Pete Cosey

[koganbot]

Embedding the start, which is the part I love best, for the ensemble work and Miles' trumpet twists; Cosey and Lucas get to really working the guitars later (here), but I don't know how to embed a vid so as to start it in the middle.

Watch on YouTube

I think of this music as a combination of probing with lasers and scraping the barnacles. Huge impact on a number of guitarists I knew (incl. me) in late '70s NY. This, Dark Magus, Pangaea, and On The Corner.

Comments

[dubdobdee.livejournal.com]

I love these records -- tho actually I know Agharta much better than Pangaea -- and never knew you knew them! Not sure you ever wrote about Miles anywhere (OR anywhere that I read, which is not QUITE the same thing of course).

[koganbot]

I did write about Miles, and you read it, except it was only obliquely about Miles, since he wasn't the subject of the piece:

http://www.villagevoice.com/2003-04-01/music/a-wiggle-in-your-wham

(Go to 3rd page and start with the paragraph beginning "James Brown's 'Papa's Got A Brand New Bag'...")

[koganbot]

OK, I'll say a little more now: to me this music caused as much a revolution in my idea of what sound could be as anything short of James Brown and Richard Meltzer; so it's on the order of dub or hip-hop in making me rethink. Don't have good words for the rethink, it dating from around 1978. But let's say that one was previously thinking of music as made of rhythms and melodies (not necessarily how I thought of it in my life, but as a musician I was trying to get good with rhythms and melodies), and maybe chord progressions and harmony, though I was never all that competent with those. And "call-and-response," which in my mind symbolized the idea of notes in interaction, musicians in interaction. But with Miles I was getting an expanse of "space", though since music unfolds in time this space is mostly temporal. But imagine a room, and what happens when you stretch a diagonal rod from a floor corner diagonally up to the opposite ceiling corner and then start hanging cloth from the rod. The room is divided differently, it could be several rooms now. Anyway, I think of Miles as creating a space and then in a couple of seconds reorganizing it with a horn blast here and a wah-wah squiggle there, so there's constant reorganization even while the funk rumbles on. I also had in my mind the image of the sound running forward and then suddenly halting, leaving kinetic energy in the silent space that follows (and rarely would the sounds stop all at once; a particular instrument would stop unexpectedly, and this absence would help shape our perception of how the rest of the sound seemed).

From Creamer (On The Corner) and Cosey I could hear something that wasn't limiting its sense of possibilities to what the chords and the melodies seemed to invite; so we'd get notes or riffs that could feel like streamers, or like jets of paint...

I mastered none of this in my playing, however. And that this music seemed like such a revelation was owing to my not really having taken in early jazz, or early 20th century classical, or the more droning of the blues tracks I listened to. Eno's Another Green World had sounded unlike anything I'd heard before, the man being very much a space arranger. But he seemed to be creating furnishings, while Miles and ilk were painting in motion.

[beardedtraveler.livejournal.com]

I just bought a used copy of the Japanese remastered CD of Pangaea. I read reviews on Amazon that said it was way better-sounding, and it is... cost me $40, so I'm VERY glad it is....

I wrote Friday that while it's "common knowledge" that the 3 best Davis fusion albums are Bitches Brew, On The Corner, and Agharta, my favorite 3 are Dark Magus, Pangaea, and Get Up With It. I *did like some of the extras on The Complete Bitches Brew Sessions; the moody slow jam of David Crosby's "Guinevere" was quite an interesting choice.