Main Lines, Blood Feasts, and Bad Taste - Lester Bangs [73]
Ever since Jack Johnson, which came out in 1971 and was his last incontrovertibly masterful album, Miles has become something whose antithesis he had been for the previous 20-odd years of his career: erratic. Critics particularly had trouble deciding whether albums like Miles Davis in Concert were difficult, dense masterworks or plain old dogshit: it wasn’t even as simple as the fact that Miles is a figure traditionally deemed above criticism, but rather that nobody wants to be caught sitting on yesterday's curb wacking their doodle to old blowing sessions when Miles is sculpting new thruways and monorails. Briefly, he laid on us such bones of great contention (although not very many people wanted to say so in public) as Miles at Fillmore, On the Corner, Big Fun, and Get Up with It.
Now. For anyone who has been following Miles’ career farther back than Bitches Brew there were at least parts of each of these that were a bit difficult to swallow. At least if your listener's integrity extended to yourself (fuck the public: anybody that buys Stanley Clarke albums deserves whatever they get). Miles at Fillmore, way back in ‘70-71, was the first one I remember being a bit thrown by: it was obvious that he was extending the In a Silent Way/Bitches Brew approach (which Joe Zawinul has never gotten nearly enough credit for, and may have been almost wholesale ripped off when you get down to it, despite the avant/MOR row of pap he's been plowing with Weather Report), no, rather he was reiterating the leaps of those albums in a way that not only added nothing, but was literally not up to Miles’ traditionally Mandarin-impeccable standards.
I dismissed it as an off-note unaccountably put on record, but then he followed the brilliance of Jack Johnson and the relative comeback of Live Evil with On the Corner, which still reigns supreme as the absolute worst album this man ever put out. On this experiment in percussion and electronics, what little actual trumpet you could pick out of the buzz-whiz and chockablocka was so distorted as to be almost beyond recognition. And this from the man who made a good deal of his rep on the devastating, transcendent depths of pure human emotion he could find in his soul and axe. It seemed almost to amount to a form of suicide, or at least an artistically perverse act of the highest order.
There were, of course, the Faithful who declared foursquare like Jann Wenner of John and Yoko's Wedding Album that Miles Knows What He's Doing Even If I Don’t—Ralph J. Gleason, a man whose penchant for glib preachments and name-dropping could be eternally excused by his boundless passion for musical art, devoted a lead tandem review in Rolling Stone to On the Corner and the then-current Santana album. They were, he said, a new genre of “street music” with heavy Third World (or at least American Ethno-Cultural Minority Group) ramifications, directed to audiences of same with the review's obvious though unstated implication being that if we the (presumably) white jass-buffs couldn’t get with it maybe it was only meant for the bros.
I have in my time heard similar claims made, in more stridently specific terms for mediocre-to-ghastly albums by people like Archie Shepp, Joseph Jarman & The Art Ensemble of Chicago, and Sun Ra, and they were every bit as big a platter of horseshit in those instances as with Miles. Gleason once told me that Shepp was working in an area where it was very difficult indeed to tell “good” playing from “bad” and that therefore Three for a Quarter, One for a Dime was one of those then-proliferating albums which were simply immune to critical arbitration. I mean, if “free” playing's tenets are adhered to to the letter then we really have no business telling Archie Shepp, for instance, that he has been exploiting the ethnocentricity and oppression-bred anger