Sometimes it seems like the end of history.
This is the time of year when - in the 1980s, ’90s and the ’00s - I might be preparing a list of the best or “most important” records of the year. I’d be flipping through physical artifacts - vinyl records or CDs - re-listening and thinking about how the sounds were made, how they matter and why I might value one above another. And how to present a brief for the most affecting, surprising and joy-infusing of them.
But you know what happened to music. Or worse, you don’t, and you resent the privileged snobbery of anyone who might presume to be a “critic.” There’s always fun to be had for the alert and receptive; if pressed I could come up with a list. I kind of liked parts of that Miley Cyrus record and I think I understand Kanye West’s stance as the sort of public intellectual who is “no fan of books.” We’re out of history now, back to Year Zero. We’ve got about a century’s worth of would-be popular music atomized and uploaded that any of us can pull down out of the ether any time we want it.
We can start from anywhere and leap to anywhere; if we have a little bit of a knack and the proper tools, we can manipulate and rejigger the digital DNA of golden oldies, turn them inside out and transpose them into different keys and match them up with other beats and voices. And the living shall commune with the dead, the voices of ghosts shall be repurposed and spun into Soundcloud uploads and You-Tube videos. We have been delivered to a post-literate world where the old skill sets that went into music-making no longer apply. That’s not all bad, it’s just progress.
Also, we can go back to what once was, as Columbia/ Legacy has done with Miles Davis: The Original Mono Recordings ($109.99), returning his pre-stereo-era music to the way Davis wanted it presented.
But the new musical reality baffles record companies that feel the need to sell us things and artists who still want to be paid for the music they make. Most of the music that arrives in my house in some tangible form is old music, repackaged and prettied up for that demographic that still prefers to touch the things they’ve bought. All I want for Christmas is Sony/ Legacy’s Bob Dylan: The Complete Album Collection Vol. 1, a $280, 47-CD compilation of his released work to date (even though I already have all the music contained on those albums) and the complete Paul Simon set (The Complete Albums Collection, 15 CDs, $139.98), although I probably have all the bonus tracks that come with it.
When I was younger, those career-spanning anthologies reminded me of little tombs, but in an age when most music lives on hard drives and in the communal air of cyberspace, their concreteness is convenient and reassuring; a reminder that there is a real world out there beyond our screens.
There are those who will argue that it all went wrong when we began recording music, that the explosion of jukeboxes during the 1930s decimated the corps of American musicians playing in a vernacular style and introduced a slick professionalism into what had been an eerie and eccentric, atavistic cultural practice.
I do not know what Miles Davis thought about that, or what he would think about the fetishization of his work or the planned obsolescence of most American pop. It is far easier to reduce Davis to a caricature - Skeletor with a horn, a Yoruban cool ex-junkie with a rasping voice and an unbanked anger who, had he but an hour to live, would spend it “slowly strangling a white boy” - than to begin to understand him. He has been dead 22 years and hardly a day goes by when I don’t think of him and his dark and winding sound, his blats and lines and mystery.
Miles Davis: The Original Mono Recordings collects the first nine albums he recorded for Columbia beginning with 1955’s ’Round About Midnight, running through the masterpieces Kind of Blue (1959) and Sketches of Spain (1960) and winding up with the difficult-to-find 1964 album Miles & Monk at Newport. (The album’s title is slightly disingenuous; Davis and Monk don’t appear together on any of its tracks and Davis’ portion of it was recorded in 1958, five years before Monk’s three cuts.)
The other rare album in the set is Jazz Track, Davis’ soundtrack to the 1958 Louis Malle film Ascenseur pour l’échafaud (Elevator to the Gallows) with three additional tracks from a session recorded right before the Kind of Blue dates.
While some might argue that the mono set is superfluous given the proliferation of Davis material - I own at least seven different iterations of Kind of Blue - there is something to be said for the mixes presented here.They were the original presentations of the material; Davis and his engineers and producers preferred them even after the widespread adoption of stereo in 1958. I prefer the mono versions of Kind of Blue and Sketches of Spain but don’t have much of an opinion about the others.
The set documents a remarkably fertile five years in the life of one of the 20th century’s most important musicians - and it doesn’t even include all the great music Davis recorded during the period. He was famously signed to Columbia in October 1955while he was still under contract to Prestige. He immediately began recording for Columbia, but none of those recordings could be issued until he’d delivered four albums he owed his old label.
That he was ever signed by Columbia was something of a fluke, for the label’s head jazz producer, George Avakian, considered Davis, then 29 years old, a washed-up heroin casualty. But in July 1955 he saw Davis perform with a quintet led by Thelonious Monk during an intermission set at the Newport Jazz Festival. They played Charlie Parker’s blues “Now’s the Time” and Monk’s “’Round Midnight.” In the latter tune, Davis played his solo with a mute. Monk didn’t like it, but it earned Davis a standing ovation, and Avakian renewed.
“I wanted to leave Prestige because they weren’t paying me no money - not what I thought I was worth,” Davis wrote in his autobiography. “They had signed me for peanuts when I was a junkie and had hardly ever given me any extra. When the word got around that I was leaving … a lot of guys thought that I was cold-blooded to leave. … But I had to look ahead and start thinking about my future, and the way I saw it I couldn’t turn down the kind of money Columbia was offering. I mean I would have been a fool to do it. Plus, it was all coming from the white man ….”
Davis’ Columbia contract reportedly called for him to be paid $300,000 a year, and he was given a $4,000 advance against the royalties for ’Round About Midnight, which was finally released in February 1957.
’Round About Midnight was Davis’ second landmark album, announcing his return to full health. It also set the stage for the most productive and satisfying section of Davis’ career in which Davis and tenor saxophonist John Coltrane worked within the confines of what has come to be known as the “first great quintet” with pianist Red Garland, bassist Paul Chambers and drummer Philly Joe Jones. This quintet produced some of the most authoritative and intriguing music of the 20th century. Davis’ later excursion into fusion and his earlier hard bop work with Parker are important periods in their own right, but the heart of Davis’ career is here in these nine discs.
Jazz is difficult to write about because it has a mutable grammar, an imperative to iconoclasm and a healthy disregard for the opinions of the unhip. It is intuitive and reflexive and, at its highest levels, accomplished without much conscious thought. Jazz is shamanism, a savage magic one believes or doesn’t. As such, it can be dismissed or adopted by the genuinely pretentious who invariably argue for the obscure over the known, the hard-to-swallow over the melt-in-your-mouth, their golden taste over yours.
It is not like rock ’n’ roll, a form so democratic that anyone can play it, even the tone-deaf and fatuous. Rock ’n’ roll is mostly about the pose, the sneer and costume, the noise and the jangle and the outrage. There’s always something to write - about its politics and nihilism or the silly faces rock singers make. It’s easy to write about rock ’n’ roll, for most of it is imminently explicable.
But jazz - while it has inherent elements of fashion and politics - is mainly music. Talent is not a prerequisite for rock ’n’ roll. Jazz requires fluency in a wordless tongue. While there are few absolutes in jazz, it is possible to be wrong. And if you are wrong, you are exposed. Everyone in the room will know you are wrong - except maybe you.
Jazz is a language many may grasp, but few can speak. It is not coded and concrete.Notes are not words and meaning does not discretely attach to them. Jazz is context and condition; the only inarguable circumstance is that every listener hears what he hears.
Or, as Davis used to say, the music speaks for itself.
Email: pmartin@arkansasonline.com
Style, Pages 47 on 12/15/2013