MILES OUTSIDE THE COMFORT ZONE
I’m currently reading a highly informative and authoritative biography of Miles Davis by Ian Carr. (Spookily, a book I ordered at about the same time that the author died).
I’m a latecomer to Jazz and there’s still a lot within this genre that leaves me cold, much as I’ve tried to like it. Many years ago I bought a copy of Miles Davis’ ‘A Kind of Blue’ and ‘Sketches of Spain’ – the former mainly because it is so often cited as the greatest Jazz album ever made. I can appreciate the superlative musicianship and the super cool vibe it has but I can’t honestly say that I am not as excited by it as I am by rock music.
I assumed, therefore, that because I grew up on a diet of The Beatles, Motown and, later on, Prog-Rock and Punk meant that my ears were simply not attuned to what there was to ‘get’ about these ‘classic’ Jazz records.
However, something has clicked over the past couple of years. I now find I can hear more clearly the link between Free Jazz and Free Folk, for example. Here, I use to term ‘Folk’ very loosely. I don’t mean acoustic song-based music but, rather, the many mutations and contaminations of the form through drones – ambient – noise – psych-rock. Jazz is another genre to add to this list.
The young Italian saxophonist Valerio Cosi helped a lot in highlighting this missing link. The Jazz spirit is present in his work even though he also incorporates many different musical styles. I blogged about him as part of the new (weird) experimental music in the Italian underground in October 2008.
By this roundabout route I came back to Miles Davis, this time entering his world a decade on from his ‘Kind of Blue’ period with two albums released in 1969 which Ian Carr says “worked like a boxer’s knock out combination” – ‘Silent Way’ setting up the KO to be delivered by ‘Bitches Brew’. These were not widely embraced by Jazz purists mainly because by this time Davis was drawing on other forms, notably rock rhythms. You don’t hear this so much in the pure, calming sounds on ‘Silent Way’ but both albums are important to establishing him as a musical innovator who always wanted to set himself (and his listeners) fresh challenges. He wasn’t interested in being merely an entertainer or trading on his past successes. The uncompromising attitude is well captured in a quote in Carr’s biography:
“We play music for you to learn and listen. The kids, they are so great they can dig what we’re giving them. The rest of the people give them shit. They give them the same old fucking thing to be comfortable. That’s the reason we are playing, not to be pop stars. What does it mean to sell out to the kids? I haven’t sold old to the kids. I don’t sell out to nobody”
Making music that takes me on a journey away from the comfort zone is something I can never get enough of.
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