“The music I was really listening to in 1968 was James Brown, the great guitar player Jimi Hendrix, and a new group who had just come out with the hit record ‘Dance to the Music,’ Sly and the Family Stone… the shit he was doing was badder than a motherfucker, had all kinds of funky shit up in it…” Miles Davis, ‘Miles: The Autobiography’
Following a final appearance at the Schaefer Music Festival in Central Park in the summer of 1975, a sick, exhausted, burnt-out Miles Davis put down his horn, planning to take a few months off. According to his autobiography, he didn’t pick it up again until 1980. Instead he entered a dark, isolated period of self-imposed exile, filled with alcohol, prescription painkillers, cocaine, and sex workers. The preceding six years were his infamous ‘Electric Miles’ period, an incredible run of albums that seemed to break every rule of jazz orthodoxy. Incorporating elements from rock and funk music, and from non-Western musical traditions, adding electronic instruments like the Fender Rhodes and electric bass, electronic effects like wah-wah, phaser, and delay pedals, as well as sitar and tabla, sometimes using multiple bassists or keyboardists at the same time, Miles’ electric period albums also upturned the conventional jazz approach of attempting to capture an authentic performance, instead using extensive post-recording cut and paste, tape loop, and overdubbing techniques. Controversial among critics and jazz fans at the time, over the years this music has been reassessed, its prescience and influence heard in genres like ambient, hip hop, trip hop, house, techno, drum and bass, post punk/no wave, and in sampling culture generally.
It was Davis’ then partner, singer Betty Mabry (later Betty Davis) who initially provided much of the influence for his 1970s seismic musical innovations, introducing him to the music of Hendrix and Sly Stone, artists she knew personally, and steering him toward a potential new audience of young, white, acid hippies who would embrace his elongated psychedelic jams the same way they did Jerry Garcia’s. Davis heard the potential that contemporaneous black music innovations could have for jazz — be it Hendrix’s blues-rooted, wah-wah-drenched playing, James Brown’s extended single chord vamps, or Sly Stone’s innovative, accessible psychedelic funk — and developed, extended, and then transcended them in multiple directions, across several studio and live albums.
He did it via what became known as Miles’s Stock Company Players, a rotating group of musicians that coalesced at the end of the ’60s including Wayne Shorter, Gary Bartz, Airto Moreira, Herbie Hancock, John McLaughlin, Chick Corea, Keith Jarrett, Joe Zawinul, Ron Carter, Billy Cobham, and a changing roster of talent.
Much of the music of Miles’ electric period wasn’t quite jazz; in incorporating rock, funk, and Indian and African musical elements, these albums genuinely transcended genre: neither rock nor jazz, they were some kind of entirely new thing instead. At times, the music of Miles’ electric period is stark, lean, dimly lit, droning, and grinding, sometimes it’s full-on, explosive, a maelstrom of angular storm-jazz, at other times the music is abrasive, squelching, scorching acid-Afro future-funk-fusion, and at times it’s all this and way more; but it’s always developing, striving and evolving, never looking back. An unfriendly, challenging, acerbic, and dissonant catalogue, but one that also contains audacious beauty, power and depth.
