Miles Davis in Concert (1973)
- Details
- Written by T-Shirtwolf
I'm really glad I picked up a sweet copy of Miles Davis in Concert on vinyl. There are a couple advantages to the CD issue (now out of print - but obtainable), namely the removal of the fake crowd noise that opens or closes some sides of the vinyl, and the lack of interruption between sides 3 and 4. But the vinyl version says so much more, mostly because it says nothing at all.
No song titles. No personnel. Just some funky cover art and four sides of groove.
This gesture was a big middle-finger to the jazz establishment which had rejected Miles' 1972 opus On the Corner. And it remains a middle-finger stuck in the face of Wynton Marsalis, Ken Burns and every other contributor to the Jazz Mausoleum that has been under construction for the last 25+ years. Miles still reminds us what really mattered about jazz, that its vitality came from a living two-way connection with the popular music around it and not from the trappings of respectability and quasi-academic critical acclaim. Jazz never needed to be "Afro-American Classical Music" as some were trying to style it at the time. It never needed ambassadors or schoolmarms to teach us how to "understand" it. It needed to be heard and felt, danced to, talked over, smoked up and gotten down with. And that's what Miles Davis in Concert is good for.
It's easy enough now to find out when it was recorded, who the players are and what the titles of the compositions are. Many titles later appeared in 1974's Big Fun and Get Up, With It LPs. But imagine picking up this record and just having no idea what anything was or who was playing it. It'll take you back to times when jazz was real music for real people instead of fodder for PBS specials.