Miles Davis

Three electric pianos playing simultaneously. A guitarist who had never recorded with Miles before. A single repeated theme that frames two long improvised sections like a pair of parentheses. Producer Teo Macero editing the tapes heavily in post. In a Silent Way arrived in 1969 as something genuinely unprecedented, and it still sounds like nothing else in jazz even today. It is the most beautiful record in Miles Davis's catalog, and possibly the most influential.

The music barely moves. The textures shimmer and shift, but nothing drives forward the way jazz is supposed to drive. There are no solos in the conventional sense: the musicians move in and out of the texture, surface and submerge, play around a central theme that never really develops but just exists, glowing. Shorter's soprano saxophone on the title piece sounds like it's coming through a wall from another room. Miles's trumpet is spare, unhurried, and devastating.

Joe Zawinul wrote both compositions that appear here. "In a Silent Way" was substantially stripped down by Miles from Zawinul's original arrangement: Miles edited out the chords, leaving just the melody floating over the sustained electric textures. The decision to loop the opening theme and return to it at the end was Macero's, not Miles's. Both decisions were correct. This record required exactly the kind of collaborative reimagining it received.

There's a version of first listening to this album that requires patience. If you come to it expecting jazz as you know it, or even as Miles had been playing it up through the late sixties, you are going to be disoriented. The opening title track is twenty-six minutes long. There are two electric pianos playing simultaneously. John McLaughlin is on electric guitar and he plays like he's trying to rewire something. And through all of it, Miles's trumpet sounds like it's coming from another room, processed and distant, cutting through the mix only when it wants to.

Producer Teo Macero edited the tapes the way a rock producer would, cutting and looping sections, layering performances that were never intended to line up. The result feels less like a jazz session and more like a weather system: dense and shifting and impossible to fully map. Wayne Shorter's soprano saxophone surfaces and disappears through the mix like something half-glimpsed. Zawinul and Corea layer electric piano lines that overlap without ever resolving into anything comfortable.

"Spanish Key" is the track that tends to land hardest on first listen: a locked groove with McLaughlin threading sharp lines through the polyrhythmic churn underneath. "Miles Runs the Voodoo Down" is the one that feels most like rock without actually being rock. Neither one sounds like anything that existed before this record. Bitches Brew is not always an easy listen. But it is probably the most ambitious thing Miles ever did, and the ambition pays off.

The electric record that functions as pure rock and roll. Assembled by Teo Macero from sessions recorded across several months in 1970, A Tribute to Jack Johnson is built around a single locked groove on side one: "Right Off" runs for over twenty-six minutes, anchored by Michael Henderson's deep electric bass vamp and John McLaughlin's jagged, endlessly inventive guitar. Miles plays over all of it with his most aggressive and extroverted trumpet in years.

Henderson was the key hire in this period. He came from Stevie Wonder's band and had no jazz background, which was exactly what Miles wanted: someone who played the kind of simple, deep funk groove that you could stack other things on top of. The "jazz musicians don't know how to groove" critique that was circulating in early-seventies music culture clearly got to Miles, and this record is his answer to it. "Right Off" grooves as hard as anything Sly Stone was recording at the time.

Side two, "Yesternow," is slower and more brooding, with a spoken narration about Jack Johnson added by Macero in post-production. The contrast between the two sides gives the album a narrative arc that most of the electric records lack. Jack Johnson is probably the most accessible entry point into the electric period for listeners who love the quintet records but feel lost in the more abstract electric textures.

A double album combining studio tracks with live recordings from the Cellar Door in Washington, D.C. in December 1970. The Cellar Door concerts were among the rawest and most intense performances of Miles's electric period, and even heavily edited by Macero the live material crackles with physical energy. Keith Jarrett had replaced Chick Corea on electric piano and organ, and his more rhapsodic, slightly chaotic approach gives the band a different center of gravity.

Gary Bartz on saxophone is the other new element, and he fits the post-Bitches Brew aesthetic better than Wayne Shorter had: where Shorter was cerebral and precise, Bartz is looser, more emotionally direct, closer to rhythm and blues in his phrasing. The combination of Bartz, Jarrett, McLaughlin, and Henderson gives the Cellar Door band a tougher, more aggressive sound than the Bitches Brew ensemble.

The studio tracks that separate the live material are more experimental and abstract, with Macero's editing working harder and the textures becoming more dissonant. The result is a sprawling record that rewards attention but doesn't always reward casual listening. Live-Evil is the electric record for listeners who want the music pushed as far as possible from accessibility.

Miles described this record as his attempt to make music for young Black audiences who had moved on from jazz to funk and soul. He hired a large ensemble and stripped the music to something closer to rhythm and groove than improvisation. The result polarized critics when it came out in 1972 and remains divisive today. Jazz listeners who wanted the second quintet found it noisy and tuneless. Funk listeners found the rhythms too abstract and unresolved. Miles didn't care about either reaction.

What On the Corner actually is, listened to on its own terms, is a texture record: forty minutes of layered percussion, cycling bass vamps, and fragments of horn playing that float over the top without soloing in any conventional sense. Macero's editing creates a kind of permanent transition state where nothing ever quite arrives. The Indian influence from Paul Buckmaster's arrangements gives it a quality that feels more like early minimalism than jazz or funk.

The record has been reappraised substantially since the nineties, particularly among hip-hop producers who recognized the sample-ready cyclical rhythms before most jazz critics did. On the Corner is a difficult listen and a fascinating historical document, but more than that it is a genuinely original aesthetic statement that had no real precedent and produced no real imitators. Nothing else sounds quite like it.

Recorded at Philharmonic Hall in New York in September 1972, this double album documents the band that immediately followed the On the Corner sessions. Carlos Garnett holds the saxophone chair, and his soulful, direct approach gives the music a different kind of intensity than Gary Bartz or Wayne Shorter had provided. Khalil Balakrishna on electric sitar and Badal Roy on tabla add the Indian rhythmic textures that Miles had introduced on the On the Corner studio dates. The rhythm section has coalesced around Al Foster and Michael Henderson into something more recognizably funk-influenced.

The material here is long, sprawling, and built around percussion-heavy grooves that accumulate gradually rather than arriving. Cedric Lawson on electric piano and synthesizer provides a shifting harmonic backdrop, and Miles himself plays less trumpet and more organ on this record than on any previous release, which surprised listeners at the time and still sounds unusual.

In Concert is a specialized pleasure: you have to be in the right frame of mind for it and willing to let its rhythmic cycles work on you at length. But if you engage with the electric period at all beyond Bitches Brew and Jack Johnson, this record rewards the deeper dive.

A double album of outtakes and extended sessions from the fertile 1969 to 1972 period, assembled by Macero from material that hadn't made it onto Bitches Brew, Jack Johnson, or Live-Evil. Given that those records were already exceptional, the leftover quality of Big Fun might seem like a warning sign. But the material here is consistently strong, and "Go Ahead John" from the 1970 McLaughlin sessions is one of the most ferociously exciting things Miles recorded in the electric period.

The album works because the sessions it draws from were so productive. A different producer might have left all of this in the vault, but Macero had the ear to recognize that extended, unedited takes from these bands had their own value. The version of "Ife" runs for nearly half an hour and demonstrates how the electric band could sustain a groove at extreme length without losing intensity.

For collectors and dedicated listeners, Big Fun is essential. For everyone else, it's a worthwhile fourth or fifth listen into the electric catalog, after you've spent real time with In a Silent Way, Bitches Brew, and Jack Johnson. The context matters; this record makes more sense once you know what it was left over from.

"He Loved Him Madly," the Duke Ellington tribute that opens this double album, is thirty-two minutes of near silence: drifting organ tones, sparse trumpet, and a collective holding of breath that makes In a Silent Way sound busy by comparison. Miles played it as a memorial after Ellington's death in May 1974, and the music has the quality of a vigil rather than a performance. It is one of the most emotionally affecting things he ever recorded.

The rest of the album is more varied: "Rated X" is a dense, dark organ-and-percussion piece that sounds genuinely threatening; "Calypso Frelimo" runs for over thirty minutes and shows the late electric band at its most rhythmically intricate. The personnel shift from track to track, as the material was drawn from sessions across four years, but Macero's sequencing gives the double album a coherence that his other compilations sometimes lack.

Get Up with It is the most underrated record in Miles Davis's catalog. It was released at a moment when he was about to go on hiatus, and it was largely overshadowed by Agharta and Pangaea, which came out the following year. But "He Loved Him Madly" alone makes it required listening, and the rest holds up alongside the best of the electric period.

The matinee concert from Osaka, February 1, 1975. Miles was in chronic pain from hip surgery and playing through it; this was among the last concerts before his six-year retirement. What the band produced that afternoon was ninety minutes of the most savage and beautiful electric music anyone had made. Pete Cosey plays electric guitar with a raw ferocity that makes every rock guitarist of the era sound polite. Michael Henderson holds the bass grooves like someone whose life depends on it.

Agharta is built around long, uninterrupted performances that build through cycles of intensity without ever releasing into anything conventional. The matinee crowd at Festival Hall gets a seventy-minute set that moves from near-quiet to overwhelming and back in patterns that feel almost structural. Miles's trumpet is processed, sometimes barely recognizable as trumpet, surfacing through the electric density like signals from somewhere far away.

The companion piece Pangaea, from the evening concert the same day, is equally extraordinary. Together they document the final and most extreme articulation of everything Miles had been building toward since Filles de Kilimanjaro. If you've ever wondered how far jazz could go from its origins without ceasing to be jazz, these two records are the answer.

The evening concert from the same day as Agharta. Both records were released the following year, and the choice of which one to recommend first is genuinely difficult; they are companion pieces that cover the same band in the same venue within hours of each other. Pangaea is generally considered slightly darker and more extreme than its matinee counterpart. Miles plays more organ and less trumpet, and Pete Cosey's guitar is if anything more reckless.

The two pieces that fill the double album, "Gondwana" and "Zimbabwe," are named after geological and geographical concepts: Gondwana, the ancient supercontinent; Zimbabwe, a country in the process of becoming. The naming reflects Miles's interest in a certain kind of scale and historical weight that he wanted the music to carry. Whether the music delivers on that ambition is something you have to hear for yourself.

After Osaka, Miles Davis effectively retired for six years. He didn't perform again until 1981. Pangaea, heard with that knowledge, has the quality of an ending: a last statement so complete and so extreme that the only reasonable response was to stop. Whether it's better or worse than Agharta is not a useful question. It's the other half of one of the greatest live recordings in jazz history.

A late vault release of outtakes from the 1967 and 1968 quintet sessions, issued in 1976 while Miles was in retirement. The material predates the electric period: these are acoustic recordings from the same period that produced Nefertiti and Miles in the Sky, and they have the spare, abstract quality of the best second-quintet work. The title track is a Wayne Shorter composition of particular beauty, built on a gentle rocking figure that seems to float rather than swing.

Hearing this record after spending time with Agharta and Pangaea is a kind of temporal dislocation. The acoustic quintet with its restrained post-bop language sounds almost conservative by comparison, which is strange given that it was the most forward-looking small group in jazz when these sessions were made. Context is everything.

The two pianists across the sessions, Herbie Hancock and Chick Corea, are both identifiable and quite different: Hancock brings more harmonic density and a kind of orchestral thinking to the voicings, while Corea is lighter and more questing. Both serve the music perfectly. Water Babies is an ideal record for listeners who love the second quintet and want more of that specific language before it dissolved into electricity.