It was a brave move by bassist/producer Bill Laswell to remix some of Miles Davis’ most challenging material but this project, drawn from the original tapes of Davis’ 69-75 period, is outstanding. Many early 70s Davis productions suffered from muddy low-end, poorly defined rhythm tracks and an overall brittle sound and Laswell’s production addresses these issues beautifully, bringing out the bass, drums and percussion, introducing more detail and clarity, and also revealing previously obscured parts in the process. 

Davis’s records at the time were created out of lengthy jams, heavily edited together post-performance by engineers and producers in a process he had little involvement in, and the awkwardness of some of the edits has always bothered many fans. Laswell radically rearranges and reconstructs these tracks, creating new sections and introducing previously unheard performances; he condenses Davis’ entire ’69 album In A Silent Way into a wonderfully flowing, new, but also utterly familiar 15 minutes, and cuts in half He Loved Him Madly, distilling it into an intense, brooding, hyper-funky, pre-trip hop epic.  

The overall results here are stunning: futuristic, shifting, electronic-jazz-rock-funk-hybrid sonic soundscapes that are both prescient and otherworldly. Superb.

– Harold Heath