Miles Davis ‎– In A Silent Way (1969)

Style: Post Bop, Fusion, Modal
Format: CD, Vinyl
Label: Columbia

A1.   Shhh / Peaceful
B1.   In A Silent Way
B2.   It's About That Time

Credits:
Bass – Dave Holland
Drums – Tony Williams
Electric Piano – Chick Corea, Herbie Hancock
Guitar – John McLaughlin
Organ, Electric Piano – Josef Zawinul
Producer – Teo Macero
Tenor Saxophone – Wayne Shorter
Trumpet – Miles Davis
Engineer – Russ Payne, Stan Tonkel

Recording in February 1969, Miles Davis seemed to pick up the vibe of what was going to go down that crazy summer. It was a tumultuous time as the sixties came to a close. First came the Manson Family, then the murder during the Stones' Altamont show overshadowing the na've utopia of Woodstock. With In a Silent Way Davis seemed to sum up the dying of the light as the war and violence took over from love and peace. Certainly his most somber record since Kind of Blue , it was a reflective record that would bridge the gap from one of the greatest quintets in jazz history to the most controversial era of Miles Davis' work.  

In a Silent Way is a foreboding and deeply meditative record that has an almost spiritual quality. Following on his first real plunge into jazz-rock fusion on Filles de Kilimanjaro , the quintet's last record, In a Silent Way was a real head twister. Following Filles' blues-rock-jazz ideology, Davis really pulled together the methods that he began with on the previous release. But the change was the low-lying, almost silent feel. Gone were the funky up-tempo tracks, replaced with two long tracks with sparse arrangements that relied more on atmosphere than any of Miles' earlier records.  

Holding onto Tony Williams, Herbie Hancock and Wayne Shorter from the quintet, Miles added future fusion gods Chick Corea and John McLaughlin, as well as Dave Holland (filling Ron Carter's shoes on bass) and organist/pianist/composer Joe Zawinul. In a Silent Way tackles the tone palette of Kind of Blue , setting into an electric fusion. Opening with the subtle and quiet "Shhh/Peaceful," the record begins a soothing adventure, led by Zawinul's trippy drops of organ. Slowly the track picks up with Williams doing double time on the hi-hat throughout. But McLaughlin is the major soloist, and what would become his signature guitar chops softly intertwine throughout. Finally Miles and Wayne take the stage and fill the holes in with killer solos that rival some their best work from Miles Smiles and Nefertiti. But the B-side with "In a Silent Way/It's About that Time" opens with silence and Williams continuing where he left off—a continuing groove would be played to dreadful bore on On the Corner three years later. The track really shifts as the jam of "It's About that Time" takes off and builds into some classic Davis/Shorter playing that really lays out what is about to come on Bitches Brew. The tracks eases off again and goes back into "In a Silent Way."  

Without hearing this overlooked gem, many fans of jazz have missed out on one of the genre's most original and all-encompassing works. The record has recently gotten the full treatment with Columbia/ Legacy's Complete Sessions box set and it continues to prove how vital it is to the Davis catalogue. The record is an essential piece to understanding Miles and where jazz was heading. Its mix of rock and fusion point to Remembering Jack Johnson (rock) and Bitches Brew (fusion). Two important notes are the emergence of Joe Zawinul and the editing and production of Teo Macero who would both be focal points in the movement of Miles' music. Zawinul's presence on organ gives the record its otherworldly feel, but the groove and layout of the record are credited much to Macero's time at the knobs. His splicing and rearranging would become instrumental in the emergence of Miles' sound especially on Bitches Brew and On the Corner. Building and peaking the long tracks so that their flow was consistent and maintained the ideology of the piece.  

In a Silent Way is a one of kind record that mixed the late-'60s pop and underground movement into the jazz realm. On this record Miles began to hook into the late '60s sounds that flowed from the jam bands in San Francisco. No more is that more evident that in the otherworld-like organ of Zawinul. Starting with Filles the groove of Jimi Hendrix really started to take shape in the work that Miles began 1968. This is best shown on disc one of the Complete Sessions. The opener "Mademoiselle Mabry (Miss Mabry)" has its foundation based on Hendrix's "The Wind Cries Mary." Through Macero's production and Miles utilizing the same musicians would bare similar but ever-evolving grooves with each release. They would never make a record like it again, an absolutely timeless work that proves that Miles Davis and crew were some of the most innovative thinkers in modern music.

TREVOR MACLAREN  / All About Jazz

Charles Mingus ‎– Mingus Ah Um (1959)

Style: Hard Bop, Bop
Format: CD, Vinyl
Label: Columbia

Tracklist:
01.   Better Git It In Your Soul
02.   Goodbye Pork Pie Hat
03.   Boogie Stop Shuffle
04.   Self-Portrait In Three Colors
05.   Open Letter To Duke
06.   Bird Calls
07.   Fables Of Faubus
08.   Pussy Cat Dues
09.   Jelly Roll
10.   Pedal Point Blues
11.   GG Train
12.   Girl Of My Dreams

Credits: Bass [Contrebass], Written-By – Charles Mingus Drums – Dannie Richmond Piano – Horace Parlan Saxophone – Booker Erwin, John Handy, Shafi Hadi Trombone – Jimmy Knepper, Willie Dennis Liner Notes – Marc Berhardt

Drop the needle on Charles Mingus' bluesy call to prayer on "Better Git It In Your Soul" and Legacy's decision to include Ah Um in its vinyl series comes into sharp focus. There's simply no better way to hear the 1959 Columbia masterpiece than on 12" vinyl and, while it may be hard to detect the business logic behind the series, the meticulous remastering by Allan Tucker makes clear the aesthetic motive.  

During the last decade, the major jazz labels have essentially been in the reissue business. Archival photos and historical essays have cluttered CD liner notes and unreleased tracks, rehearsals and false starts have been tacked onto LP-length albums to fill 80-minute digital capacities. On their vinyl series, Legacy has taken a minimalist approach. Duplicating the original LP sleeve with its quirky, geometric painting on front and the detailed 1959 notes by Mingus biographer Diane Dorr-Dorynek on the back, the focus is once again on the incredible music and, because of the limited LP format, it's the original nine tracks that Mingus intended.  

Ah Um represented a turning point in Mingus' career on multiple fronts. The personnel is a mix of mainstays from the bassist's '50s ensembles and newer voices that would play an increasingly important role in Mingus' tumultuous output during the '60s. Producer Teo Macero began his career on sax and was an early participant in Mingus' Jazz Workshops before arranging the Columbia sessions that would result in Ah Um and Mingus Dynasty (Legacy, 1959) and later the bassist's triumphant return to the label with Let My Children Hear Music (1972). A transition is also apparent in the choice of material, as Mingus moves away from the third-stream, modernist vision—"Self Portrait in Three Colors"—cultivated in the mid-'50s to a more guttural, increasingly political style embodied by the still lyricless "Fables of Faubus."

Matthew Miller/ All About Jazz

Chuckle a pitying chuckle over Allaboutjazz.com's guide "1959: The Most Creative Year in Jazz." Miles Davis's Kind of Blue: "the quintessential jazz album"; Coltrane's Giant Steps: "a major landmark in jazz history"; Brubeck's "Take Five": "one of the most popular tunes in jazz"; Ornette Coleman's The Shape of Jazz to Come: "the essential free jazz album." Mingus Ah Um? "Essential to Mingus fans and jazz aficionados" (emphasis mine). 

Poor big-bellied, cigar-loving, temperamental, insecure, misogynistic Charles Mingus. While routinely placed on best-of-genre lists and talked about as one of the preeminent bassists and bandleaders in jazz, his best albums never clump comfortably with anyone else's, or with any particular subset of casual jazz listeners. They're too spirited for cocktail hour, too rough and moody for listeners who revel in crafstmanship, and not radical enough for daredevils. 

Then again, Mingus' music never seemed comfortable outside its own world, either. At the dawn of both modal and free jazz, he kept solos short and music composed (even if, as with 1959's Atlantic recording Blues and Roots, the players didn't see the charts before the studio date). In an era where big bands were left behind for small combos or reimagined entirely (as with, say, John Coltrane's late albums), Mingus was a Duke Ellington acolyte who approached his pieces with the formality of an orchestral composer. 

"Better Git It in Your Soul"-- if Mingus had his own sound, Mingus Ah Um's opener was it: a warm, striding, Sunday-morning tune carried on moaning horns; a friendly, convivial atmosphere punctuated by hollers Mingus didn't bother suppressing in the studio. Mingus, born to a black father and Chinese-American mother who allowed only church music in the house, embraced blues and gospel in the complex way one embraces a friend they've fallen out of touch with, or their hometown-- cautiously; with a burdened and deep-buried love. The song never struck me as primitive or rootsy, but a comic-book version of primitive, rootsy music-- a form reduced to its most basic shapes and traits; a form almost abstracted. 

The album rolls from there. And while "Better Git" is as good a definition of Mingus there is, the album is remarkably diverse: Set pieces like "Fables of Faubus" or "Jelly Roll" (which are a jazz analog to the Beatles's warped, fruity variations on early British pop, like "For the Benefit of Mr. Kite") play alongside factory-pressed bop- and swing-style songs like "Boogie Stop Shuffle" and the mournful, reverent balladry of "Goodbye Pork Pie Hat". Harmonies invoke modern classical music almost as often as blues, and his chosen instrumentalists spend as much effort adding color to the ensemble as personality to their brief solos. 

Regarding the product at hand: a 2xCD 50th anniversary "Legacy Edition" with a list price of $25. The remaster is the same one performed by Mark Wilder in the late 1990s and still in print. Along with a couple of alternate takes, the second disc contains Mingus Dynasty, an uneven and far less interesting album recorded later in 1959 and issued early in 1960. The liner notes are slim and strangely conceived (do I need to read that a song on this album is a "grand slam home run" even though I clearly have already purchased it?). The bonus material on the second disc, in PDF format, should've been in the booklet if they're charging $25 for a package that probably didn't demand a lot of work to re-release. That's that. 

I'm sure I'm not versed enough in jazz to assess what it is that makes Mingus Mingus, but listening to Ah Um again-- an album I plucked from my dad's collection at age 15-- I remember sitting in my family's basement thinking that I had no idea jazz could be funny. (I hadn't yet heard Thelonious Monk.) I thought jazz was all elegance and poise. I remember reading transcriptions of Charlie Parker solos and wondering if my intellectual awe would translate to a real, visceral love of the music. It didn't-- I felt detached. Mingus was slurring and gestural. His compositions that looked prim on paper sounded rusted and sun-bleached in performance. The fiery ones sounded a little tight-assed and penned-in-- you could almost hear the band bucking with discomfort at the form they found themselves playing in. The music had character; it beamed. Still does.

Mike Powell / Pitchfork 

Teo Macero & Wally Cirillo ‎– Explorations (2010)

Style: Jazz
Format: CD, Vinyl
Label: Fresh Sound Records

Tracklist:
01.  Teo
02.   I'll Remember April
03.   How Low The Earth
04.   Mitzi
05.   Yesterdays
06.   Explorations
07.   Smog L.A.
08.   Level Seven
09.   Transeason
10.   Rose Geranium
11.   Heart on my sleeve
12.   24+ 18+
13.   Sounds of may
14.   Thou swell
15.   Neally
16.   Adventures
17.   TC's groove

A studio Svengali to some and a certified genius to others, Julliard-trained Teo Macero is still perhaps best known for his high profile post as Miles Davis’ longstanding producer and collaborator. Macero’s earlier careers as a saxophonist and modernist jazz-meets-classical composer earn much less ink. This invaluable Fresh Sound compilation gathers some of the best of his output from those largely forgotten years. Seventeen tracks represent four separate Fifities sessions and the notes go into decent detail about the methods and intents behind the compositions. Some of the theory-related specifics are Greek to me, but Macero’s ambitious composerly goals are audibly evident even to the layman. On “Neally”, for example, from a September 1955 nonet session comprised of all-stars like Art Farmer, Eddie Bert and John LaPorta the band negotiates forward-thinking elements of counterpoint, polyphony, polyrhythm, atonality, and free improvisation all within the brisk span of just under five minutes. Several pieces also find Macero investigating the possibilities of overdubbing horn parts, like the Blindfold Test-perfect title composition where five separate Macero sax lines (3 tenor, 2 alto) improvise freely within the loose framework of a chromatic tone series. In addition to all the compositional heavy-lifting, Macero’s tenor beguiles with an aerated cool a/tonality that sounds like a possible progenitor of modern players like Stephen Riley and Mark Turner. The other MVP on three of the four dates is obscure accordionist Orlando DiGirolamo who takes to the musical experiments in textural dissonance like a duck to water, particularly on the first session in a quintet with Macero, bassists Charles Mingus and Lou Labella and drummer Ed Shaughnessy circa 1953(!). As far as protean Fifties free jazz/third stream goes it doesn’t get much better. 

Derek / masterofasmallhouse

Teo Macero With The Prestige Jazz Quartet ‎– Teo (1957)

Tracklist:
A1.   Ghost Story
A2.   Please Don't Go Now
A3.   Just Spring
B1.   Star Eyes
B2.   Polody
B3.   What's Not