Miles' "On the Corner"

iirc, there was a lot of editing on The Black Saint and the Sinner Lady, and the master take of "Brilliant Corners" was assembled from multiple takes.

Monk's Columbia albums (also produced by Macero) were pretty heavily edited too, though it mostly consisted of cutting out bass solos and the like.

haha wow I had no idea about the Reggie Lucas-Madonna connection wtf

Dog Latin, you can get this new on vinyl from Amazon for £14.50 from 3rd party sellers

The lack of melody suggested (certainly to white writers) that perhaps black men had less to say musically when they wrote on their own. Even worse, the post-production suggested to jazz musicians dependence and some sort of weakness (as well as probably a lack of masculinity).

this makes no sense in the context of, like, miles' own career, let alone jazz

duke ellington, count basie, billy eckstine, thelonious monk, charles mingus yeah those black jazz guys couldn't write a melody

thanks IAUYW!

just remembered there's a bunch of weird edits/sound effects stuff on Rahsaan Roland Kirk's early 70s work too

xxp

purchased! along with a long overdue copy of the shape of jazz to come

yea Naive Teen Idol i don't want to be a dick but i think you are on some bullshit

cosign

this wasn't the first miles record that was compiled and stitched together from various sessions though? iirc bitches brew and the rest of his electric albums were similarly put together?

I think the difference between On the Corner and In a Silent Way or Bitches Brew or A Tribute to Jack Johnson or Black Saint and the Sinner Lady or Brilliant Corners is that all the latter are edited together in a way that sounds fairly organic, like plausible jazz performance even when Jack Johnson is doing things that would be impossible to do in a live setting like throwing an ambient loop under Miles trumpet (at least given suspension of disbelief), whereas On the Corner is the first to fully throw its artificiality in your face. It doesn't in any way sound like a live jazz performance and I think that's where a lot of the resistance to it came even in spite of some predecessors sharing other radical elements with it.

I don't know if the comparison's often made but My Life In The Bush Ofor Ghosts is taking this exact idea and running with it, but that was a lot later.

And aumgn beat it to the punch by a bit

What Rev said. Chambers dedicates pages to how offensive it was that "In a Silent Way/It's About That Time" begins and ends WITH THE VERY SAME RECORDING. I doubt he'd have even noticed much less criticized it had Miles not recorded OTC and subsequent records a few years later.

I don't get how a record next to nobody paid attention to could kill a genre.

Jazz musicians and critics didn't ignore it. They actively hated it and wondered why someone of Miles' caliber would record it. Witness the lead from this piece:

Within weeks of its release in 1972, Miles Davis's On the Corner had become the most vilified and controversial album in the history of jazz. "Repetitious crap," wrote one critic. "An insult to the intellect of the people," remarked another. Even the musicians who played on the album were bewildered

When I first discovered this stuff in the 90s, I poured through Downbeats and countless blindfold tests to learn more about it and I honestly don't remember a single positive comment from anyone. The record was toxic.

I think the question you have to ask is:

Why? Why was this record so reviled by the industry (and many of the people who played on it even)?

And I think to begin to understand that you have to remember what jazz *was* by 1972. It was an increasingly intellectual exercise. It was an extremely sophisticated cultural expression. It was an exclusive language that very few people understood. And ... its audience was small and largely comprised of white people, many of whom harbored, shall we say, somewhat complicated ideas about civil rights.

All of these things were the things that Miles Davis HATED about jazz by 1972. Essentially, he hated his audience – and resented what they perceived he was doing up on stage night after night.

So it's not just that the jazz community didn't "understand" OTC. It's also that it represented everything about music that jazz wasn't: simplistic, brutal and for blacks only. It came from one of the foremost practitioners of the genre, who was openly hostile to these self-appointed "guardians" of the music, many of whom were in his own band. And even if the music he was recording didn't ultimately pave the way a new direction for jazz, it made damn clear that there was nowhere else to go.

It killed jazz.

I think the question you have to ask is:

Why? Why was this record so reviled by the industry (and many of the people who played on it even)?

I don't know why I should even care about this, frankly

and again - "killed jazz" in what way? Jazz remained commercially viable and aesthetically distinct for roughly another decade. OTC sold dismally, but subsequent jazz funk releases sold hugely (Herbie Hancock springs to mind).

Re: what rev said- I don't know if the comparison's often made but My Life In The Bush of Ghosts is taking this exact idea and running with it, but that was a lot later.

Dah stupid phone. Sorry for the duplicate post

I think the comparison is even made in the liner notes to the reissue of MLITBOG, isn't it?

Possibly. I just made a play list with cuts from both and they sit well together.

Ok second time around I think I see what NTA is getting at a little more -- jazz was certainly fraught with political and historical meaning for people and records like OTC clashed with what jazz meant to a lot of critics, fans and even musicians, for better or worse. Sort of comparable to the way that Dylan going electric clashed with an entire philosophy about music's relationship to its audience, it wasn't just "oh I'm grumpy and I don't like that harsh sound." Those records clashed with the idea of jazz as intellectual and respectable, and that was important to a lot of people, not least because it had been and still was a struggle to convince people that black people could even make intellectual or respectable music. And I don't mean "respectable" in some kind of caricatured, "I'm playing Autumn Leaves in a tuxedo" kind of way, I mean actually worthy of respect as a serious creative endeavor. You can't quite call the reaction "conservative" because conservatives of the time mostly wouldn't even have taken jazz seriously, but it was conservative relative to the burgeoning psychedelic/hippie/spiritualist culture that was spilling over into fusion records.

It "killed" jazz in the sense that seeing possibly the top figure in jazz deliberately turn his back on what "jazz" meant to them, at a time when jazz was already struggling commercially (yeah shakey actually it was) and slipping in cultural importance weakened people's belief in jazz as a still-viable idea. I think now we can kind of get past all that, especially in an era where you can so easily listen to everything from every era and free it from all that critical baggage, and this makes it hard to remember that jazz used to signify more than just another interesting kind of music to listen to for a lot of its listeners.

'albums that killed genres' would be an interesting and highly fraught thread. is there an album that 'killed' rock?

K1d 4?

I was going to suggest 'Funeral' for some reason. That whole 'who the fuck are Arcade Fire' thing on Twitter a few years ago certainly rammed home the idea that today's youth generation isn't necessarily interested in rock music as an exciting force for change.

but insofar as musicality and genre picketlining, Kid A's probably a better suggestion.

picket-fencing, not picket-lining

Tho I had forgotten about it until you mention it, apparently this is a thing for me:

Loveless: The Death Knell of Rock?

I even mention Miles in the 70s!

I think there were some significant rock records after Loveless. Although perhaps not many.

But yeah, I can buy the idea that OTC killed jazz figuratively.

Significantly, many of the practitioners of the New Music, who themselves were accused of "killing" "jazz" in the 60s, weren't fans of Miles' electric work.

So let's say jazz as a sep genre (racial codes for retailers and DJs only somewhat aside) began to sheer away from, or find its own place in the pop convergence, the biz maw, with the arrival of bop as a movement. Which was also, with the arrival of WWII's draft, the temp restriction on recording (v-discs aside) and the Musician Union strike, the end of the big band heyday, thus back to small band swing, with Benny Goodman and Charlie Christian jamming hot, fast concise and complex, on the radio even, but not nec; for dancers and frat boys at all. Back from war, maybe some study via the GI Bill, third stream and Birth of the Cool, rise of the educated suburbanites grooving to Take Five, yadda yadda, free jazz upsets the apple cart, then becomes, for fans and those who actually prefer to read or write about it, another niche, another tag, as and as for more of that refined suburban appeal, the Quintet's audience wasn't buying the records or coming to the shows anymore.
So Miles brings jazz back into the pop convergence---not like Bud Shank having a hit with "Michelle" and then sneering at the Beatles, nor like younger jazz musicians, like Gary Burton and Larry Coryell, who grew up listening to and absorbing rock, country etc,--but by being what he is, an older guy who has also listened to and is still absorbing the post-War developments, who gets the pan-genre appetites of the beast they called Rock (absorbing rock 'n'roll, rhythm & blues, other previous hybrids and niches), the post-Woodstock mass bohemian munchies, not just of kids, but of somewhat older people with more educated jaded, maybe middle-aged crazy tastes (bored-ass music junkies in their late 30s and early 40s, like himself, for instance, and remember a lot of the ringleaders of the 60s were not actually kids).
He uses jazz, as previously known as one more element of a syncretic approach--coming from the other side of, say, Music From Big Pink, or Astral Weeks, or Sgt. Pepper's---but also, as he says in his autobio, he was cruising to tapes of Stockhausen and James Brown, speculating about *that* kind of convergence...
Anyway, I've started listening to the OTC box on Spotify, and right off, the uncut master of the title track, 23 minutes and change, is very beautiful, very lyrical, in the conversational cadence of several voices---as with the arrival of Ornette, the controversy seems silly now---except that Miles's melodic electricity does move through a non-programmatic context, it finds/becomes its own context in the context which might be no context 'til he and his crew showed up (also pre-empting dorko bop-prog "fusion" and elevator filigree floatation, as would soon follow).
Speaking of context, this box also includes "He Loved Him Madly" and others I really don't (and prob won't care to) associate with the OTC moment (a reason for the title: it was something on a corner, a transitional moment in the expedition)

Good summary, and just a note about this:

free jazz upsets the apple cart, then becomes, for fans and those who actually prefer to read or write about it, another niche, another tag,

At the time, the new music was accepted -- often grudgingly, but accepted nevertheless -- by the critical establishment as the next significant development after Parker, Gillespie et al. The tone of some Down Beat pieces from the time is, "Yeah, I know this is the new movement in the music, but that doesn't mean I have to like it!" not "This is NOT the new movement in the music!"

<3 u dow, great post

Thanks, guys. Also, using jazz elements in this syncretic approach was not only a trans-genre experiment,it was also a *jazz* move, the kind that keeps becoming and is always necessary, in terms of shaking it up and finding new ways to express, to breathe.

i don't knwo, "albums that killed genres" isn't really an interesting concept to me, just seems kind of music critic armchair theorizing bs. which i guess is what a lot of ILM engages in and can be very interesting sometimes. but "albums that killed genres" doesn't strike me as any more stimulating than those lame "non-rock albums that rock fans love" thread. i mean it's just kind of arbitrary. did "the shape of jazz to come" kill jazz? wynton marsalis? all those cheesy technical fusion records of the 70s that are really bad? why OTC and not bitches brew, for example? it's just kind of a silly thing to engage in because genres come and go and audiences move on to different things. folk music is alive and always has been even though dylan went electric at newport in 65. there are people still singing folksongs and playing banjos and shit everywhere. just the commercial engine behind has long since moved on to other things. doesn't mean that dylan "killed" folk

Tarfumes, you're also reminding me of the flame wars charted in Ben Ratliff's Coltrane: The Story of a Sound. Trane and Miles may have upset some more than outsider Ornette did, because those two were our guys.

Haven't read that yet, but yeah, Trane especially had to deal with a metric ton of bullshit, even before he put together his group with Pharoah, Rashied Ali, and Alice. People were calling Coltrane "anti-jazz" and "hate music" in 1961!

<3 cheesy technical fusion records of the 70s

peace suckas, gonna listen to some Return to Forever now

there are people still singing folksongs and playing banjos and shit everywhere. just the commercial engine behind has long since moved on to other things. doesn't mean that dylan "killed" folk

― marcos, Thursday, September 18, 2014 10:25 AM Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

I think that's kind of the point though -- not "killed" as a thing that people play and like, but "killed" the sense of a movement with a purpose. I mean folk music in the early 60s was not just a style of music but had a sense of being a movement. Dylan going electric didn't "kill" folk music but certainly dealt a blow to the movement's political aspirations or to a sense of cohesion around a set of ideas that folk music supposedly represented. I wouldn't be overly literal about the idea that an album can "kill" a genre, but it can be a signpost of a major cultural shift for sure.

<3 cheesy technical fusion records of the 70s

otm. grow up

I guess if you analogize musical movements to religions, it's kind of like having your major prophet suddenly come out and commit major heresies. I think it's harder for us now to conceive of the kind of weight these matters had for people at the time because we're very post-political about our music today and every style of music is just another style of music.

I kind of have my thing I get on about in re Dylan going electric though, bc I think it's one of the most misunderstood moments in pop music history, widely thought of as a bunch of crusty purists not liking loud noise or something. I mean, it's sort of that but there's more to it.

not "killed" as a thing that people play and like, but "killed" the sense of a movement with a purpose.

I am more amenable to this interpretation

peace suckas, gonna listen to some Return to Forever now

― The Reverend, Thursday, 18 September 2014 19:57 (21 minutes ago) Permalink

CHEA

it was already on its deathbed tbf - Miles is probably the only figure who could deal the deathblow (who else was there that was so universally revered/had been around so long? Coltrane was dead, Ellington/Basie already irrelevant, Mingus too combative, Monk had disappeared)

man Sextant really is the only thing that comes remotely close isn't it

feel like most of the other recs and fusion stuff of the era is either too tight or too rock oriented or something, but Sextant has a similar burbling sprawl