This is the ninth sumptuously produced multi-album box set of Miles Davis material taken from the trumpeter's 30-odd year association with the Columbia label. It will probably be the last. Few 20th-century artists have had their work subjected to such sustained scrutiny (while picking up eight posthumous Grammies in the process), and it says much for Davis's creative genius that he can still leave you wanting more.
Here the unedited, unexpurgated sessions that provided the material for On the Corner, Big Fun and Get Up With It are spread over six CDs which take a mere six-and-a-half hours to get through. There are two hours of new music, including 'Mr Foster' and 'Jabali', dedicated to drummer Billy Hart.
Originally released on vinyl in 1972, On the Corner is Davis at his funkiest - and it came packaged with blaxploitation cover art by Corky McCoy in the hope of reaching the young black audience that had long deserted jazz. Davis's ambition to become king of the ghetto was never realised but the album has been widely sampled by DJs , while the loops and edits of drum 'n'bass, hip hop, electronica, trance and techno are all anticipated in these ground-breaking recordings.
At the time, Davis had been introduced to tape manipulation techniques developed in the contemporary classical world by the Darmstadt school in general and Karlheinz Stockhausen in particular, which he confronts with influences from the music of Sly Stone, James Brown and Jimi Hendrix. Pieces such as 'He Loved Him Madly' or 'On the Corner' are impossible to navigate using the known stars and fixed horizons of your existing musical value system. This is devil's music of the highest order and it can be scary. Former Stevie Wonder bassist Michael Henderson is key to realising the sounds that were spinning inside Davis's head and is a constant presence as some two dozen musicians drift in and out of these sessions, all recorded between 1972 and 1975.
This collection accounts for all Davis's studio work during this period and he comes close to realising a new musical language (which he arguably achieved on the live albums Agharta and Pangaea from 1975). Now whichever way you look at it, that's some heavy shit.
