Though I’ll be focusing on Miles Davis Electric period in this piece it’s only one part of his story. By all accounts he was a pretty intimidating presence to be around. His discography is also intimidating. There’s at least 61 studio albums, 39 live albums, 26 box sets. It’s a lot to take in and difficult to know where to begin. This period is sometimes called Jazz Funk, Jazz Rock or Jazz Fusion. All of these are technically correct but the names come with Baggage. Many of the players in Miles Davis Electric band went on to define these genres. Names like Herbie Hancock, John McLauchlin and Joe Zaniwul to name but three.
If you know only one of Miles albums it’s probably a kind of blue, the biggest selling jazz album of all time, having sold in excess of 4 million copies. It’s chilled, tasteful, minimal in its approach to harmony and melody. It revolutionised jazz, slowed down the pace, emphasised the subtle over the bombastic. John Coltrane was a big part of that album’s appeal. Miles’ music was always shaped by his choice of sidemen.
A Constantly Rotating Band.
There’s almost no similarity to the records he was making a decade later. and that’s what this piece is about, Miles Davis electric era.
During this period he used what jazz critics call ‘rock rhythms’ but which really have their roots in funk. His band used increasing amounts of amplification, electric instruments, effects. The music got ever more abstract and earthy at the same time.
Miles’ band had always constantly evolved, as did the concepts and strictures he placed upon them.
In the sixties his constantly rotating band was THE place to be for the up and coming jazz musician. Whether live or, more prized, in the studio. He stole musicians on a regular basis. For example although he had no great love for the saxophonist Charles Lloyd. He thought he was a hack, But he did like his rhythm section. Miles liked Charles Lloyd’s drummers so much in fact that he stole three of them over the years. All can be heard at various points on the records.
Miles Davis Electric Personality.
Miles knew the textures, the sounds, the feel he wanted and dictated them all in that threatening mafiosi destroyed whisper of his. Musicians took to their tasks with deadly seriousness.
He’d scowl at them for their ‘butter’ cliché note choices. Throw different musicians against each other and see what stuck.
That was always Miles Davis thing. Both musically and interpersonally he’d create situations, friction, which inspired himself and the other players.
In short he bullied his musicians into giving him their best performance. This style of management came from the influence of his father, Miles Davis senior. He was an overbearing man, did not suffer fools, there’s a famous story of him having chased, shotgun in hand, a white man who’d racially abused his son. Miles Junior was old enough at 45 to be the father of most of the musicians in his band. He treated them as his father had treated him, with a strong will and an undercurrent of threat.
Despite his ‘prince of darkness’ schtick Davis was apparently quite nurturing at times. Rather than coldly fire musicians he’d encourage them to get their own bands going ‘isnt it time for you to make your own records?’ He did this with Herbie Hancock. The turnover was always high though. Some like Joe Zaniwul were invited to do further work with the band but turned him down because they just couldn’t handle the feeling of brooding tension.
Praxis Makes Perfect
Through the sixties he relied less and less on defined traditional song structures. With a kind of blue the harmony was treated in an abstract manner, forms were stretched out, allowed to breathe. The movement in Jazz during the 60s was away from traditional song structures and Miles went with the flow. Unlike most jazz players of the time he was open to trying new musical equipment. He was a modernist, not just with his immaculate hair and suit but in the true sense. He loved Wah Wah pedals, used one on his trumpet, bought them for the rest of the band and insisted they all used them.
This philosophy of throwing confounding elements into the equation extended to the compositional process. Herbie Hancock and many other players talk of his philosophy that mistakes are legitimised by what follows them, there are no wrong notes, it’s all about context.
The bands improvised for long sessions, and when they were in the studio just about everything was recorded, even the breaks in case one of the players had something. The majority of the sessions from the years I’m going to be talking about are contained on a series of box sets which give a pretty comprehensive overview of a very fertile period.
He carried on setting musical puzzles for himself via the constantly changing band he rehearsed with. But even with this constant evolution there were just too many things going on in the world of popular music for him to even hope to keep up.
The Hippest Man in the World
Miles Davis was the hippest man in the world, or that is until the psychedelic hippy craze turned every notion of cool on it’s head. He’d always, always, dressed well, impeccably, sharp suits since the day he could buy them with his sometimes ill gotten gains. Incidentally, if anyone needs retrospectively cancelling for their attitudes and actions it’s Miles Davis but I’ll try and concentrate on the body of work rather than salacious details.
His was the ‘rebirth of cool’ he dressed in preppy brooks brothers suits, loved and was loved in Paris. he was the urbane epitome of the refined sophisticated jazzman, but none of that was cool by the late sixties.
Older, Out of Touch.
At the heart of this was a feeling, I think, of being out of touch. Out of touch with the culture, which had turned dayglo,on one side and was consumed in protests and riots on the other.
Truth be told Miles Davis simply could not get a lock on with what was going on with his fellow black people. The ones in the street, often protesting. He was up in his penthouse getting high with models. Miles had grown up rich, the kind of upper middle class that having a dental surgeon for a father provides.
He grew up with a second home in a different state with land, lots of land, and horses. He was that kind of rich. The hypermasculine image he constructed, the boxing, the mean glare was partly I think both inherited from his father and a coping mechanism for social isolation. Being rich, but black, in a world ruled by White men would have been something of a lonely liminal space.
He grew up rich and was richer by far now. how could he even start to empathise with the struggle people were facing? He spoke in interviews about the how he’d felt a separation from the mainstream of Black society growing up. This didn’t mean Added to these personal feelings he was working in an increasingly unfashionable artform. People had stopped caring about the latest jazz albums. They’d stopped caring about Miles.
Open Ears led to Miles Electric Era.
His band had acted as a launchpad for many of the young hot shots of the Jazz scheme over the last few years, that’s to say the mid 1960s. jazz critics love that era which they call his ‘second great quintet’ but the era of acoustic music had effectively ended when Bob Dylan plugged his telecaster in and pledged to play fucking loud.
People had stopped caring so much about jazz. They’d stopped caring about Miles.
Rock, the arena of exploration in popular culture was all about amplification, distortion, studio trickery. A world away from the sound world of ‘A kind of blue’, that pristine document of a band in a room.
Then there were the clothes, black and white people were growing their hair, clothes were looser, more colourful. Miles looked out of touch, buttoned up, he needed to get with it. His young new wife Betty Davis Nee Mabry was an influence in all this,kept him in touch with what was going on in youth culture.
A Woman’s Touch
She was a musician and model, who’d had a song on an album by the Chambers Brothers and been on the cover of Miles Filles de Kilamajaro as well as spreads for national circulation magazines. After her time with Miles, their marriage didn’t last long, she made some top notch down and dirty funk albums.
She’d been socialising, networking in bars and clubs since the early 60s, singing, sometimes as selector choosing the records. She had good taste and introduced Miles to a lot of the sonic foundation for his next stage.
Some of what she turned him on to was the music of people she knew, Sly Stone and Jimi Hendrix. Miles locked onto the both of them. Funk Rhythms spoke to him, this is what those people on the streets were listening to, that beat, James Brown did it even better. Tony Williams was good but the kid flew around the kit. This is music that demanded a feel, a pocket. Funk taught Miles the benefit of the three R’s repetition repetition and repetition.
Finding the Funk
It’s no understatement that the music of James Brown revolutionised music from the mid 1960s onwards. In his music every instrument, even the vocals, are a Form of percussion. Composition was treated differently, grooves allowed to play out and evolve for as long was necessary. And Jazz was originally dance music. The music of James Brown had taken that place in the popular, mainly black, consciousness.
Of course, music that derived from rhythm rather than the classical concepts of harmony and melody was nothing new globally. The tablas of India and percussive ensembles of South America had been long exploring this area. Miles listened to all that too, over the next few years he incorporated those sounds into his music too.
A New Palette of Sounds
From Hendrix he took a whole new palatte of sounds. These records didn’t just sound like some guys jamming, the sound echoed and flew around the room. In Hendrix’s records there are no real rules, noises turn inside out, whether they be guitar mangling or tape trickery.
Ted Macero could help with this, he’d produced most of Miles’ Columbia records. He’d kind of fallen into record production through the 1950s. Setting up sessions, organising the mics and musicians. He knew how to splice tape.
This new idea of editing takes together to create whole new compositions was Miles’ idea but the execution was Macero and his small staff of engineers.
Creative Control
In fact truth be told it’s questionable how much input Miles had in post production aside from a couple of listening sessions on Bitches Brew. In later years Macero went on record saying he had carte blanche to do what he wanted and that Miles only entered the editing room four or five times through the electric era.
For his part, Miles kept his distance from his producer, after all he was not only whitey but he was a corporation employee, a handler sent by the company he was contracted to. As far as Miles was concerned the music was of his own invention. He took mixed sections home and let a stopwatch play as he noted down the final form that he wanted pieces to make into their final form.
The truth is probably somewhere between Macero and Miles’ version of events. Miles most definitely had his vision but would not have been able to make it reality were it not for his backroom boys.
Personal animosity aside they stuck to their roles and had an ultimately productive working career. It could be said that with his hands off yet forceful and antagonistic style of management Miles was again throwing a little friction in the mix. Another confounding variable.
The Start of Miles Electric Era
The Hendrix influence came through subtly at first in ‘Ms Mabry’ from Filles De Kilamanjaro. It’s both a homage to Hendrix and named for his wife Betty’s maiden name. For that tune Miles borrowed the tender chromatic turnaround from ‘The Wind Cries Mary’ and built a slinky low key way around it. On that album he’d started to use electric instruments, bass, keyboards, but it was with his next that the electric period would truly begin.
And that’s what we’re going to be concentrating on in the next part of this series. Thanks for reading.
For those wanting the next part of my Krautrock series, it’s upcoming, a lot of source material to catch up on.
Shameless Plug
I got really quite obsessed with this rich seam of music. So much so that I made an albums worth of material. It’s just cone up to Spotify and all the other streaming platforms. It’s a blend of funk rhythms and diminished key moodiness. I played all the instruments, layering them up over a few months. After sweating away at mixing and mastering. Here’s the result.