Just recently started to listen to this on youtube and im made aware of how little i know of mile's massive body of work

Is it dug on in the org planet of jazz?

me? im digging it !

i like it, it's part of my fave miles period

nice..how would you describe the period?

have you heard/got water babies?

Its an unique outing because I thought the supporting cast especially Drums and Percussionist Tony Williams carried this album. I really don't find Davis's playing up to snuff but his compositions are as brilliant and dynamic as ever. I loved how the band filled in the need spaces with their playing I still don't now where they are going but... when they come to the "end" they fit in their respective places... very enjoyable album to listen too.

First Quintet

Miles Davis- Trumpet
Wayne Shorter- Saxophone
Chick Corea- Electric Piano
Dave Holland- Bass
Tony Williams- Drums and Percussion

Tracks: 1 & 5

Second Quintet

Miles Davis- Trumpet

Wayne Shorter- Saxophone
Herbie Hancock- Rhodes Electric Piano
Ron Carter- Electric Bass
Tony Williams- Drums and Percussion

Tracks: 2-4, & 6

============================

[Edited 1/16/13 19:25pm]

jonylawson said:

have you heard/got water babies?

i actually have all of miles officially released studio albums and pretty much all bar maybe some of those cheapo unnoficial live cds you get for £3 with no recording details. i have a load of boots too. i even have most of the expensive box sets, the original fancy packaging ones in most cases, with the metal sides. a few were repacked cheaply later but i got most at record fairs at decent prices

it's the more experimental later 60s to mid 70s miles period i like best. kind of blue, esp and sketches of spain are great albums, but it's stuff like in a silent way, bitches brew and on the corner where things get the most interesting, and the transitional period in between that you are mentioning is interesting to see him change the boundaries of jazz. it's not fully far out yet, but notably different to a kind of blue. i also like pangaea and agharta the two live japanese albums that were recorded the same day, just 1 track per cd. i also like pharao saunders and alice coltrane who are quite experiemental. even coltrane dabbled in some far out stuff. he went full retard on an album that is just sax and drums. it literally sounds like the drum kit is falling down the stairs whilst someone is ramming the sax down coltranes throat

water babies is actually a compilation album of left overs from the period i mentioned. it was released when miles had retired in the 70s. about half the album is from the in a silent way sessions. it shows the transitional stage between the accoustic and electric period. it's not a terrible "coda" style effort but i'd suggest getting the best proper albums first. have a read at the discography on wiki and following the pages per album to get a feel for the period, you can click up and down to the next albums. all music may help too

It's a transitional record.

I don't think it's as good as the couple of records that preceded it or followed it. But if you want to listen to something that already has a lot of the same vibe as the 1970s fusion stuff, but is still 60s jazz then that'll do the trick.

unique said:

[...] even coltrane dabbled in some far out stuff. he went full retard on an album that is just sax and drums. it literally sounds like the drum kit is falling down the stairs whilst someone is ramming the sax down coltranes throat

Interstellar Space? That one didn't come out until the mid-70s though. It's pretty tough to say what sessions he would have released himself had he not died.

I prefer those recordings by him that are somewhere between sounding like "someone is ramming the sax down Coltrane's throat" and his earlier soulful approach.

unique said:

jonylawson said:

have you heard/got water babies?

i actually have all of miles officially released studio albums and pretty much all bar maybe some of those cheapo unnoficial live cds you get for £3 with no recording details. i have a load of boots too. i even have most of the expensive box sets, the original fancy packaging ones in most cases, with the metal sides. a few were repacked cheaply later but i got most at record fairs at decent prices

it's the more experimental later 60s to mid 70s miles period i like best. kind of blue, esp and sketches of spain are great albums, but it's stuff like in a silent way, bitches brew and on the corner where things get the most interesting, and the transitional period in between that you are mentioning is interesting to see him change the boundaries of jazz. it's not fully far out yet, but notably different to a kind of blue. i also like pangaea and agharta the two live japanese albums that were recorded the same day, just 1 track per cd. i also like pharao saunders and alice coltrane who are quite experiemental. even coltrane dabbled in some far out stuff. he went full retard on an album that is just sax and drums. it literally sounds like the drum kit is falling down the stairs whilst someone is ramming the sax down coltranes throat

water babies is actually a compilation album of left overs from the period i mentioned. it was released when miles had retired in the 70s. about half the album is from the in a silent way sessions. it shows the transitional stage between the accoustic and electric period. it's not a terrible "coda" style effort but i'd suggest getting the best proper albums first. have a read at the discography on wiki and following the pages per album to get a feel for the period, you can click up and down to the next albums. all music may help too

cheers man

i have about ten miles davis albums...love in a slinet way and on the corner but im just aware he has a fucking massive back catalogue

naiivly perhaps hes the one artist that reminds of prince the most..that whole always looking forward vibe except maybe miles last couple

The biggest annoyance on Filles is really the RMI electric piano, which is heard on a couple of tracks played by Chick Corea (it sounds like a toy piano). Thnkfully they chose to use a Rhodes on the following ones.

novabrkr said:

unique said:

[...] even coltrane dabbled in some far out stuff. he went full retard on an album that is just sax and drums. it literally sounds like the drum kit is falling down the stairs whilst someone is ramming the sax down coltranes throat

Interstellar Space? That one didn't come out until the mid-70s though. It's pretty tough to say what sessions he would have released himself had he not died.

I prefer those recordings by him that are somewhere between sounding like "someone is ramming the sax down Coltrane's throat" and his earlier soulful approach.

i think that's the one. it was so horrible i might have actually taken it back for a refund, or at least never played it again. i thought it was just 2 tracks on the cd, but not according to wiki, maybe the first 4 tracks segue into each other, or maybe it just sounded so bad it blended into one long thing of noise. at least it wasn't a long album. impulse put out a lot of great stuff around the 90s and early 00s but one or two things i bought i just couldn't get into at all, but most of it was fantastic

jonylawson said:

unique said:

i actually have all of miles officially released studio albums and pretty much all bar maybe some of those cheapo unnoficial live cds you get for £3 with no recording details. i have a load of boots too. i even have most of the expensive box sets, the original fancy packaging ones in most cases, with the metal sides. a few were repacked cheaply later but i got most at record fairs at decent prices

it's the more experimental later 60s to mid 70s miles period i like best. kind of blue, esp and sketches of spain are great albums, but it's stuff like in a silent way, bitches brew and on the corner where things get the most interesting, and the transitional period in between that you are mentioning is interesting to see him change the boundaries of jazz. it's not fully far out yet, but notably different to a kind of blue. i also like pangaea and agharta the two live japanese albums that were recorded the same day, just 1 track per cd. i also like pharao saunders and alice coltrane who are quite experiemental. even coltrane dabbled in some far out stuff. he went full retard on an album that is just sax and drums. it literally sounds like the drum kit is falling down the stairs whilst someone is ramming the sax down coltranes throat

water babies is actually a compilation album of left overs from the period i mentioned. it was released when miles had retired in the 70s. about half the album is from the in a silent way sessions. it shows the transitional stage between the accoustic and electric period. it's not a terrible "coda" style effort but i'd suggest getting the best proper albums first. have a read at the discography on wiki and following the pages per album to get a feel for the period, you can click up and down to the next albums. all music may help too

cheers man

i have about ten miles davis albums...love in a slinet way and on the corner but im just aware he has a fucking massive back catalogue

naiivly perhaps hes the one artist that reminds of prince the most..that whole always looking forward vibe except maybe miles last couple

i would agree he is one of the artists most like prince in that he has been very progressive with his music even if it meant alienating his fans, and he has quite a big catalogue but then he had a long career. i think frank zappa is another one that's similarly like prince for similar reasons, he also has a hardcore collecting based fanbase and a large number of bootlegs

if you want to dig further into miles then i'd suggest sticking with studio albums from kind of blue onwards, and use wiki/allmusic as a guide and get the "proper" albums that were recorded and released as albums, rather than the ones that are compilations of previously unreleased material (you can get those later as they aren't bad), and stick to the late 60s to the 70s retirement period. all those albums are on CBS/sony and you can get them for about £5

in the 80s you have tutu which is good, and there is aura which is a bit bland, your under arrest isn't bad, very commercial and it has a great cover of human nature on it. miles also covered time after time (cyndi lauper) and perfect way (scritti politti - to which he also played on on of their own tracks). bee bop was the hip hop styled album which i'm not a fan of. so not much in the 90s period to get (there are more than the ones i mentioned though). for the earlier period there is a 20 album box set which is on 10 cds that i got for about £12 from amazon, which was a great deal and helps cover his early albums (the licensing is in public domain or something which is why they are cheap). some of them aren't bad and are what many peoples idea of "proper jazz" is, so look for that. there was also a recent CBS boxset relatively cheaply on CBS/sony which the best of the CBS studio albums, so a bargain if you wanted them, but a strange choice as too many albums and a bit high a price for a first time listener, and the miles fan/collector has the other box sets that are more indepth, so it's like picking a dozen of princes best albums in a box set with no extras, and charging £50. a bargain, but fans don't need it and normal punters aren't going to pay that money

so there's basically about 51 studio albums which you can get the 20 album box set of the early stuff, then get the CBS stuff from later 60s to 70s. and get tutu for the 90s. then you have 36 official live albums to which agharta, pangae, black magus and bitches brew live cover the peak 70s experimental stuff, which i'd suggest. most of the rest are the earlier stuff or later stuff, of which there are some cheapo live albums with some of his prince covers as he was playing stuff like movie star and madhouse tracks. then if you want to get deep with deep pockets you have the boxsets like plugged nickel, cellar door and blackhawk, which are miles version of 21 nights in london or celebrations, and not for the beginner

so going down the cheapo boxset and then working forward from kind of blue for proper non compilation studio albums it's a good way to discover miles, then get those 3 live albums and then the 70s compilations, get the few 90s albums and then fill in the rest of the studio albums which you can usually pick up quite cheap and you'll find getting the whole lot isn't half as hard or expensive as you might think. some of the 90s/00s boxsets are pretty fucking fantastic too, but most of them take a period of his career spanning 2-4 albums and rearrange the material in chrono order (as like prince he would record a bunch of stuff and some wouldn't get released until later) and adding in outtakes, so the boxsets don't replace the normal albums as they don't always have the full normal album in order. if you find you like a particular album like in a silent way or bitches brew or round the corner or jack jones then the box set is nice to have, and some of them you can get pretty cheap at times. original prices of some of them were ridiculous but i think bitches brew and in a silent way were the only two i bought at full price when they came out, but then those weren't that pricey, perhaps as they knew they would be popular and stores bought in bulk they sold for a better price, but others i managed to get for under £20 for a pile of great music and beautiful solid packaging, the complete opposite of a downloaded mp3

Hmmm. Interstellar Space is the only one I can think of that has just the sax and the drums, but it has more than two tracks on it. There are two Coltrane albums with just two tracks on them that come to my mind "Om" and "Ascension" (some issues of Ascension have the two tracks split into shorter ones as well). Both are abstract and noisy, but aren't just duo recordings.

I remember hearing some of that stuff when I was a teenager and felt "insulted" by it like you just described. I've grown to appreciate that material a lot though (he was way ahead of Miles at one point). Having said that, if it was "Om" album that you had then I'm not going to blame you - it's not a particularly good example of abstract 60s music and was probably recorded on drugs.

whooh! indepth mr unique.cheers man

ueah i have tutu..not a bad album at all..infact i have alot more than i relaised but i still come across new shit with him i have nevr heard of

thanks though...i love reading your posts on music

true about boxed sets..i have kind of blue twice but would love the box set too...

as well as the box set for in a silent way

oooh the touch and smell of a nice box set!