Klaus wrote:
Same Jens. It took me years to really understand that period of Miles's music too, but I struggled with Miles in general when I was getting into jazz. People always say his albums are a good introduction to the music, but I'm not sure that's actually true. I found him elusive in the sense that he doesn't have a defined sound. Or rather, he has six or seven different sounds and styles. His trumpet sound is unique, but the music itself is always vastly different, because he always evolved and kept exploring new ideas and expressions. If you didn't know you'd never guess in a million years that the same guy made Birth of the Cool, Sketches of Spain and Bitches Brew.
Apparently a lot of people can pick up Kind of Blue and find it amazing the first time they play it, but I needed to start at the beginning and hear his development from playing with Dizzy and Parker, then inventing cool jazz, continuing through hardbop and into modal, etc, in order to really get that record. The experimenting is such a big part of his music. Change becomes a feature of the music itself, how it grows and evolves. Recordings like Bitches Brew never really made sense until I got there naturally. It felt like trying to read the middle chapter of a book without having a clue what it's about.
i think his career is actually a great study in music, and what we expect out of artists and bands. i personally love his output from 59-67 the most. the workin'/steamin' lineups with garland/coltrane/chambers and jones are great, then kind of blue and sketches. the mid 60s lineup is probably the most talented group he ever assembled. shorter, hancock, carter, and williams just had unbelievable chemistry. seven steps to heaven through filles de kilimanjaro is probably the best 7 album run in music history. his fusion stuff, starting with in a silent way, is very good, but its mood music for me, in a lot of ways. i need to be in a certain mood to listen to bitches brew, but, i could listen to sorcerer or nefertiti at any time, no matter the mood im in. miles seemed to march to the beat of his own drum, which most geniuses do. i think some of what he did failed, and some it hit the heights that no one, or almost no one, could ever reach. thats what musical exploration is all about.
the present day equivalent to him, in my opinion, is john zorn. zorn is in the avant garde space, but hes created hundreds of albums spanning all different aspects of not only jazz, but fringe genres like grindcore and cartoon music. hes written film scores, hes adapted older pieces and put a new spin on them, hes created a bunch of different "bands", similar to how miles built the first quintet and the second quintet (the masada lineup for zorn, and then the dreamers/electric masada lineup that supplemented it). some of his music is inaccessible and pure dissonance, some of it is just mindblowing and almost too much to comprehend.
i much prefer an artist who is willing to fall on his face trying to do something new, which is why im a big fan of live improvisational music, from jazz to jambands. experimentation, surprising me with something i wasn't expecting, is always preferable to just connecting a to b and going through the motions.
