Miles Davis: The Complete Jack Johnson Sessions (Continued)

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Another new element in the band that recorded the material that mostly became the Jack Johnson album in April 1970 was bassist Michael Henderson. Henderson had played with Detroit soul acts like the Fantastic Four, Detroit Emeralds, and Billy Preston since turning thirteen. He later toured with Aretha Franklin and Stevie Wonder before Miles brought him into his band. Henderson was the first musician that Miles had hired who did not have a jazz background and who had never played acoustic bass; he formed the basis of Miles’ rhythm sections for the remainder of the 1970s, becoming a fixture with Davis until his semi-retirement began in 1976. When Miles reconvened his band in the studio to record the sessions for On the Corner in 1972 Henderson was the only former member of his band who was left. Clearly Henderson brought something to the group that the other jazz bassists hadn’t quite been able to. That something was his ability to create a circular, funky riff and to stick with that no matter what else was going on. The key element here is that Davis was creating funky music, black music. Listen to the interaction between bassist Gene Perla and drummer Billy Cobham on the two takes of “Ali” presented here, or Jack DeJohnette’s drum work on the first six tracks of the set, a number that became known as “Willie Nelson.” You hear the stuttering funk drumming that comes up from the New Orleans second line channeled right into the stop/start speeded up James Brown sound. Yet at the time all anyone could hear was the electric guitar of John McLaughlin, and the music was labeled as rock. Miles believed that funk and the raunchy electric guitar sound went together. After all, the guitar sound was inspired by Jimi Hendrix, and Miles recognized Hendrix as a blues-based black musician even though Hendrix’ audience was overwhelmingly white and overwhelmingly rock based. Both Sly and the Family Stone and George Clinton’s Parliament were incorporating rock guitar into their funk jams, but again it just didn’t seem to be noticed. Not until the arrival of Prince in the 1980s did another artist so successfully unite the rhythms of funk with the nasty, distorted guitar of hard rock. Later in the same decade, hip-hop began to incorporate a hard rock guitar sound, and soon it became an accepted thing.

Of course, Miles was also creating some music that fell into the rock area. In fact, reissue producer Bob Belden has said “This is the album that is going to get Miles into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame.” “Go Ahead John” pretty much gets into a pure rock groove, even though it starts out with a lyrical Miles trumpet statement and moves through a few different styles. We can now enjoy the jam, including lengthy solos by Miles, Steve Grossman, and, of course, John McLaughlin. When the track was originally released in 1974 as part of the Big Fun double album it was cobbled together from various parts of the takes heard here (five in all) and mixed with an automatic switching device that moved McLaughlin’s guitar sound back and forth between channels in what now comes across as a fairly amateur dub technique. Unfortunately, it was excruciating and just plain uninteresting to listen to. Here, it becomes much more interesting, even though there is no single track that truly constitutes a whole piece of music. It doesn’t matter though—these sessions, done March 3, 1970, were definitely some kind of run through for what would become the Jack Johnson soundtrack, sharing a particular affinity with “Right Off.” Another track with a rock bent is “Honky Tonk,” two versions of which are heard here. Part of the first (labeled Take 2) was used as the final track that appeared on the Get Up With It album. In addition, the introduction was fused to a live Cellar Door performance as an intro to the track “Sivad” from Live-Evil. The track is arresting as it often threatens to settle into a clichéd blues rock groove, but never does for very long, the rhythm consistently being broken up by Keith Jarrett and Billy Cobham. The May 19 session from which “Honky Tonk” comes was Jarrett’s first with the Davis group, and he appears on many of the set’s remaining sessions as well, but he may well have been figuring out his role for much of this, because he is never as strong an element in the music as one might have expected. In all likelihood we’ll have to wait for the complete Cellar Door performances to be released to really gauge Jarrett’s impact, because that is when the group supposedly began to really gel.

Things get a little less interesting over the last two discs in the set, which feature the last studio sessions that Miles & Company would have for nearly two years. The multiple versions of “Nem Um Talvez” that Davis recorded with Hermeto Pascoal are interesting primarily because they show that more interesting versions of this existed than were used on Live-Evil, but they are not so interesting as to completely alter one’s perception of the piece. Other pieces that appeared in some version on Live-Evil, including “Little Church” and “Selim” don’t benefit from their inclusion here because there’s nothing new to add and the original tracks weren’t as full of ideas as some of the other pieces. The lengthy open jam “The Mask” that is featured on Disc Five was played live a few times, but this is the first time the studio versions have been heard. Unfortunately, there isn’t a lot of interest here, even for free jazz fans. The disc, and the set, end with the original album-length versions of “Right Off” and “Yesternow”

That’s not to say that the music on these last couple of discs isn’t interesting at all, it’s just questionable how often any listener will want to return to them. The same cannot be said of the first three discs in the set—they are completely arresting, artistically stunning, and unlike quite anything else that had been heard up until their recording.

The remaining material, all named after boxers (with the exception of “Willie Nelson” which wasn’t titled until it was pulled from the vaults in the early ‘80s for release) are Miles’s most straightforward funk/blues/rock statements. “Johnny Bratton” is a slow burn urban groove featuring wide-open chords from McLaughlin, Dave Holland’s electric bass groove, and Jack DeJohnette’s driving drumming. On the subsequent two takes (there are three included) it begins to percolate more, with McLaughlin playing more of a rhythm guitar role. “Archie Moore,” recorded only once, is a slow blues by the same lineup that recorded “Go Ahead John.” Miles apparently thought he had a hit record with “Duran,” which features an incredibly hooky bass line played by Holland and Billy Cobham’s excellent drumming. While it is closer to what we normally think of as fusion than most of Davis’s other work, it lacks any interesting melodic structure that might have made it successful with rock listeners. “Sugar Ray,” a tribute to Miles’s role model, presages the kind of stop/start funk groove that would be utilized on On The Corner and subsequent Davis work, although here it is presented in a much more open, less dense manner. Toward the end drummer Lenny White breaks into a stuttering sixteenth note beat that will sound familiar to anyone who listens to today’s electronic Drum ‘N’ Bass music. “Ali,” recorded at the same session that yielded “Honky Tonk” is structured around a killer bass riff, with Miles darting in and out making brash pronouncements just as Ali himself did. On all of these tracks Davis plays with an aggressive, in your face style that was somewhat new for him, and a definite change for listeners more familiar with the introverted sound of his muted trumpet and lyrical playing on recordings such as “My Funny Valentine” and “Someday My Prince Will Come.”

This was clearly a very fertile period for Miles Davis and his musicians in the studio, but like all things it came to an end. Davis began to concentrate on his live band, seeking to turn the music he had been working on in the studio into an exciting listening experience for a live audience. It seems as though Miles would work out the new sound or ideas he had in the studio and then slowly introduce the new repertoire into his live sets until the music he was playing live was in line with what he was releasing on record. Several live recordings were done during this period as well, and a wealth of material was recorded that was never released. Davis would only make two more real statements via studio work during the remainder of the decade: On The Corner and Get Up With It. While On the Corner would advance Davis’s concept of black urban funk, it didn’t connect with either a jazz or rock audience very well and remains Davis’s most controversial release. Get Up With It contained much of interest, but it was ultimately a hodgepodge of styles from sessions held between 1970 and 1974. The music that Miles created during 1970 was mostly overshadowed by the release of Bitches Brew, and most of the work that came after (including the Fillmore East and West albums, Live-Evil, and Jack Johnson) have long been seen as disappointing followup work to that major release. With the release of these long-unheard recordings (and the upcoming release of a Cellar Door box set) it can now be stated that nothing could be further from the truth. Miles had simply moved on by the time the record-buying public caught up to where he was at, a not infrequent occurrence in the career of this one-of-a-kind jazz pioneer. The Complete Jack Johnson Sessions scores a decisive knockout in five rounds.