Watched this tonight, very enjoyable. And how about Airto Moreira's tribute performance to Miles?
Watched this tonight, very enjoyable. And how about Airto Moreira's tribute performance to Miles?
Interviewer of reprobate ne'er-do-well musicians of the long-haired rock n' roll persuasion at: www.velvetthunder.co.uk and former scribe at Classic Rock Society. Only vaguely aware of anything other than music.
*** Join me in the Garden of Delights for 3 hours of tune-spinning... every Saturday at 5pm EST on Deep Nuggets radio! www.deepnuggets.com ***
It wasn't Johnny Mac playing on the In A Silent Way session that bothered Tony, but rather the possibility that Miles was angling to poach the guitarist. It's possible Miles may have maneuvered to have McLaughlin play on the session without telling Tony. Imagine you're a guy who's putting together your own band, you've specifically brought a musician over from another country specifically for that purpose. Then you turn for a session by a bandleader who's notorious for hijacking musicians from other bandleaders, and you see the very same guitarist that you brought to NYC to play in your band, it's easy to see what he'd be upset about. I've even heard it suggested that's why Tony plays the same rhythm through about 2/3's of the album (which by the way, is one of the things I love about In A Silent Way, that he stays on that one groove for so long).Originally Posted by Dave (in MA)
According to the Wikipedia article on IASW, Williams was afraid of losing Larry Young to Davis, and sent him home, and that's how Zawinul ended up being involved.
Ah, so perhaps Tony was worried that Miles was going to hijack his entire band, before they even had to chance to do anything.
If you've heard the IASW box set you know IASW was cribbed together from a lot of snippets of tape by Teo Macero. Tony plays the same rhythm through 2/3 of IASW because his contribution is looped and repeated several times.
Teo was really a huge part of the releases from IASW, Bitches Brew, Jack Johnson too.....
Teo was a big part of Miles' albums throughout pretty much all of his classic era stuff, not just the late 60's/early 70's. In jazz, any producer is a big part of deciding what form the music is released in, in terms of which take is going to be "the master", track order, etc. Teo took that a step further by editing stuff together and so forth, going all the way back to Kind Of Blue, at least. You know the story about the "malfunctioning" tape machine that caused side two of Kind Of Blue to be originally mastered at the wrong speed? Well, I heard an interview from Teo once where he insisted he did that deliberately because he thought the tracks sounded better running a little faster. He said, "It's like they're criticizing my work", in reference to the 90's era reissue that had the material in question running at the supposed "correct" speed. And I believe I read he also did a lot of tape splicing on Sketches Of Spain also.
Teo also did a lot of tape editing and so forth on Live/Evil and the Fillmore East double album. In the Cellar Door boxset, there's an elaborate explanation of exactly what Teo did on side four of Live/Evil, the details of which I've largely forgotten (the booklet is sitting in a box right behind me, if I could be bothered to look it up).
I know there's big chunks cut, wholesale, on At Fillmore East, also. He said "We were making a Miles Davis album, not a Chick Core album, or a Steve Grossman album, ya know what I mean?", I guess meaning that what he cut was the solos by the other band members, or at least, he edited them down so they weren't quite so long.
Be that as it may, the very first time I listened to the Fillmore East album, I could heard all those edits. To me, if a listener can spot where you cut a chunk of music out on the first listen, you've done a bad job. Having said that, the original Fillmore East album is still pretty awesome. I somehow wasn't expecting to like that one much, buying it really on the recommendation of a musician friend of mine, and ended up liking it quite a bit (though I still say the Pete Cosey era band was the best of the Electric Miles bands).
And having said that, the four CD release from last year that finally restored all four sets from the Fillmore East run to their original form as they occurred on the nights they were recorded, is even better.
Well, he must have played that rhythm at least twice, because the version you hear on side one he's playing on the hihat (which I think is about the only thing we hear him play on side one), and on side two, he plays it on snare drum for a long stretch, before finally breaking into the doing a more typical jazz drumming thing on the full drumkit toward the end of side two.
But I'm not sure if those were loops or not. My copy of the boxset vanished on me a couple years ago, and I still haven't figured out which black hole in this house it fell into, but my recollection is the boxset had all the disassembled bits that Teo spliced together, and you hear Tony playing like that on the actual session as it happened. On the other hand, I suppose Teo could have made up loops and overdubbed the other musicians on top of it.
Either way, I still think it's one of the best examples of drumming anywhere. Great grooves, and perfect examples of how less is indeed more (Sorry, Yngwie!). Likewise, I love McLaughlin's guitar work on In A Silent Way and Bitches Brew. There's a longstanding story of Miles supposedly telling McLaughlin to play "the most fucked up, white bread, un-jazz playing" he could muster. I don't know hear "white bread" so much as "less is more" in what Johnny Mac does on those two albums. And I still think it's astounding that's a Gibson acoustic guitar with a soundhole pickup mounted on it on In A Silent Way, as opposed to a "proper" electric guitar.
And one more Miles thought: I love the bit on the Bitches Brew boxset, where Teo asks Miles if the next take was going to be part two or just another take of the bit they had just done or whatever. Miles barks at him, "It's going to be part nine, what difference does it make, mother...?!". Teo's like, "OK, OK...this is part something". There's something I find amusing about that bit.
He was busy first with Tony Williams Lifetime, which was his primary commitment...and then his own Mahavishnu Orchestra. He was very clear with Miles, as I recall reading, that he would not tour with him.
Teo began doing what became known as "collaging" with IASW. Miles would go into the studio and do lengthy jams (check out the Jack Johnson box to hear endless repetitions) and hand the tapes to Macero, who would edit them down into cogent forms.
With IASW, he actually took a chunk from the beginning of side one "Shhh" and repeated it, pretty much exactly, after "Peaceful."
Macro did, in some instances, create loops though I can't recall when he did. Of course, back then, loops really were loops - loops of tape that were made by literally cutting out chunks of tape and splicing them together. Just as, back in the days of analog tape, folks sometimes did edits the same way - an exacto knife and some precision cutting and pasting (literally). I was on a session once where the producer changed the arrangement, and when we ran the tune down everyone remembered...except for me. So, with an exacto knife and scotch tape, he fixed it. Listening to it, you'd never know it....it was so surgically precise I'd challenge anyone to hear it.
Pre-digital and Pro Tools, there were certain guys who were masters with a knife and scotch tape....it was pretty amazing to watch...even more amazing to hear the results.
I have to say that Laswell's Panthalassa is among my top handful of electric-well, any-Miles discs.
(And Panthalassa:The Remixes is probably my least favorite)
I don't want to derail the thread at all, but isn't this how Yes and Eddy Offord did Close to the Edge, too?
Music isn't about chops, or even about talent - it's about sound and the way that sound communicates to people. Mike Keneally
It's how most rock albums after the mid 60's were made. Most of the classic progressive rock albums (including most of our favorite, Yes, Genesis, ELP, etc records) were done that way, with each section of a given piece of music recorded separately then comped together after the fact.
There were of course exceptions. I remember watching a documentary about Tom Petty And The Heartbreakers, and Benmont Tench talks about how they did something like 40 takes of Refugee, because "it didn't occur to us to comp takes together, so every time someone messed up we went back to the top of the song and start again".
Indeed.
If you listen to the Beatles hits on decent headphones they're full of splices -- and they were only three minutes long.
I read the above statement as (paraphrasing here) "Tony was furious at Miles for trying to poach John for his live band DURING the Silent Way recording sessions," but perhaps that's wrong, too.
Some of you may like this, or may be not.
http://www.cdbaby.com/cd/anestofeggs2
The way I understood it, that's exactly what Miles tried to do. I'm sure it's mentioned somewhere that McLaughlin said Miles actually came up to him and offered him a job, and McLaughlin turned him down because he wished to honor his commitment to play in Tony's band.
And I could have sworn I read once that Miles tried to pull the same stunt during the Bitches Brew sessions, but by then, McLaughlin was already thinking about what was to become Mahavishnu Orchestra.
I like how each track is $.99, but they want $9.99 for the whole album. I've never ordered from CDBaby before - is that for artwork?
Music isn't about chops, or even about talent - it's about sound and the way that sound communicates to people. Mike Keneally
Yeah, but it wasn't just a matter of ethics; McLaughlin LOVED playing in Tony Williams' Lifetime; at the time, he considered it to be his dream band.
A little different actually. My understanding is groups like Yes, ELP, VdGG, etc would break long songs into more manageable chunks to record and, yes, engineers would then splice them together.
But Teo took long improvisational passages that had no prior intention of necessarily going together, and constructed compositions out of them.
It may sound like splitting hairs but it's not: one is because groups felt they could not manage a good full take (heck, vdgg never played "lighthouse keepers" in its entirety 'til last year's tour); the other, The creation of compositions out of improvisational snippets that may or may not have had any intention of belonging together. The former is quite typical engineering work; the other is true collatgng...
i reviewed this even it first came out.
True story. The producer was advertising the record at All About Jazz, and when he read my review - despite it largely being positive, got his back up from the final paragraph that started with:
He first contacted me to complain, and I simply said "if you are going to try and remake an album as iconic and groundbreaking, you can't expect there not to be comparisons.Purists may cringe at such a literal reinterpretation of a timeless recording like Kind of Blue, and to be certain, A New Kind of Blue is not destined to be a classic either in terms of its musical impact, nor in terms of the performances, which are strong but don't have the kind of "wow factor" of the original.
"Plus," says I, "I did follow that with this ending":
Hardly a trashing.But what Guthrie has created, with his g.org band, is an homage that sheds some light on the musical connection between Evans and Davis, lends a contemporary and extended spin to some ageless material and, quite simply, makes for an entertaining and engaging listen.
"Not good enough," says he, who then goes over my head to All About Jazz founder/publisher Michael Ricci, asking him to pull my review. Michael re-read my review and deemed it a more than positive one that should be taken as such, despite being compared to the original. Quite rightly, he explained to the producer, no matter how good it is, it can't be expected to be considered on the same level as such an iconic classic.
"Not good enough!" says the producer yet again. "Pull the review; after all, I paid for advertising..." So Michael tells him he will not take the review down, but that he'd be happy to pull the ad and refund the guy's money, which is what happened.
One early reason to explain why I came to All About Jazz and ended up staying there ever since. Michael's a tremendously supportive publisher who only calls writers to tasks when there's a real reason...not when some guy decides to make an album, with admittedly fine players like Randy Brecker, and redo a classic as if it were made in the CD age so you could go longer with the tunes...much longer (too much, some might say, but I didn't). To think that it could be held up beside the original - a very good imitation/extrapolation, to be sure, but a long way from innovative and landscape changing - and not have that mentioned would have been, IMO, irresponsible.
Anyway, it's still a decent record well played but, with hindsight a flawed - stupid, even - concept. But if you like the players, it's certainly well worth a spin, but it won't make you turf your original Miles Davis album in its stead...
Last edited by jkelman; 05-26-2015 at 09:08 AM.
With a dick producer.
True, but we'll never know how many "prog epics" were spliced together in the studio versus being designed that way.
So the paid ad went away, but he still got a positive review published, for free.
Posting Permissions
Reply With Quote
Bookmarks