tones. Cosey often arranged his guitar strings in different places on the fretboard and never played in standard tuning, using at least 36 different tuning systems, each of which altered the style and sound of his playing. According to Tzvi Gluckin from Premier Guitar, his experimental guitar playing was rooted in the blues and displayed a sense of phrasing that was aggressive and "blistering" yet "somehow also restrained", particularly in his control of feedback.
  Davis had enlisted Cosey to provide his music with sounds from the electric blues and Jimi Hendrix, whose use of distortion and the E-flat tuning was shared by Cosey. According to Charles Shaar Murray, he evoked the guitarist's echoic, free jazz-inspired solos while Lucas performed in the manner of Hendrix's more lyrical rhythm and blues songs; Cosey's guitar was separated to the left channel and Lucas' to the right on Agharta. Jazz scholar Stuart Nicholson wrote that Davis utilized his guitarists in a way which realized the "waves of harmonic distortion" Hendrix had explored in his own music. In Murray's view, the album invoked his influence on the trumpeter more explicitly than any other of his records; Nicholson considered it to be the "closest approximation" to the music they could have recorded together.
caption: Sonny Fortune (photographed in 2007), a featured soloist on Agharta
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