miles beyond
this week, fighting off incipient sickness, i've been listening to miles davis' the complete on the corner sessions (for which, thanks to frank and jon) and reading dutch journo paul tingen's miles beyond: the electric explorations of miles davis, 1967-1991. it's one of those music books (like charles shaar murray's hendrix appreciation, crosstown traffic) that can make you look at music you think you understand in a totally different light, and it includes enrico merlin's detailed sessionography. particularly worthwhile are chapters where tingen discusses why it was necessary for miles to make the change to electric music after exhausting the creative possibilities of his second great quintet, and the rather problematic business of miles the man as portrayed in his ghostwritten autobiography. an admitted jazz non-expert, tingen examines miles' music through the prism of zen buddhism and the ideas of philosopher ken wilber, and comes up with this insight on the failures of the avant-garde: "much avant-garde art has been forgotten by history because it either announced a worldview that never manifested, or developed in a dysfunctional manner that did not correspond with evolution's inherent process...Art that that does not include the past, that only tries to transcend it, has invariably been shown to have little depth or lasting value." reading the descriptions of miles' creative process, i'm reminded of how it felt (albeit on a much less exalted level) playin' with the wreck room jamcats back when that gig was an improvisational opportunity and not a "live music jukebox." there's loads of ambient and dance music, not to mention the entahr concepts of local greats like sub oslo, ghostcar, confusatron, sleeplab, and top secret, that would be hard to imagine without miles' '70s innovations on albs like in a silent way, bitches brew, live-evil, on the corner, big fun, get up with it, and agharta.
posted by stashdauber at 5:29 PM
2 Comments:
The Tingen quote you cite here seems wrong to me in a couple of ways. One, lots, if not most, of "avant gardes" have a sense of history, evolution, depth & value. And, as you note, lots of "avant gardes" have subsequent influence in more popular cultural forms.
"Avant gardes" more often are perceived as "failing" because their impact has been so mediated that some folks who end up doing work that builds on prior avant garde work, and nearly none of their audiences, don't know there's any connection to the prior work.
More specific to Miles Davis, I think some of the impetus to going electric was Davis' reaction to realizing that his last acoustic quintet had absorbed a lot of influences from avant garde jazz that Davis had been badmouthing for years. Going electric was, in part,a (probably unconscious) way for Miles to go even further into the avant garde without publicly recanting his prior opinions about Ornette Coleman, Cecil Taylor, and others.
true -- in the chapter about "on the corner," tingen quotes miles acknowledging the validity of ornette's harmolodic ideas, comparing them to bach's use of multiple voices.
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