Main Lines, Blood Feasts, and Bad Taste - Lester Bangs [74]
No, we must admit that we, or our forefathers, or somebody, stands guilty of 400 years of YOU KNOW WHAT. But I will also go on record as saying that I have been listening to all kinds of jazz including more “free” rambles than most sane people (I used to listen to Coltrane's Ascension and Albert Ayler's Spiritual Unity while eating breakfast), and even though I don’t know the first thing about the technical aspects of music, I can tell good jazz, free, or otherwise, from bad, and Archie Shepp has put out a whole lot of albums that are either gibberish (Three for a Quarter) or blaxploitation bullshit (Attica Blues). Ask just about any musician and he’ll tell you that with certain minor exceptions, isolated tracks and such, Pharoah Sanders has been totally uninspired and unforgivably gimmicky since Trane died: and I had the laff riot of seeing Sun Ra live in Berkeley a few years back, the old wack-dome himself along with a full troupe of dancers, percussionists, etc., two sax players chasing each other through the audience staging a mock cockfight with their horns SQUEEKASWANKASQUOOONKRRRRRONKARGGHHH etc. much to the delight of the 99.999 percent white audience.
The Connection between all this and Miles’ ouevre is a connection, precisely. Even though he still doesn’t move as many units as the prodigal Stanley Clarke or blear-orbs McLaughlin, it's safe to assume that in 1976 at least a couple of double-disc meistersplats of murk-mung elektro-Miles are as essential a component of the cokespoon swinger's pad as the proper brand of aromatic candles. So Miles is not just background music but an essential part of the conspicuous consumption mores of a certain current subculture, and perhaps should not be criticized as music at all, but rather in accordance with their rise or fall on the barometer of college student and pimp-chic Hip. So maybe Tom Wolfe should start reviewing his records instead of me.
On the other hand, Miles has meant a lot to me ever since I first heard Birth of the Cool when I was too young to understand it, and while I still think I can tell good Miles from bad (the latter being something never experienced on wax, at least, till this decade), I’m still not ready to write him off as so many others have done whether they pay lip service or not. This in spite of the fact that the one time I finally got a chance to see him live, in 1973, he was such an asshole that his cooking (and, of course, unidentified) backup band put him to shame, while the titan himself settled for stalking sullenly around the stage, pausing his premature curmudgeon's sulk every few minutes to lift his horn and blow three to six random careless and totally irrelevant notes, or to find himself wandering behind an electric organ on which he randomly essayed two-finger off-notes more suitable to in-store demonstration than what was going on around him. The highlight of the concert was when some smart-aleck in the audience threw a Fris-bee, it hit him in his black badass dog-mean s&m choker, which fell off. His entire performance, from music to personal bearing, was a giant fuck-you to everybody present (including his fellow musicians?) and I hated his guts. If you wanted to rationalize this shit academically you could see it as the logical extension of his legendary proclivity for turning his back on his audiences, except that when he used to do that he was playing music that could snap your soul in two at the same time, besides which it's a matter of simple convenience (after all, why should we extend him any courtesy?) to reject all such notions which can only encourage more infantilism, and merely write the guy off as an asshole. And quite possibly a burnt-out one at that.
But here I sit, nearly three years later,