Music Arcades: Miles Davis: Agharta

You might be surprised to hear how I arrived at this mid-'70s period of Miles' work. It was via Julian Cope, and specifically this extended review.

But if you think JC is an unlikely Miles fan, just look at how many references there are to him on the Cope site. Here's an excerpt from what he said about Agharta:

Non musicians could argue: "But why does the music get credited entirely to Miles Davis rather than to the ensemble?" To which Miles would most likely have replied: "Replace any one of them and you'll still get almost this sound. But replace me and they would be lost and directionless. For I am the shaman and their facilitator. No chords because I dictate that. On the one because I dictate it. Untold freedom to play what they wish BUT within the exceedingly narrow boundaries which I have set. Like an Andy Warhol painting on which Andy himself chooses the subject matter, the canvas size, paint type and the four desired colours but never actually touches, this music has extreme pre-sets. It can only sound one way. Like Stockhausen's Music Concrete, it is the purest form of music imaginable. Like Japan's Taj Mahal Travellers, who never even gave their tracks titles, it has returned us to a time so long before classical civilisation that even our hands and feet and lips and throats and asses become musical instruments.

I wouldn't dare try and write about music like Cope does, because I've seen others try and fall flat on their faces. Here's something else that I find useful, taken from Lee Jeske's sleeve notes with my CD issue (note how it also mentions Stockhausen, RIP):

[T]he solos are secondary to the sound of the whole, which ranges from the kind of fat funky stew that introduces the recording to the minimalist electronic bleats and blats that end it. Things at once seem to change quickly, at once seem to change hardly at all — as Isaac Hayes-like disco wah-wah guitar bangs butts with Karlheinz Stockhausen-like spatial electronic noodles. The music is both brainy and funky, both fiercely demanding and eminently danceable

I find the album very dense, perhaps partly because three of the four tracks are over 25 minutes long. Dense like a forest, impenetrable, untamed, sometimes dangerous (though there are also extended periods of calm), black and very, very sophisticated. The absolute opposite of crude. Bass not base. I enjoy it a lot.

Last word to Miles himself, quoted in the sleevenotes from his autobiography:

with Mtume Heath and Pete Cosey joining us, most of the European sensibilities were gone from the band. Now the band settled down into a deep African thing, a deep African-American groove, with a lot of emphasis on drums and rhythm, and not on the individual solos. From the time that Jimi Hendrix and I had gotten tight, I had wanted that kind of sound because the guitar can take you deep into the blues.