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| Cover art: IoF© Department of Art Dept. |
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.
Go ahead. I yam exhaustipated, I tells ya.
ReplyDeleteCool cover. Kudos to IoF© Department of Art Dept!
ReplyDeleteRight up my dark alley, this is.
ReplyDeleteI'd like to know where it is, though... dark alleys can be confusing
ReplyDeleteThere is/was(?) a Church of John Coltrane in San Francisco. I lived around the corner from it for a while. The Church of Jimi Hendrix was nearby. The cognoscenti called him Marshall. I was in the witLess protection program. I went to visit SF not long ago and was supremely disappointed that Clown Alley was gone. Best boiga and fries anywhere.
ReplyDeleteIn the mid 1980s, my husband and I were invited by a musician friend, who played Bass there from time to time. It was as good a service as any, with some great music. The people were welcoming, friendly, but not "in your face". Surprisingly, the church is basically an Episcopalian offshoot.
DeleteA piece on either or both churches would be great.
DeleteThe producer was always one of the band ever since Bitches Brew.
ReplyDeleteI didn't know that. In spite of his dictatorial tendencies, he knew how to let people do their job.
DeleteNothing special ... ice water with lime, plus gruyere and Triskets. BTW, this is my favorite "This Is It," written and performed by my friends in the Jumpers. https://youtu.be/_kd2Yz14EdI
ReplyDeleteHere's the linkage.
ReplyDelete( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)
Listen to it as I type, and it is excellent!
DeleteMany thanks!
Happy you're happy! It's been on a loop for a few days here - took a lot of tweaking to get right.
DeleteIt's perfect!
DeleteOkay - church(es)? I've never been a churchgoer, nor were my parents, so I probably got the habit from them. But I have an instinctive aversion to praying and praising as a community thing. Doesn't feel right, doesn't "fit". I'm very fond of empty churches, though - the old parish churches of England - and suitably in awe of cathedrals.
ReplyDeleteMy parents weren't churchgoers, but I was packed off to Sunday School. Consequently, I'm an atheist who knows a lot of bible stuff.
ReplyDeleteMy parents were both atheist, thank god.
ReplyDelete*snork*. I don't know if my parents were atheists - religion was one of the many major issues never discussed - or even chatted about - in my family.
DeleteMy mother told me jokingly, she became an atheist, the day she figured out, Santa Claus was a hoax.
DeleteThere's an aphorism, that goes: "There are no atheists in foxholes", but that was exactly where my father became an atheist, during the battle of Okinawa.
There is no room for god in a universe totally saturated with itself.
DeleteSounds very good - thank you...
ReplyDeletei don't want to listen to this until i can find my hate-mail pen. where did i put it after i wrote that letter to mom?
ReplyDeletei am fascinated by your destructive tendencies, though.
it was listenable! i can't imagine the amount of work you must have put in to achieve that.
ReplyDeletealso, how did you come to know howdy doody? that original show from 1949 onward was my first obsession.i ate dinner on our telephone stand with my eyes glued and my heart desiring a howdy doody marionette. howdy was my first encounter with a supreme being and dilly dally was the first time i realized that there was such a thing as a floating conscience. a lot to process for a 4 year old.
Thanks for some actual feedback, Monsewer De La Mour. It took more listening than actual granular editing, getting the sequence right by trial and error. It now sits happily after Aurora as his final album, and forms a kind of trilogy with Tutu and Amandla. And it has a better cover than Doo Bop and Rubberband.
DeleteMy cultural references have always been American, from the time I picked up my first Marvel and DC comics in the mid 'sixties. Mad Magazine was more than an influence, it was an encrypted world I wanted to solve - discovering it had been a comic before a magazine was like opening Tutankhamun's tomb - such richness! And Howdy Doody was there. Parodies of ads for unknown products - this was true surrealism. I'm still immersed in "old" US culture - I've been bingeing old radio shows for a couple of years now (Jack Benny being a favorite). Those old shows are essential to understanding the Firesign Theatre (another world of hieroglyphics). And I never grow tired of the true noir movies and US hardboilded writing. But this is all last century - contemporary US culture has zero attraction for me.
the mad comic books were a revelation to me. starchie and howdy dooit are still the most disturbing parodies i have ever encountered. i was not exposed to the comics in real time as most of my childhood comic book sources were woolworths and such. they mostly carried dell comics.
ReplyDeletein the late sixties, early seventies i was lucky enough to have a band member who collected ec comics. and chicago was awash with comic collector shops run by some of the scariest eccentrics in the land. eventually i actually had a personal comic salesman who came to my house whenever he had new finds, he was also my old movie poster dealer. i sold all my stuff for practically nothing years ago when i was at rock bottom.
i know our musical tastes are not exactly aligned but i am really appreciative and often astounded by your wit and art. you often leave me feeling that i'm illiterate.
What's the point of getting our tastes aligned? None. None more point. As somebody will always say, "it's all subjective" (as if the entire universe was anything but).
DeleteThe disturbing aspect of parodies is unappreciated. Those EC Mads, and the early magazines, are as much weird as funny. Will Elder's genius was nightmarish and funny, something nobody else quite managed. His Okeefenokee swamps were darker than the darkest horror comic.
I'm not saying you should write a screed, DEPRAVOS, but I'm sure it would be appreciated, and you'd get that much-deserved trading card!