jazz

Record #974: Miles Davis – Jack Johnson (1971)

/ Nathaniel FitzGerald

Jazz is a difficult realm for completionists—especially when you’re dealing with cats like Miles Davis. Jazz players were notorious for recording everything, and almost all of those records have something notable to justify collecting it. But there’s so much to sort through.

While my own jazz collecting has mostly focused on Davis’ electric period and the work his band members (e.g., Herbie Hancock, John McLaughlin, Chick Corea…) were doing, there’s one important piece that had escaped my collecting until recently.

That is Jack Johnson, a celebration of Black Excellence originally commissioned as a soundtrack for a documentary about the titular champion boxer, who famously shrugged off threats from the KKK to lay down to white opponents.

But perhaps my own interest in it is that this is the only time that Davis collaborated with Sonny Sharrock, my favorite jazz guitarist—even of Sonny was uncredited.

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Record #873: Miles Davis – On the Corner (1972)

/ Nathaniel FitzGerald

There’s no point in debating the point that Miles Davis is the most important figure in jazz. No one else is as widely recognized outside of jazz circles nor as influential within them. Throughout the trumpeter’s five-decade career, he pioneered a number of movements, ushering in fundamental shifts in what jazz was. After cementing his status as a bebop great, he went on to pioneer cool jazz, then changed the face of jazz by embracing rock music, psychedelia, electronic instruments, and experimental recording techniques.

That experimental streak was perhaps never as fierce or fearless as on On the Corner, which saw him taking the heroin-hot mania of Bitches Brew and the extended-form ambience of In a Silent Way and distilling them into a dystopian block party.

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Record #846: Eli Kahn – How Are You? No Really…How Are You? (2022)

/ Nathaniel FitzGerald

If you’ve gone anywhere in South Bend over the last ten years, there’s a non-zero chance that you’ve happened upon a performance by Eli Kahn. You might find him providing mood music at a winery or playing with his jazz duo After Hours at a party or headlining a music festival with the hip hop project The B.E.A.T. or providing a soundtrack for an experimental dance show or creating ambience for an art opening.

He’s practically a local cryptid at this point, playing anywhere and everywhere live music can be found with an impressive array of effects pedals and a custom fanned-fret seven-string (with two bass strings on the bottom).

His first solo record, How Are You? No Really…How Are You? is as comprehensive and delightful CV anyone could ask for from Kahn, tying together diverse influences like lo-fi hip hop, jazz, and post rock.

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Record #817: Charles Mingus – Mingus Ah Um (1959)

/ Nathaniel FitzGerald

Some years bear a strange significance in music history. Single calendars that compress massive explosions of musical ingenuity within their pages.

In 1967, it was psychedelic and progressive rock. In 1977, it was punk. 1991 brought multiple waves of noisy guitar bands, from grunge to shoegaze to post-hardcore to the massive umbrella of alternative rock.

For jazz, that year was 1959, which saw several seminal releases: Coltrane’s Giant Steps, Brubeck’s Time Out, Coleman’s The Shape of Jazz to Come, and Miles Davis’ Kind of Blue, which is arguably the greatest jazz record of all time by every metric.

But even among such legendary peers, Charles Mingus’ masterpiece, Mingus Ah Um, stands unwavering on its own two feet and swings mightily at all challengers.

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Record #673: Herbie Hancock – Sound-System (1984)

/ Nathaniel FitzGerald

Herbie Hancock is one of the more convincing chameleons (pun intended) in jazz history.

After writing indelible standards like “Maiden Voyage” and “Watermelon Man,” pioneering fusion alongside Miles Davis, and leading the far-out, futuro-Afro fusion band Mwandishi, Herbie easily could have rested on his laurels and still been heralded as a legend.

But resting isn’t exactly one of Herbie’s strong suits. And in the mid-eighties, he continued to look forward. Sound-System, his second album with the Rockit band, finds him setting aside horns, pianos, and tune itself in favor of drum machines, turntables, and samplers and exploring hip hop, funk, and electro.

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Record #575: Miles Davis – My Funny Valentine (1965)

/ Nathaniel FitzGerald

In the grand scheme of Miles Davis’ immense, indelible catalog, there is not necessarily anything particularly special about My Funny Valentine. But, it was the first Miles Davis record I owned (because I found this copy for cheap ten years ago), and for a while, it was the only Davis record I owned.

But it was also recorded fifty-five years ago today, which is a happy accident. Continue reading →

Record #574: Miles Davis – Kind of Blue (1959)

/ Nathaniel FitzGerald

Miles Davis once said that you could sum up all of jazz history in four words: “Louis Armstrong, Charlie Parker.” And as elegantly concise as that history may be, it ignores the “Prince of Darkness” himself.

No individual left a larger footprint on jazz—or perhaps music history overall—than Miles Davis. And Kind of Blue, his most popular record—and most popular jazz record ever—demonstrates his mastery as a composer and a bandleader.

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