Music Arcades: Miles Davis: Pangaea

It strikes me that Miles' mixture of ego and self-effacement could almost be the precise inverse of David Sylvian's, if you accept what I said a week ago about him dominating the music while taking equal billing in the ensemble. Miles' contribution to the music is that of just another band member; but he takes top billing — well, the only billing on the cover.

But then I mentioned all that, in a different context, when talking about Miles' Agharta album — which was recorded on the same day as Pangaea. Agharta was the matinee show; Pangaea the evening show. Quite a productive day.

I was discussing a different perspective on this album with Brian Eno last week. He was saying how a lot of artists are poor judges of their own work, and the real genius behind albums like Bitches Brew and In a Silent Way was Teo Macero, who re-edited Miles' studio jams, stitching them together, and placing instruments in spatial relations to each other that didn't aim to simulate the 'real world' (a smoky jazz club) but instead projected in a completely innovative way. I mentioned my friend David Kay's counter-argument that, if you look at live albums of Miles' '70s period like Pangaea and Live Evil, then you find they're still pretty shit hot — yet, being live performances, they weren't subject to any of the Macero magic. Eno suggested that Miles had learnt from Macero and was emulating what Macero had achieved on stage. I said that I'd heard Miles was (surprise, surprise) not that chuffed at Macero getting the credit for some of his groundbreaking music.. "Certainly Miles was the seed, but Macero was the gardener," he said. And so the conversation turned.

Pangea_animation_03 Brilliant name for the album. When the music is dense and heavy it evokes the tropical rainforest of that lost landmass, and when it thins out I picture the dust blowing across bones in a Sergio Leone desert— but then, about 35 minutes into Gondwanaland, there's a walking bass line, and suddently we're back in downtown New York City. On the right is an animation of Pangaea breaking up and forming the continents we know.