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Listen to This: Miles Davis and "Bitches Brew"
by Victor Svorinich
The following is an excerpt from the “MUSIC" chapter of Listen to This: Miles Davis and “Bitches Brew" by Victor Svorinich (University Press of Mississippi, 2015). Call It Anything “I'd like to say one thing about Miles Davis. One time he said to me, 'Hey Wayne, do you get tired of playing music that sounds like music?'" --Wayne Shorter “Call It Anything" was one of the working titles used for Bitches Brew. It ...
Continue ReadingMiles Davis: Kind of Blue
by Nenad Georgievski
In any kind of art form, music including, there are pathfinders who probe new territory and establish new trails, and this breed of people is indeed of a rare kind than the many who follow behind and eventually benefit from their trailblazing. One such pathfinder in the 20th century music was the great Miles Davis.Throughout his entire career, Miles was propelled in strange new musical ways which in turn galvanized not only jazz, but contemporary music as well. Unlike some ...
Continue ReadingBulletin Board Members' Picks
by AAJ Staff
Since we started the Building a Jazz Library (BAJL) series, we've assembled more than sixty collections, and that number continues to grow. We thought it might be interesting to see what readers would recommend, so we asked AAJ Bulletin Board members to provide a short list of recordings they considered essential, and the 159 different lists that came in over a six-month period added up to a tremendously diverse collection of music. The following thirteen recordings (listed ...
Continue ReadingMiles Davis: Olympia – Mar 20, 1960
by C. Michael Bailey
A Totally Subjective History of Jazz, 1945--1968 I am going to over-simplify the history of small-ensemble jazz between the heyday of bebop and the vestibule of fusion using a single catalyst--Miles Davis. Davis was instrumental in or the genesis of five major movements (not including fusion) in jazz where the hinges of these movements can be assigned (however arbitrarily) to specific recordings: Bebop--Davis records “Billie's Bounce" with Charlie Parker for Savoy November 26, 1945. This ...
Continue ReadingAll of You: The Last Tour 1960
by C. Michael Bailey
The problem with Miles Davis' 1960 European Tours has been one of programming. First to know is that Davis toured Europe twice in 1960: the first time with John Coltrane, March 21st to April 109th, and then with Sonny Stitt from September 27th to October 13th. The second thing to know is not every performance of the tours was recorded. What “complete" means is “all that's available. Like any number of Rolling Stones bootlegged performances, Davis' European recordings have been ...
Continue ReadingFor the Artists: Critical Writing, Volume 2
by Greg Masters
Miles Davis: The Complete On the Corner Sessions Sony-Legacy Music, October 2007 “There is no architecture and no build-up. Just a vivid, uninterrupted succession of colors, rhythms and moods." —Arnold Schoenberg, describing his Five Pieces for Orchestra in a letter to Richard Strauss, 1909, quoted in The Rest is Noise, Alex Ross (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2007) The music Miles Davis forged in the first half of the 1970s, his so-called “electric period," is ...
Continue ReadingJazz Life: A Journey for Jazz Across America in 1960
by Nenad Georgievski
Jazz Life: A Journey for Jazz Across America in 1960 William Claxton and Joachim E. Berendt 552 ISBN: 3836544687 Taschen 2013 A single photograph can say and convene more than a thousand words. Although music itself can't be photographed, only a handful of photographers ever got closer to pulling it off than photographers such as Herman Leonard, William P. Gottlieb or William Claxton, to name but a few, whose photographs have captured ...
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