MILES DAVIS — Miles in the Sky (review)

MILES DAVIS — Miles in the Sky album cover Album · 1968 · Fusion Buy this album from MMA partners
4/5 ·
js
Well if you are keeping score at home, “Miles in the Sky” is the album on which Miles started mixing rock and RnB into his music. Now if you think Miles was the first jazz artists to do this, well then you have a lot of music history to catch up on as jazz artists had been mixing rock n roll and RnB into their music since the early 50s when rock and RnB were birthed from a combination of jump blues and African American church music. The main difference between soul jazz and fusion was the fact that rock and RnB itself changed considerably in the late 60s, but that’s a subject for a whole nother essay.

“Miles in the Sky” opens up with Tony Williams cutting a persistent rock beat on “Stuff”, but this isn’t your standard pop rock of the day, no, this is Miles Davis and this track is far more abstract than what most rock bands were playing at the time. Herbie Hancock is playing the Fender Rhodes with his best gospel/RnB riffs and Miles is working out his ‘angry trumpet’ sound that will become full flower on “Live at the Fillmore”. Side one closes out with the somewhat experimental, “Paraphernalia”, that hints at the ‘static’ music Miles will feature on “Get Up With It” and “On the Corner”. Guest guitarist George Benson turns in one of the more interesting solos in his career.

Side two kicks off with, “Black Comedy”, an aggressive post bop number that recalls the “Miles Smiles” album and is the closest thing to straight up jazz on the album, but there is still that unsettling rage lurking in the background. We are a long way from “My Funny Valentine” at this point. The album closer, “Country Son”, is the most ambitious number as the band shifts from RnB riffs to floating ambience and back again in a rotation of compositional ideas. So much of what we hear in jazz in the 2020s can be traced back to this album, the mixing of genres, the tendency towards abstraction and the unexpected twists and turns in arrangement. On this album Miles does away with an opening melody on all of the songs, and instead just cuts straight to the improvs and compositional structures. In many ways, ‘In the Sky’, is more forward looking than many of the more celebrated Miles Davis albums that will follow it. The one drawback is the sound and production, the entire album just sounds a bit flat and grey, but that still can’t stifle the amazing creativity at work here.
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