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By Root 421 0

because I was sweeping some deep latent anguish under the emotional carpet, or not confronting myself on some primal level—and Miles cut through to that level. His music was that powerful: it exposed me to myself, to my own falsity to my own cowardice in the face of dread or staved-off pain. Because make no mistake, Miles understands pain—and he will pry it out of your soul's very core when he hits his supreme note and you happen, coincidentally to be a bit of an open emotional wound at that moment yourself. It is this gift for open-heart surgery that makes him the supreme artist that he is. So, obviously, I am damned if I am going to shrug him off at this point. I am going to tear these fucking records apart and find out what the source of the cancer running through them is, praying for cure.

There are various theories being bantered about the grapevine concerning Miles’ present state, many of them having to do with his personal problems (health, personal relationships, etc.), and they are undoubtedly a major contributing factor in his decline, but to write a fade of this magnitude off to gossip fodder would be cheap, and since he hasn’t incorporated his personal problems into his hype/legend like certain other artists, they remain nobody else's business. It's too easy to concoct chemical or sexual demonologies. What emerges from Big Fun and Get Up with It is a sense of depression so deep and uncon-solable as to be cold as the floor of a morgue. When you think of the cokespoon set that buys these albums because it's Miles, man, because of some stupid image, it's impossible to imagine them actually sitting there and listening to the entire half hour of “He Loved Him Madly,” Get Up's opener and one of the most truly bereaved pieces of music ever put on record. It didn’t sound like the recently deceased Duke Ellington, to whom it was ostensibly dedicated, at all; but it sure did sound like death. Like a grief beyond all wails, darkness, darkness and loneliness that became positively clammy, like a lifetime prison sentence in a diving bell in the blackest depths on the bottom of the ocean. How many people could even take music like that, especially at such length?

Of course, the rest of the album was the usual hodgepodge, tossing together unreconstituted dreck, an old outtake with the “superstar” band he led in the early ‘70s, one fine side-long Spanish-tinged slip-stream, and one terse, fiendishly humorous exercise juxtaposing standard funky blues harp with some of Miles’ most biting trumpet work in ages. What it all added up to was a good bit more than the standard eccentric-avant-garde artist schtick (“I’m Miles, I can put out anything”)—clearly this music was indicating that something was wrong with the progenitor, that he was not indulging himself or tapped out or merely confused. That he was sick of soul.

Which of course, providing you believe it, still doesn’t solve the problem: IS THIS GOOD MUSIC OR NOT? And, ARE NOT SOME COURAGEOUS ACTS BETTER LEFT IN PRIVATE?

Agharta, his latest, offers few clues; it's recorded live in Japan, Miles lets his sidemen solo at respectable but probably disproportionate length, and his own outings are what we have come to expect save for one brief moment of openhearted breath-caught-in-the-throat Old Miles in the middle of “Theme from Jack Johnson,” which incidentally sounds very little like its namesake if that matters. So I am going to further complicate the Miles conundrum by answering all the questions raised above with some more:

Is this music good or bad?

If it's bad, does Miles know it?

If it's bad and he knows it, is he

just telling his audience to get fucked;

fulfilling contractual obligations;

groping for something he is at present incapable of fulfilling;

putting out product because like Dylan, John Lennon, etc. he simply has nothing better to do and can’t admit he's washed up?

If this music is good, does that mean that Miles is trying to tell us something we may not want to know (cf. latent anguish theory)?

If this music is good, is it also good