Every so often I have my hair 'done'. It's a luxury, a kind of time-out. Two hours or more to think and dream along different streams. A public kind of dreaming, especially on a Thursday evening, when it's crowded. I get to read fashion magazines. I am far from the type for these. I could not wear the clothes featured, nor put on the shoes or contemplate the make up nor the diet fantasies proposed and propelled along their pages. It is all wonderfully alien, yet territory for thinking. My hairdresser, Sam, gives me decent coffee, maybe a small Greek biscuit from the cake shop across the way. I don't talk much. The staff and other customers gossip around me and there's a lot of laughing and screeching. This is both comforting and friendly, but also exclusive. Or, as I realise, it's me who excludes. That I have nothing to say into this. But that isn't the point for me. This time, and I wonder if it will stick, I think of ways in which I might need to chang...
Comments
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Chris Murray
Have you seen the hateful reviews it got when it came out? Maybe the biggest jazz backlash in history?
On the Corner, man, what a tremendous album - all those electric Miles albums are good
are you familiar with Agharta and Pangaea? recorded live in japan on the same day in 1974, the last recording he did before the hiatus
Agharta is the matinee performance, Pangaea is the evening performance
except for the reed player (Sonny Fortune at his soulful best, playing his ass off) the band had been together for about 2 years, and the fractured funk has morphed into rock that grooves so hard and heavy that it can be uncomfortable - bassplayer Michael Henderson has this monster honking sound
guitarist Pete Cosey takes Hendrix, Sonny Sharrock, his own experience as a Chess session player (that's him doing the wacka-wacka on Electric Mud) and his experience playing with chicago free jazz musicians, and turns it all into one of the most massively blistering guitar attacks ever
not to mention Al Foster on drums and Ndugu on percussion... man, it just piles up in there
of course, these being Miles Davis albums, there are moments of great vulnerability and tenderness - Miles' solo that starts about 8 minutes into side 3 of Pangaea (disc 2 on CD), for example, so simple and lovely, and that sound of his!
the greatest thing about these two albums, and this on no way diminishes the delectability of Jack Johnson, On the Corner, Bitches Brew, Get Up With It, and all the others, is that it is all live, and, because the band had been together for a good while, the music turns on a dime - the studio albums are all highly edited...
well, they're both incredible - chris daniels says check it out