This Is It

Cover art: IoF© Department of Art Dept.

The last studio recordings of Davis* [Miles - Ed.] don't get much stylus time from anybody except uncritical Davis-heads. Leave us face it - most jazzbos don't dig hip-hop or rap or smewthe Rn'B vox, and don't want their Davis fucked up with "feats". And those are the tracks responsible for the relegation of Rubberband and Doo-Bop to the aisle-end dump bin of his career.

What's left even after you strip out the already dated and misguided youth market clichés the man hoped would get him played on street corners during dope deals - take a breath - also gives the goatee n' beret demographic the horse staggers. That rhythm section?! What the actual fuck!? Davis never gave a shit what we thought. Not even the steam off of it. He wasn't hung up on the past - it was done and gone. Let's do this.

This Is It (title taken from the lead track) makes for a brilliant and celebratory last studio album, nothing like the bag of beatbox leftovers you might expect. Above all, it's fun; up-beat, good-humored, varied, sumptuously detailed, and surprisingly consistent, with some astonishing bursts of playing from the man with the horn when he feels like it, his spark undimmed.

The first step was easy - all the vocal tracks from Doo-Bop and Rubberband were kicked to the curb. A dirty job, but someone had to do it. After a hazmat scrubdown, High Speed Chase was nixed for the original Rubberband session, and Wrinkles, an endless go-nowhere carthorse plod with vestigial trumpetry went into the shredder, as did most of Chocolate Chip for the same reason. Then the transformative alchemy of sequencing - that underappreciated art - over a weekend of cloistered experiment. In a masterstroke of editing brilliance, Echoes In Time was seguéd seamlessly onto Rubberband - thrill at the instrymental contiguity! - providing an elegiac coda to the best Davis studio album since [your choice here - Ed.].

This is a record album to be played, not an archival or completist box set to be filed away. You can dance to it, drive to it, do drugs to it, maybe even do it to it. Ten tracks across fifty minutes shouldn't be a stretch for anybody, even on Adderall. The sound of Late Period Davis is familiar from Tutu and other swell records, and you either go along with it or invent spurious arguments why nobody should be enjoying it. The opinion (and it's always voiced by some drawling æsthete) that it's more a producer's album than his is just so much stale gas. Davis always let the producer do what they wanted - we might as well dismiss the Gil Evans - and even Teo Macero - sessions for the same reason.

You want the last great studio album from the man with the horn? You want the soundtrack to summer? This Is It. 

*It's the hipster jazzbo rule: always refer to Miles Davis as Davis, and John Coltrane as John.