Main Lines, Blood Feasts, and Bad Taste - Lester Bangs [78]
Yeah, except this ain’t where he left off. He left off with Agharta and Pangaea, two concerts recorded on the same day in Japan. The former, an afternoon concert, was the last “new” Davis LP released in this country (in 1976) before The Man with the Horn, while Pangaea, the evening show, is only recently available here on import. And there was a fury completely absent from either Man or the recent gigs in that music, especially in Pangaea, whose first side's violent, headlong assault had led me more than once to call it “the first jazz of the Eighties.”
The truth is that the jazz of the Eighties, if there's going to be any that matters, probably began in 1972 with On the Corner. God knows few enough people had any use for it in the Seventies, including me, who had followed and loved everything Miles did from Birth of the Cool on out, and couldn’t even hear it, much less feel its cold flame and realize its intentions, for five years after it was released.
I think one reason so many of us had trouble with that most radically abrupt of Miles’ departures was what we perceived in the album as an absence of exactly that emotional quality Crouch spoke of. It's always been axiomatic that even if others had greater technique, or he seemed in the Sixties to have been “passed up” by his alumni like Coltrane, or even that he seems to many ears to have been playing the same blues solo in different settings for decades, still, Miles has more soul. If On the Corner could hardly be accused of being that same solo, it also could be (was) accused of having no discernible emotion in it.
The two keys we missed were rhythm and attitude. For the first time a Miles Davis album was conceived not as a setting for the type of deeply emotive trumpet playing on LPs like Sketches of Spain and My Funny Valentine, but as a world and a world-view fully realized in which all parts were equivalently integral to the whole. It was like a big painting of a whole city laid out as if on a map come wrigglingly alive. It was like a hive. Those who still don’t “get it” might be best advised to put it on cassette and listen to it while walking around downtown Detroit, New York's 14th Street, or any really busy, crowded urban area. (Though interestingly enough I first really heard it when I was in Jamaica, where it was suddenly almost obscenely, frighteningly alive, and its sense of menace unmistakable.) As an old girlfriend said once when we drove through ghetto Detroit with it on the box, “I get it; this is an environment record.” But that environment doesn’t have to be funky; what was initially perceived as emotionless in the music turned out actually to be an alienation so extreme that we could only grow into it and the album as time caught up with us and we caught up with Miles. In fact, the music seems to change with and comment on different environments: in more low-rent areas, on the (real) corner, it not only catches the rhythms of human movement, but each instrument, and each little melodic or rhythmic figure (what once seemed like doodles, squiggles) that appears briefly, disappears, and reappears again several minutes later, is like a different one of the characters you see regularly passing through your local interzone, blending at first but eventually becoming the cast of an urban drama without beginning or end in which they are all hanging out. Play it in Macy's or mid-town Manhattan or at the shopping mall and it grows discernibly colder, the wriggling entities more sinister.
It is, in fact, pretty cold everywhere, but it is a coldness of rage at the very heart's