Main Lines, Blood Feasts, and Bad Taste - Lester Bangs [77]
If it's good and the effect of that goodness is to depress us, should we keep listening?
If it's bad, are reviews like this not the worst possible medicine for Miles’ afflictions? Should we tell him he's jiving himself, and effect a boycott until he relocates himself?
If it's bad, why am I so much more fascinated with Miles in a state of decay than I was when he was making one fine, solid, mainstream album after another?
I won’t pretend to have the answers to any of those questions, but I will say this: the very fact that they had to be posed makes this music more interesting and provocative than nine-tenths of everything else being released today. For Milesophiles, I’d suggest that you go back to two early albums for the precedent to his current dilemma: to Miles in the Sky for a preview of the spaciness that made Bitches Brew almost too airy and some of its followers almost invisible; and to an album that has been called at various times Jazz Track, Frenzy and Elevator to the Scaffold.9 That was the soundtrack to a French thriller that Miles laid down with some European nobodies way back in 1958, it was completely different than anything else he was doing at the time, and in its deep-night sense of terminally disconsolate moodiness has remained a classic over the years that prophesied the artist's recent psychic plunge.
As for all this new Miles music, I sit here at the end of Agharta with a rubbery weight at the bottom of my heart. I’m no masochist, and nobody could ever call Miles maudlin, but I’m not sorry. I have finally learned to think of Miles’ most recent music and what he has done to his art as taking a jewel, a perfectly faceted diamond as big as the earth shining brighter than ten thousand suns, suppose you took that jewel and with implacable, superhuman, malevolent hands crushed it in on itself, compressed by a force beyond comprehension until it was half its original size, black all over and a cold and unbreakable lump. I think of that diamond as the emotional capacities of Miles’ music, as Miles’ heart; my theory re the musical personality of Miles Davis is that he has committed upon himself, his heart, just exactly what was done to that diamond, for reasons having to do with great, perhaps unbearable suffering. In Patti Smith's words, his music now to me is “a branch of cold flame,” and I think that, crushed as that heart is, the soul beyond it has not been and cannot ever be destroyed. Like Graham Greene's “burnt-out case” (and he was not referring to drugs), perhaps that is all that is left. But in a curious way that almost glows uniquely brighter in its own dark coldness; and that, that which is all that is left, is merely the universe.
Phonograph Record, June 1976
(Reprinted in New Musical
Express, April 30, 1983)
9Available currently as Ascenseur Pour L’Echafaud (Lift to the Scaffold): Original Soundtrack (Verve).
Miles Davis:
Music for the Living Dead
Miles, you worthless wretch! Here we wait all these years—Okay! It's hip for every no-ears trendy in the world to like On the Corner now! Satisfied?—and you hand us this Death of the Cool plate of half-thawed cryogenic Bitches Brew doodles! And that vocal! Good lord man, in terms of self-service via groveling acolytes, James Chance was cooler than this when he had that girl warble “He's almost black….” while he gurgled out one of his hideous sax solos, almost as hideous as those squishy little noises you’re making under that sub-EWF simpering! Miles, you should have died!
Now that the dust has settled, the most appropriate word for Miles Davis’ “comeback” album, The Man with the Horn, and his concurrent series of live gigs would probably be “tentative.” Stanley Crouch wrote in The Village Voice of the Avery Fisher Hall concert I attended: “Miles Davis’ performance struck me as a con job in its obvious manipulation of the audience's eagerness to like whatever he did … but his homemade post-bebop sound is still more moving than anything I’ve heard on trumpet since Clifford Brown.” The Boston Phoenix's Bob Blumen-thal