Miles in Japan

There's a hack journalist in my head - his cubicle shiny with pizza grease and donut residue - always on the lookout for correspondence and coincidence. This is where he earns his stipend; two Miles Davis albums, both recorded in Japan, ten years apart, as different as nigiri and maki. (My man pulls double duty in the Strained Metaphor Department as well.) This, in the parlance of our times, is a 'hook'. Now I've got an excuse to write about the baddest motherfucker to ever pick up a trumpet, drive a Lamborghini and call Steve Miller a "sorry-ass cat".

Personnel: Miles Davis (trumpet), Sam Rivers (tenor sax), Herpes Handjob (piano), Ron Carter (bass), Tony Williams (drums)

Miles In Tokyo documents a July 14 gig during our man's first trip to Japan in 1964. The trip started inauspiciously; Miles vomited up his in-flight entertainment of sleeping pills, booze and cocaine upon his hosts at the Tokyo airport. He was musically unsettled as well. Having recently lost tenorist George Coleman, Miles heeded the recommendation of drummer Tony Williams and brought in a left-field choice, the Boston avant-gardist Sam Rivers - one of the truly great saxophonists of the modern era - to fill in for the duration of the tour. By this point the core of the Davis band had been playing together for over a year but were still struggling to find their own sound. Sam Rivers was a very different player - volcanic, mercurial yet analytical - than the straight ahead Coleman and the enigmatic saxophonist who would succeed them both and inaugurate Miles' 'Second Great Quintet': Wayne Shorter. Miles - at 38 a veteran of several musical revolutions - and his young band - Williams, the youngest, was 18 - were looking for a new sound and Rivers' brief stay served to clear out some of the cobwebs in the quintet's music. As Williams said, Rivers "changed the sound of the band before Wayne joined".

Here, as for much of the 60s, Miles live setlist neglects the band's current compositions in favor of a strict diet of standards and old favorites, so the band is in comfortable territory. Tempos are mostly fast, though not the Napalm Death-like rush they would reach in the Shorter years, and the emphasis is on the solos. If I Were a Bell shows Miles to be in great, aggressive form and while Rivers sounds a little constrained by the format his playing is tough, inventive and clearly challenging to the rest of the band, prompting a more flexible approach to the rhythm and freer, less confining harmonies from Hancock. So What, a laid back staple from Kind of Blue, gets a particularly furious treatment, the band impatiently boiling behind Miles' long lines before Williams erupts in clangorous percussive fits that nearly envelop Rivers' scouring tenor. Walkin' begins with a similarly intense treatment then heads into more impressionistic territory during Hancock's solo.

My Funny Valentine, long a calling card for the trumpeter and a showcase for his pure, haunted cool, exposes some of the divisions at work in the Rivers lineup. With the rhythm section's mostly muted support Miles plays an exceptionally strong solo from the source melody; Rivers plays around it - a dessicated ghost of the tune - and the band skirts abstraction. All of You finds the band working with an elastic pulse, reacting particularly closely to Rivers' loose limbed, digressive phrasing. It's worth noting that Miles and Rivers never actually play in unison at any point on the album, the trumpeter stating the theme alone before heading off into the solos. Rivers was clearly just a guest in the band but his presence inspired a lot of thinking about the dynamics of the music. The result is the sound of a band in transition, groping its way toward a less hierarchical group dynamic that would coalesce in the dark spiraling mysteries of the Wayne Shorter years.

Personnel: Miles Davis (trumpet, organ), Sonny Fortune (soprano sax, alto sax, flute), Pete Cosey (guitar, synthi, percussion), Reggie Lucas (guitar), Michael Henderson (bass), Mtume (conga, percussion, water drum, rhythm box), Al Foster (drums)

When a 2-CD set opens with a pair of tracks entitled Prelude Parts 1 & 2, and those two tracks total well over half an hour, you know you're in for something more than just another set of jazz standards. There are five tracks in all (Maiysha, Interlude and Theme from Jack Johnson are the others) but in effect Agharta is just one big jam; a mutating slab of dense, freaked out poly-rhythmic alien jazz-funk that pushes Miles Davis' electric period as far from his bebop origins as can be imagined; as far as even Miles cared to go, for this and its companion piece, Pangaea (recorded later the same day) would be his final records before a drugged-out six year sabbatical from which he finally emerged a much different player; a pop jazz superstar. It's deeply ironic that jazz critics in the late 60s and 70s considered his contemporary music a sellout to the hippie crowd; while Miles did want to transcend the traditionally insular jazz audience, albums like Agharta and Pangaea were probably too jazzy for the rockers, too rocking for the jazzers, insufficiently mocking for the mockers and too weird for almost everybody.

Taped live in Tokyo, Japan on February 1, 1975, a little over ten years after his first visit to the country, Miles was a changed man; he suffered from bleeding ulcers, a bad hip and was addicted to cocaine, pills and alcohol. He was no longer measuring his music in terms of bars and rests; instead it married Stockhausen's theories of music as process - a continuing, eternally unfolding river of sound - to a Black Power ethos of deep funk grooves, African rhythms and collective improvisation. This is music to be listened to from the bottom up; solos are subordinate to the organic interaction of the band.

Prelude is almost nothing but rhythm, each player a living, breathing drum in some dark ceremonial rite. Stravinsky's 'neo-primitive' Le Sacre du Printemps was famously inspired by the composer's vision of a young girl dancing herself to death; Prelude, with its relentlessly driving wah-wah guitars and the leader's horror-show organ, could score a frenzied dance to summon the spirits. It's one big boiling cauldron of voodoo. It's also the perfect soundtrack for driving down darkened streets, stoned, on the way to a Blue Cheer concert. Or so I'm told.

Miles acts as a mad conductor, performing rhythmic amputations, directing the group to drop out in full stops that leave soloists momentarily clawing in the air before the band jumps in to cushion their fall. It's a breathtaking strategy that works well when Fortune is soloing, but only serves to accent the vacuity of the guitar solos; they're great rhythm players but their sub-Hendrix shredding is more notable for its fevered wah-wahing than its substance. But, again; to focus on them is to somewhat miss the point.

Prelude sets the template and the rest of the album follows suit, albeit less intensely, with disc two meandering along spacily - lazily, even - with some nice flute work by Fortune and more dubbed-out trumpet swimming in echo and wah. You could call it go-nowhere music for a go-nowhere world, but it's also not that far removed conceptually from the universally beloved Kind of Blue; there's some of the same sense of stasis that one finds in All Blues; an open plain with no roads and no map. Miles claimed that Kind of Blue was a failed attempt to evoke the interplay of African thumb-piano and drum, the spontaneity of African music; maybe he never captured the sound he heard in his head back then, but in 1975 he still wasn't ready to stop trying. Perhaps the attempt was everything; maybe - for Miles - anything that can be easily captured isn't worth holding onto.



The above photo says more than I ever could about where Miles Davis was at in the early to mid 70s. Once a friend of mine who was tripping on mushrooms pointed to this picture, pasted on the wall, and said, "Right now I feel the way Miles looks". I'm sure a lot of people do. And Steve Miller really is a sorry-ass cat. "Abracadabra" my balls.