When I was in my early teens, Miles Davis was music that my older (by 11 years) sister and her husband, an advertising exec, played while sipping a pre-prandial martini or two. They were especially fond of "Sketches of Spain," probably my least favorite Miles album. I liked Miles, but wasn't excited by his music. I preferred sax-based jazz (Coltrane, Stan Getz, Charles Lloyd) to trumpet-centered music.
It wasn't until 1970 and the release of "Bitches Brew" that I really began to dig Miles. While Coltrane took jazz to remarkable spiritual heights, Miles decided to get funky and visceral. Fusing funk and rock tropes with his own spare, incisive horn work, he created a whole new genre of music.
Of course, jazz purists howled that he'd sold out, but I loved it. I listened endlessly to the two discs on the Radio Shack system I'd bought with my dad's death benefit, reveling in the dark, multilayered, rhythmic gumbo that Miles and his band played down.
Later I discovered the live albums that he subsequently recorded in Japan, where fans really got what he was doing. I love those albums even more than "Bitches Brew:" "Pangea," Agartha," and "Dark Magus," especially. Wonderful dark, primal stuff.
P.
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