Miles' "On the Corner"

btw, i always thought it was greg tate who got more critics to take 70s miles more seriously.

otc is halfway to kraftwerk on the stiff funk meter, but only halfway. who in the post punk world was avowedly influenced by this stuff? i always used to mix otc and agharta into metal box and hex enduction hour.

I listen to Jack Johnson and Get Up With It a lot, and regard those two as the best electric Miles records. And Agartha, but I'm a bit burnt on that one these days, having listened to it quite a bit over the last few years. Altho there's lot of great stuff on other records. On the Corner is something I admire and in certain moods really like a lot, but it's never gotten me like JJ or GUWI. I bought the remastered CD recently and have been listening to it more, and I've come to appreciate it a lot more.

this is my favorite miles after in a silent way.

I haven't actually heard this one but it sounds like it would be my favourite album ever.

since when is funk not about finding new alien ways of being funky? It's one of the funkiest things I've ever heard

But yes, he's more fair than, say, Bill Cole was. And it's light years beyond that Ornette book, where the author refers to all the Prime Time stuff as having "emphasis on the 2nd and 4th beats".

These two artists have very dissimilar approaches. Apples and oranges. This looks like the ol' 'let-me-pull-a-couple-names-out-of-a-hat' trick to me.

what if art ensemble of chicago had a funk rhythm section

Have you ever heard their music? Was there a more versatile double-bassist than Malachi Favors? They're quite capable of playing in just about any style they wish, as needs arise. But what about their very singular music do you find unsatisfactory? i.e. why would you ask them to blithely gesture when they've spent lifetimes cultivating a sound that is very much their own ( hint: they don't sound like "coltrone/coleman" either)

Anyway, On the Corner is a definite top-5 Miles disc. Used to consider it my all-time fave, but I'm not so sure now. Yes, handclaps! ALso sitar and cowbell.

Ha! Same here. One of those records you instinctively understand (or not ;) even if it's like nothing you've ever heard before. First jazz (or should that be "jazz"?) record I ever bought and still my favorite of his (together with Bitches Brew, never can decide which is my fave/fave).

(ok i can really, but it's just so... not quite funky, but... maybe jess is otm.)

...okay, I'll dig it out and have another listen.

they [coltrane and coleman] are different but their innovations are fundamental to what cutting edge jazz is today: they established harmonic freedom in the solo, melodic freedom in the scale including microtones, and popularized songless improvisation.

in the 70s and 80s, jazz was no longer making money like it did before. so there was a huge split between purist/avant jazz typified by aeoc and million-selling lite fusion typified by grover wash. jr. a representative 80s performer, wynton marsalis, regularly ventured into coltrane and coleman territory in his solos and occasionally in his composition style too. their style had been absorbed into the main stream, if less comfortably than that of the boppers. that of 70s miles had not, and perhaps has not even today.

i didn't say i didn't like aeoc: i was imagining a world where those players of the 70s i esteem had chosen to get down with a vengeance. i would like that even better.

hint: they don't sound like "coltrone/coleman" either

in terms of the nuts and bolts of their solos, i guess i disagree. from a music theory standpoint, i would contend, free jazz is free jazz, just like blues is blues and chromatic composition is chromatic composition. you can say ligeti is way different from schoenberg, and so too aeoc was way different from ornette, but the difference is of degree not of kind. [strange, i feel like geir talking in this way... am i wrong about all this?]

--

interesting to see on this thread that lots of people pick out different choices for the album that does nothing for them... for me, it's "it's about that time"

Sounds great.

who in the post punk world was avowedly influenced by this stuff?

Contortions and Voidoids (though don't know if I'd call 'em "post"). (Quine r.i.p., poor fellow.)

while light on the electric guitar...

From my self-centered view it's an incredible guitar album, since it flipped how I thought of the instrument. Guitars not used for outfront solos, more for darts and jabs and laying down barbed wire, shooting nails in your wheels, suckering you into the ditch.

actually this is a crucial point I've been curious about for a while. how many of us love 'sketches of spain' as much as we love the 70's stuff? how many of us love 'kind of blue' as much? 'birth of the cool'?

I kind of actively hate 'sketches of spain'.
'kind of blue' & 'cool' I like on occasion, but with a certain detachment.

we now raise an eyebrow at the violent critical reception of 70's miles, but how many modern fans of those albums are just as passionate about the earlier stuff?

i'll second ascensceur pour lechefaud.

Considering some of the music that Gil Evans made in the 70s like his arrangement of Hendrix tunes and 'Svengali', it is a shame that nothing between him and Miles never happened in that time period. I wonder what a Gil Evans arrangement for a big band like the one used on Bitches Brew would have sounded like. It seems to me that Evans was also there in spirit on the arrangement for "He Loved Him Madly".

All this time I've thought I thought I was all alone [sob]!

Fwiw, I'm rather fond of the "atrocious" Sly & Robbie cover of Black Satin too (it's on the '85 album Language Barrier btw Gaz!).

why is [reputedly difficult album/book/film of choice] considered difficult, I got it straight away

But this genuinely was my experience with OTC - I was expecting something that would need repeat listening before it sounded like music, and instead got a dense but immediately enjoyable slab of energetic funk that doesn't seem any more difficult than, say, James Brown's more abstract live stuff. I'm still baffled by its reputation as Miles's least accessible album.

Crap things about You're Under Arrest:
Sting

It's not in the same league as Tutu 'though, my love for which is enormous and probably irrational on account of it being the first jazz album I ever bought.

I like Sketches Of Spain, but I hate all the other Gil Evans albums, especially Porgy & Bess. Soundtracks to naptime if ever there were any.

Should note, btw, that Language Barrier was produced by noted On the Corner champion and Panthalassa "Conceiver," Bill Laswell...

I have a very nice Japanese CD of Agartha. It really sounds better than other re-releases. There are some truly sublime moments on Agartha, right up there with some of the spooky and for me incredibly evocative bits on "Calpyso Frelimo" off of "Get Up With It."

As far as liking '50s/'60s Miles better than the '70s...well, I relate more to the '70s stuff since it's closer to my era, I suppose. But there are great performances from the period when he had Bill Evans and Adderley in the band, I'm thinking of an amazing version of "Love for Sale" from '58 on which Evans is so fucking cool. I also don't love the Gil Evans soundscapes (except for the great, great "Miles Ahead"). The '60s stuff is actually somewhat like the "process" music of the '70s, just minimal "heads" and then out, with Tony Williams basically the main reason for listening. I have heard a boot of a '67 performance with Shorter/Carter/Williams/Hancock that for me blows pretty much everything else Miles did in the '60s away, completely intuitive long medleys of various tunes. It's called "No Blues."

But I think Davis did some incredible music during all his periods--I love "Aura," for example. I do prefer Monk and Rollins to Davis during the '50s and '60s, for the most part, and I like Wayne Shorter's '60s solo stuff better as well. So in the end, I do listen to the electric stuff way more than anything else by Miles.

(Love Pangaea, never heard Agharta, find Magus a little tiresome at bits but great at others.)

Oh shit, have you not gotten yours? I have a friend that got a bunch of them. I didn’t pop for OTC yet but am still thinking about it.

As for outtakes, I don’t know about that Freedom Jazz Dance Bootleg Series set, but a bunch of the Bitches Brew outtakes that hit YT a few years back were pretty revelatory:

https://youtu.be/84QDf5vCOgU

I didn’t pop for OTC yet but am still thinking about it.

It doesn't seem to be listed anymore, I get a "Product currently not available." for it. Most others are still there though.

honestly, it made me lose interest in the bootleg series to the point that i just now looked and found out that volume six was live stuff with the coltrane-era band and that it has already been available for two years. my reaction? meh.

― Totally different head. Totally. (Austin), Tuesday, July 21, 2020 9:39 PM (yesterday) bookmarkflaglink

The first three sets (1967 and 1969 live stuff with DVDs, the Fillmore box) were so great. Then there was that stupid Newport set, about half of which was previously-released, followed by Freedom Jazz Dance. No wonder people stopped caring about future releases. But the 1960 box with Coltrane is brilliant.

The freedom jazz dance set does not make for fun listening imo. I was surprised at how much I did not enjoy this glimpse behind the curtain as it were.

After reading Miles' autobio, where he mentioned that the band seemed frustrated that they never played the stuff they were recording at gigs, I too felt that it was a real missed opportunity. For all his pushing his musicians, he seemed to feel that playing the standard repertoire every night was the safer bet.

the band seemed frustrated that they never played the stuff they were recording at gigs

"Footprints," "Gingerbread Boy," "Masqualero," "Riot," and "Agitation" were all regularly played in 1967 (though those five might've been the only contemporary pieces they performed live).

That said, the band stretched out waaayyy more on the live standards than they did on the studio recordings of new pieces. The Plugged Nickel performances of warhorses like "Walkin'" or "Four" are much more daring than anything on E.S.P. or Miles Smiles.

The Palo Alto show is fucking great & noisy & weird!

They really need to do an In Concert/Dark Magus/Pangaea/Argarta-era live box

― The Mandymoorian (Whiney G. Weingarten), Monday, July 20, 2020 12:34 PM (two days ago) bookmarkflaglink

This, though considering Sony/Columbia still hasn't managed to issue Pangaea or Argarta as properly mastered CDs in the domestic US, I am not holding my breath

That said, the band stretched out waaayyy more on the live standards than they did on the studio recordings of new pieces.

yeah, i mean, that stuff is well-nigh unrecognizable a lot of the time.

I actually enjoyed that Freedom Jazz Dance set, but I think I like hearing bands rehearse and uncut session recordings more than other people. it's definitely the bootleg series i return to the least. The Newport set was kind of a lame concept but it does have plenty of killer stuff on it.

Thanks for the recs on the live versions of of the Shorter-penned material. I've never had the Plugged Nickel set, but clearly I need to dig into it via streaming. Masqualero is a favorite of mine so I'm eager to check that out.

If you haven't been following it yet, I highly recommend The Heat Warps, a project that is "exploring every available Miles Davis concert recording from 1969 through 1975 in chronological order". It just recently got into 1970, a lot of good material to come.

― soaring skrrrtpeggios (jon /via/ chi 2.0), Monday, July 20, 2020 1:55 PM (one year ago) bookmarkflaglink

I've been catching up on the shows posted on The Heat Warps, currently flipping out over this footage of the On the Corner band from NYC, January 1973 (afaik the only circulating footage of this line-up). From the mega-rare 1974 documentary Prince of Darkness. It feels beamed in from another dimension--washed-out 16mm film with occasional trippy kaleidoscope effects; Miles higher than a kite with trademark big sunglasses, afro, and rare mustache; dark, manic voodoo funk.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cYsCJuPFLMw

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1BfHOtKDcHU

Fifty years old as of Tuesday. Still sounds incredible to these ears. One of my bigger Miles related disappointments remains missing out on the complete sessions box. You'd think there would be good money in his estate keeping those boxes in print, even if later versions forego the fancy box like the original version.

it’s definitely a weird time for CDs in general

listened to this record driving home late last night — an optimal experience! still sounds so dense and dangerous and weird.

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/Fe1ENe-aMAAOOOY?format=jpg&name=small

xpost - Oh definitely, but it seems to me like bigger box sets like this still seem to sell rather well, at least for legacy artists like this.

I wrote about it for my weekly email newsletter.

Fantastic article, you highlighted a lot of the little details that have enthralled me. And the story about the car crash, damn!

yeah that was great, thanks

50 years ago this eve, Miles began a 6-night stay at Marvelous Marv's in Denver, CO - a venue that would become Ebbet's Field the following year.

"On the Corner" was released during the residency and though no tapes circulate, all accounts suggest the band boogied hard. 1/4 pic.twitter.com/Z3peVj2C9N

— Jeremy Erwin (@theheatwarps) October 10, 2022

hink he means "legendary"? Milesologists think it did happen:

In a 2020 interview, Mtume spoke of a mythical 3-hour set the band played during this run, with Miles collapsing in the elevator post-gig (that portion begins around 12-minutes in). 2/4https://t.co/bbNgxBeTjA

— Jeremy Erwin (@theheatwarps) October 10, 2022

also from that thread:

Yep. Here’s the full lineup:

Miles Davis (trumpet)⁰Carlos Garnett (soprano sax)⁰Reggie Lucas (guitar)⁰Khalil Balakrishna (electric sitar)⁰Cedric Lawson (organ)⁰Michael Henderson (electric bass)⁰Al Foster (drums)⁰Mtume (conga, percussion)⁰Badal Roy (tabla)

— Jeremy Erwin (@theheatwarps) October 10, 2022

super good, unperson. thanks!

I don't remember a lot of the box having much to do with the album or sessions for it---mainly an unnecessary reminder of how fast he was moving in those days---but worth hearing, sure, as long as you're not expecting any OTC revelations.

I wrote about it for my weekly email newsletter.

― but also fuck you (unperson), Thursday, October 13, 2022 11:24 AM (yesterday) bookmarkflaglink

Fantastic article, you highlighted a lot of the little details that have enthralled me. And the story about the car crash, damn!

― Gerald McBoing-Boing, Thursday, October 13, 2022 2:22 PM (yesterday) bookmarkflaglink

until Robocop verifies it happened, i can't believe it.

Speaking of how fast Miles was moving, as awesome as the Dark Magus/Agartha two-guitar thing was, I'm a big fan of the rather less-documented OTC-era version of this band. AFAIK, In Concert at the Philharmonic is among the only real documents where we hear what On the Corner might've sounded like live. The version of "Rated X" that kicks off the record--with its ever-so-slow build and introduction of different elements and the bass groove not entering until about six minutes in--has always felt to me more like a proper extension than its studio counterpart (which is insane and amazing).

I believe I've seen clips of a video of this band, but, yeah, if there's some three hour bootleg of this lineup kicking around, sign me the fuck up.

https://theheatwarps.com/category/1972/

for your live electric miles needs