Music Arcades: Miles Davis: Directions

My first ever Miles Davis album. I had no idea where to start with Miles, and the only reason I started here was because this double album was reduced from £6.99 to £3.99 in the Our Price on Bridge Street. Week after week, early in 1984, it remained on the racks, unwanted by anyone else, until I succumbed.

I wasn't sure what to make of it for many years. It's a collection of what were then unreleased recordings made between 1960 and 1970, the two discs representing two sides of a profound transformation looking inwards to an absent centre. It wasn't until four or five years later that I plucked it out at random one evening in my flat, and was absolutely astonished by one track in particular. Such have been my own transformations of perspective on Miles, that I can't even be sure which track it was now, though Duran seems a likely candidate. (Random Wikipedia factlet: Duran is named after boxer Roberto Durán and was recorded during the sessions for Jack Johnson.)

In the last decade it seems every last fart that Miles did in a studio with the microphones on has been released, and that includes all of the tracks on Directions and many others besides. You can hear several of them on the Complete In a Silent Way Sessions, for example. John Walters argues that the sheer volume of these recordings is overkill. I would find it oppressive to own them all, for sure, knowing that I'd never be able to get familiar with that much stuff. But I love it that, on We7, there are over a hundred Miles albums to listen to in full, on demand. To have such easy access to the work of such a defining artist shows that 21st century western civilisation isn't doing everything wrong.