Record Club 6: Miles Davis, Agharta

Miles Davis’ Agharta—and, to a lesser extent, its sister record Pangaea—embodies the various dichotomies and outright contradictions of the artist's growth to that point. It is an album largely defined by the absence and weakness of Miles himself even as it firmly establishes his invaluable role as a conductor. Its long-form acid-funk jams sound as far removed from the cool and modal jazzes Miles pioneered as possible but also incorporates themes stretching back to Kind of Blue. Most importantly, it demonstrates his most ambitious attempt to remain current to hip, black audiences, yet Davis’ formal training at Juilliard has never been more evident.

With On the Corner, Miles overshot his attempts to appeal to young black audiences by jumping ahead of the curve by nearly 20 years, laying the foundation for hip-hop, dub, and drum and bass techniques. Its disastrous reception kept Miles out of the studios for years, but he never stopped developing his sound. When Agharta and Pangaea came out after three years of nothing but vault-clearing compilations that only hinted at the strides the ever-changing live bands were making, even Miles’ dwindling numbers of faithful must have been stunned.

From its opening moments, Agharta lives up to its namesake, the legendary city within the Earth’s core. Everything bubbles and rumbles like disturbed magma, James Mtume’s frantic percussion complementing Al Foster’s rhythmic drumming, while Michael Henderson’s groovy bass mingles with funk rhythm guitars. Everyone combines to form a primal sound, one tied to African rhythms that stretch even farther back in time to the bubbling of the primordial soup. Out of this molten foundation bursts tuneless synthesizer screams in abstract buzzes so hot the speakers threaten to melt. Those electronic shrieks sound like a primal beast moaning in agony and rage. Or a cat hooked up to a live wire. The effect is jarring, unsettling and it instantly throws a wrench into the funky groove of “Prelude,” catching the audience off-guard from the start.

When Miles enters on trumpet two and a half minutes in, his ailments and substance abuse issues can be heard in his wan tone. Further diluted in wah-wah effects, Miles’ trumpet creeps into the rumbling funk of his bandmates with a sound so watery one first suspects he hadn’t cleared his spit valve in six months. The first time I listened to the album, I nearly despaired at this; just five years earlier, Miles was at the top of his game. His playing on A Tribute to Jack Johnson is the strongest of any of his studio album, and here I thought he sounded on the brink of death.

Upon further listens, however, Miles’ playing reveals a quiet strength and a striking counterpoint to the fiery sound of his band. It’s also a reflection of the conscious, well-considered shift in style brought on by the evolution of his musical direction. As Miles explains of his playing circa-On the Corner in his autobiography:

At first there was no feeling because I was used to the old way of playing thing like with Bird and Trane. Playing the new shit was a gradual process. You just don't stop playing the way you used to play. You don't hear the sound at first. It takes time. When you do hear the new sound, it's like rush, but a slow rush...But you don't have to blast because you've got an amplifier. And the smoother you play a trumpet, the more it sounds like a trumpet when you amplify it. It's like mixing paint: with too many colors you get nothing but mud. An amplified trumpet doesn't sound good when you play real fast. So I learned to play two-bar phrases and that's where I was going with my new music.

On Agharta, Miles’ playing is not smooth in the sense of his classic mid-range legato, but he seems to have found a sound almost beyond legato, his trumpet burbling through phrases with amoebic progression, punctuated by squeaking staccato pips. Were someone to transpose his playing, I don’t think a single passage of notes would be unmarked by either slurs or dots.

Yet there is a bizarre logic in Davis’ playing here, especially if one considers him as much a conductor as a player. Miles always took his role as bandleader to heart, not merely in playing prowess but in just how much he ceded to his rotating rosters of up-and-comers. Before and after he started plugging instruments into amplifiers, he left the electrics to people like John Coltrane and Wayne Shorter. What he does with his trumpet on Agharta—and what he’s too tired to do on Pangaea, to noticeably negative effect—is guide the others with his warbling notes, pushing out beyond the band as they realign around him.

Indeed, Miles’ staccato squeaks and quivering, murky slurs tether the sound as much as Henderson’s basslines, if not more so, making him both leader and anchor. This split gives drive to his melodies (for want of a better term) and a foundation to his most abstract searching. Unorthodox as his playing sounds here, this approach fits in with Miles’ larger arc as a bandleader, in which he has always been front and center but also a background force. Photos of Miles from this period show him hunched over his wah-wah trumpet, the horn pointing almost straight down as he plays the damn thing almost as if it were a clarinet. But decked out in outlandish clothing and mysterious shades, this posture has the effect of casting Davis as some kind of sorcerer, conjuring music from beneath the Earth and tapping into that underground city to bring out its savage, alien sounds.

For fireworks, Davis turns to two players. Woodwind player Sonny Fortune gets off a rousing alto sax solo after Miles’ fractal entry that is the closest thing to traditional-sounding jazz on the whole album. His arpeggios provide some semblance of form in the tenuous musical outreach heard thus far. It’s almost reassuring to hear from him, the mere fact that he’s playing something coherent and traditional turning even the gritty punch of a sax into a burst of cool air amidst this sweltering acid-funk. But never fear; not long after, Fortune breaks out a soprano saxophone, adding a tinge of Bitches Brew to the mix with that sinewy, sidewinding, reedy noise those instruments make. I always think of a desert when I hear soprano saxophones, and the high-pitched drone here compliments the tribal rhythms well, further tying the overall sound to African heritages even as they sound like nothing of this Earth.

The other star player is guitarist Pete Cosey, who leaps in with a lengthy solo 11-and-a-half minutes into “Prelude” and promptly announces he has filled the hole left when Jimi Hendrix died before he could collaborate with Miles. With squealing, wah-wah-wracked distortion, Cosey sounds like a monster unleashed, darting in clipped, effects-laden chords and running through fast, vicious passages. Cosey is one of the few guitarists to truly understand what made Hendrix Hendrix, and his solo shows the same balance of squall and listenability.

Cosey’s prodigious skill makes him more indispensable to the band’s dynamic than any other guitarist to play with Miles. Not even John McLaughlin had the same level of importance with Miles; listen to the Cellar Door Sessions, from which Live-Evil was culled, and you’ll hear a band that is much tighter without him than with him. McLaughlin served as a session player for that lineup, and it showed; his playing is exemplary, but it exists almost entirely outside the interplay of the others, making his solos, thrilling as they are, jarring. McLaughlin’s diminished role is especially evident as Miles was slowly working his way toward the sound on On the Corner, to which McLaughlin contributed little.

(As Adam Holzman wrote in the liner notes for the box set, hearing these complete Cellar Door recordings helps bridge the dying-sun jazz of Bitches Brew with the fitful beginnings of the 1975 volcanic funk sound as heard on Dark Magus, recorded live in 1974 but not released until after both Agharta and Pangaea. The Cellar Door tapes show Miles starting to consolidate everything but the guitarist, making Cosey’s find all the more vital.)

Cosey’s interplay with the band is tremendous given how much time he spends shredding (a word one can almost use literally for his style). His whammy-bar-abusing stunts form a bizarrely logical extension of Miles’ own playing, and across the entire album Cosey keeps rhythm with second guitarist Reggie Lucas and Henderson’s fluid, walking bass.

And while I’m on the subject, let’s talk about Henderson for a bit. Having replaced the legendary Dave Holland at age 19, Henderson’s complete unfamiliarity with jazz and his inability to do much more than hold a steady beat made him the whipping boy for those who felt Miles was selling out and simplifying his music to appeal to teenagers. By 1975, however, Henderson had become the rock upon which Miles had built his new church. Plaiting his bass through the thick lines of mangled guitar distortion and soupy trumpet, Henderson is the least "visible" member playing yet quite possibly the only reason it all works. He and Al Foster generate beats that extend into infinity, holding such a tight rhythm that one feels these LP-length jams could extend even further on the strength of the foundation. Henderson’s vamps add flashes of color to the bottom end, but he works best when generating the throbbing pulse of the sound, a groove so funky you can dance to it but so unwavering it takes on the vague properties of a drone. As such, even Henderson and Foster’s time-keeping feels warped and unorthodox.

Listening to Agharta, it’s almost funny to consider there was a time Davis had slammed the avant-garde wing of jazz. The man who once threatened to stomp the foot of Eric Dolphy—one of the more melodic and precise practitioners of free jazz’s early explosion—for tuneless squawking had now gone so far not only past jazz but jazz fusion that he existed on his own island of experimentation. Yet one can easily tie the ostensible break from form here back a full decade to Miles’ work with his Second Great Quintet. Live recordings and studio albums of that lineup reveal a gradual but considerable shift in Davis’ group interplay to a kind of Left Bank to the free-jazzers New Wave, less radical in aesthetic but no less daring in aim.

With the Second Great Quintet, Miles broke from traditional songwriting patterns to develop the more fluid collage of distinctive styles and solos that sees its endpoint with these Osaka recordings. But rather than collide in shrieks and howls of cacophony, the young players of the quintet found the pulsating through lines that made the composition whole. This grounded their clashing solos and paradoxically slowed this innovative sound to a crawl, countering the abandon of free jazz with coherent experimentation. That development continued through the beginnings of Miles’ flirtations with electric and can be plainly seen in his best two pure jazz-rock albums, the serene, cautious In a Silent Way and the airtight A Tribute to Jack Johnson. Even in the maelstrom that is Bitches Brew, a calm bedrock roots the music.

That pulsing, hypnotic sound especially comes through on Agharta in the second track, “Maiysha.” Opening with Miles playing wavering chords on an organ and Sonny Fortune’s gorgeous flute lines, the song simply but brilliantly reverses the dynamic of “Prelude.” It pulls back the lead instruments into melodic softness as Foster, Mtume and Henderson play more propulsive rhythms, keeping time with Miles and Fortune but also anticipating another hot Cosey solo on the way. As chaotic and improvisational as Agharta can sound, no one is just leaping into the fray. The play between Miles/Fortune and Cosey shifts several times throughout the composition, but the rhythm section split the difference so perfectly that they barely have to modulate to accommodate, only dropping down in the middle section for a gorgeous, out-there solo from Miles that in itself demonstrates how he could ground his searching, exploratory music in gentler, more cohesive sounds.

Agharta culminates in an LP-length jam that serves an artistic smorgasbord for the various influences at work on Miles at the time, as well as his own artistic evolution. When Miles hired Henderson for his band, he specifically honed in on the young man’s green chops, commanding him never to learn “the old shit” under threat of termination. He was an artist who never liked to look back and insisted on moving forward where luminaries like Louis Armstrong kept consolidating their live shows into “just the hits.” But the “Jack Johnson/Interlude” jam uses a number from Miles’ past to demonstrate the distance travelled in just five years. “Right Off,” the tightest, most focused jam of Miles’ electric period, ruptures with a rollicking sax solo from Fortune that melts into more guitar freakouts from Cosey before settling into something sounding like the original song (albeit with a swing that reaches far back into jazz’s history) in time for Miles’ solo, which feels like a classic jazz approach to the original, variating the theme while still keeping the original version recognizable. Take out the electricity and this could be a typical jazz jam, but then the electric add-ons make it so much more. The jam soon settles into a workout of the more current number, “Ife,” but before that Paul Tingen, writer of Miles Beyond: The Electric Explorations of Miles Davis 1967-1991 notes the bassline of “So What” being played at 16:42. As Tingen says, Henderson must have figured “the risk of being fired for playing old stuff is gone.”

Tingen also correctly points to the counterintuitive ending of the show, which does not build the white-hot jamming of the rest of the album to its final explosion but instead ends on an entropic note. It’s a curious approach, one in direct opposition to the typical structure of a concert. Yet there’s a bizarre logic in it, given the nature of the music. Agharta, as indicated by its title, sounds like music made before civilization, before humanity, even. Much as it incorporates everything, from avant-garde 20th-century composition to Afrobeat, the music sounds primal, like the foundation for everything it’s consolidating rather than the endpoint. The eruption of this underground city spews forth lava that cools into a new landmass.

No wonder, then, that this cooling energy should continue into Pangaea, named for the supercontinent that originally joined all land on Earth. Granted, Pangaea’s reserved energy owes less to thematic consistency of musical rebirth than to the sheer exhaustion of the bandleader, tired and ill and forced to cede even more prominence to his band members, who seem unsure of how to proceed without him. All of the elements that made Agharta so fiery—the screeching synths, the funksplosion guitars—appear and add speed and verve, and often the band sounds as relentless as they did during the earlier show. But too often the jams fall apart, reaching areas meant for Miles to assert himself now left perilously unfilled and throwing off momentum that is slow to be regained. It’s still a great recording, but Pangaea seems to anticipate the continent breaking up into fragments rather than reflect the igneous formation of Agharta.

Nevertheless, it’s hard to take one without the other, and collectively the albums represent Miles Davis’ artistic peak, and the endpoint of various musical efforts of his. By resurrecting Hendrix via Eddie Hazel in Pete Cosey, Davis found a sound that, in theory at least, tapped into the prevailing African-American trends. In Mtume and Foster’s tribal drumming, he extended that idea further into the past, mixing the modern with the roots. And in the rhythm section’s endless loops he found a way to recreate live what he’d been doing in the studio with Teo Macero’s help, that is, reconstituting jams around a basic beat and constructing music not out editing (or just out of editing, as it were) but real-time musical direction. This style leaps to the other end of the spectrum from primal roots music to arrive at the European intellectualism of modern composer Karlheinz Stockhausen, of whom Davis was a fan. Davis describes the influence of Stockhausen on his own work in his autobiography:

I had always written in a circular way and through Stockhausen I could see that I didn’t want to ever play again from eight bars to eight bars, because I never end songs: they just keep going on. Through Stockhausen I understood music as a process of elimination and addition.

This explains why both albums peter out into the abyss rather than building to an orgasmic chord to send the crowd home reeling. It makes the jams seem incomplete, even cyclical, perfectly suited to the idea of the albums restarting after ending. Stockhausen’s musique concrète broke the boundaries of musical structure by warping recorded sounds into music, thus completely subverting musical composition while finding ways to make the whole world musical. Davis’ approach manages to find similar grounds of deconstruction and incorporation, breaking apart genre and throwing in everything until you have something as danceable as it is avant-garde.

I don’t like to overly romanticize artistic self-immolation, and anyone with even a cursory knowledge of Miles at this time knows of his crippling conditions and worse drug habits. Nevertheless, while so much of his sickness was self-affliction, the strain it induces in him with Agharta and Pangaea gives the albums the feel of Icarus reaching the apex of his flight as he hangs in the air for a second before plummeting back to Earth. This is the sound of a man reaching the limits of musical exploration and expansion and collapsing exhausted.

Following a five-year retreat of sex and drugs, Miles reemerged in the ‘80s as an elder statesman, his embouchure so ravaged that the watery tones of his trumpet here sound as strong as Dizzy Gillespie at his peak. The Miles of the '80s continued to work popular music into his sound, and it’s funny that the man who resented the stale traps into which legends such as Satch fell spent so much time following the pop culture barometer. But those '80s recordings lack the fire of these albums, and while Miles reemerged looking to stay current as fans dug with even more relish into his early days, this pocket of mid-'70s work remains understudied and underpraised. For this fan, however, Agharta and the other work of the tail end of Miles’ glory days remain not merely his finest hour but one of the most daring and inimitable musical progressions of the 20th century.


P.S. For a condensed history of Miles’ electric period, I highly recommend Bill Laswell’s remix album/tone poem Panthalassa, which combines elements from all stages of the ’69-’75 period into an hourlong jam. It cuts a lot of waffle out of Davis’ Stockhausen-inspired improvisational free-for-alls while revealing the logical foundations linking the vastly different aspects of the electric years, from the fire of “Prelude” to the abstract but deeply emotional elegy for Duke Ellington, “He Loved Him Madly.” Freshly unearthed sections mix with sometimes radically altered existing structures to make the ultimate Electric Miles mixtape.

Stuff I Like: Miles Davis

"I never thought that the music called 'jazz' was ever meant to reach just a small group of people, or become a museum thing locked under glass like all the other dead things that were once considered artistic." — Miles Davis

"White folks always think that you have to have a label on everything — you know what I mean?" - Miles Davis, interview with Les Tomkins, 1969



Over the course of a career that spanned nearly five decades, Miles Davis constantly stayed ahead of every label people tried to stick to him, including some he partially coined. Cool jazz, modal jazz, hard bop, fusion. Miles helped pioneer them all, mastered them and then moved on just as copycats moved in to try to figure him out. Everything about Miles screamed "genius" -- in the sideman world of jazz, he became a leader early and stayed a leader, spring-boarding from Charlie Parker's bebop quintet to make his breakthrough album, Birth of the Cool, a reversal from Parker's style despite Bird's input and the bebop chops of all involved. That was the first sign of Davis' ability to abruptly change everything, but it wouldn't be the last, not by a long shot.

Davis is often dismissed as the jazz musician rock kids listen to in order to say they listen to jazz. Musically, the connection between Davis and rock is thin (well, at least before he led the charge of moving jazz into rock, of course). I would look to John Coltrane and his sheets of sound before Miles' modal explorations when linking jazz to rock; Coltrane's spiritualism throughout the '60s even made the ties more obvious, what with the Love Generation rising around the same time. But aesthetically, oh man. There ain't never been a rock star like Miles Davis, and that was as true when he played smooth legato lines down in Birdland as it was when he took to stadiums. Davis once said he could tell if a cat could play just by how he stood; one look at Davis and you not only knew that he could play, you could surmise how he played. Cool in the classical (i.e. poised and resolute) and contemporary (i.e. one bad mutha) senses, Miles parlayed his glacial mood into the atmosphere of his music. Even when he pushed his music into fiery cataclysms of rock, funk and white-hot jazz, Miles still brought the smooth.

I will not try to write even a basic summary of Davis' progression from his days as a sideman after dropping out of Juilliard in '44 through his death in 1991 after he had crawled back from the brink and enjoyed a popular comeback almost no one expected of the habitual heroin addict. No single volume could ever capture the twists and turns of Davis' career nor the number of masterpieces he put out under ever-shifting lineups. Besides, I don't know a thing about music theory, so I would only stumble more in the futile effort to to catalog the evolutions and impacts of Davis' output.

What attracts me to Davis is that sense of growth, that incessant reaching for something more, something fresh. Born to a middle-class family in 1926, Davis fought against both racism from whites and scorn for his higher upbringing to keep African and African-American music alive. He abandoned the Western, white music preached at Juilliard to play jazz with Charlie Parker, helped bring the blues back to the medium via hard bop, and by the time he moved into jazz-rock and hard funk, he'd incorporated soul, funk, R&B and tribal rhythms into his sound. Everything Miles ever played tied into a rich musical past, but he modernized it, contextualized it around new ideas. In the process, he laid the foundations for future forms of black and urban music, from dance and dub (On the Corner) to electronic-driven hip-hop (much of his '80s material). Why, where would dear old Prince be without him?


Yet no matter how far Miles went with his sound, you can always recognize him. His chops, unreliable even during his rare moments of mental and physical health, do not lend to a consistency in sound: on some of his finest albums, Davis himself clearly falters, straining for notes and occasionally blowing out such watery tones I wondered if he just hadn't drained his spit valve in a month or so. You can hear the same soul-searching-as-tonal-straying at the nadir of his mid-'70s personal tailspin and a decade earlier with the second great quintet at the Plugged Nickel. And the powerful work with the first great quintet and resultant sextant returns later in Miles' earliest fusion recordings when the prince of darkness felt emboldened by his risky musical cartography. Through it all, however, he maintains a certain feel, a clearly defined approach that identifies the player as Miles from the first note.

The tone and the swagger might make Miles a dominating presence, but, for this writer, Davis' greatest contribution to music was his ability to find and nurture talent in others. Selecting only a handful of the musicians he launched through his work, one could still wind up with such names as John Coltrane, Chick Corea, Ron Carter, John McLaughlin and Tony Williams. He brought out the best in his bandmates, and while he unlocked their fullest potential, few reached the same level without him. The fusion musicians especially wandered without him, McLaughlin initially crafting incendiary work with the Mahavishnu Orchestra before that project set the benchmark for tedious, masturbatory excess in the genre. (Wayne Shorter and Chick Corea's projects followed similar arcs, while Herbie Hancock managed to break the mainstream by softening his style enough to work in pop.) Davis' ability to not just pick talent but give his backup musicians the space to explore made him more than a mere leader; small wonder that, by the time he released Bitches Brew, the album credited Miles with "directions in music." That's what he did, checked his inner compass and pointed his crew toward his idea of north, and along they went into the jungle. Somehow, they always made it to the other side.

After his five-year hiatus at the end of the '70s, Miles never fully recovered his embouchure nor his strength, but he still gathered significant rising talent, still pushed the boundaries where he could, still pushed himself. That restlessness is the truest sign of artistic genius. Davis himself railed against the idea of comfort and complacency in artists, treating it as the ultimate sign of surrender. Whether smoothly taking jazz forward by returning it to the pre-Bird and Diz days, incorporating the free jazz he initially disparaged into his work or finally playing over synthesizers and drum loops, Miles always worked fads and trends into his sounds, but when he played them he ensured their immortality. Since his death, Davis' legacy has only grown, partially because the half-admirable, half-cynical onslaught of box sets and archived material released but primarily because the public and critics are only now beginning to fully uncover the depth and beauty of his work. More than any artist, Davis encapsulated the technical and theoretical intricacies of jazz but also the emotional immediacy of the genre. Of course, by the end of his life, he'd moved so far beyond genre he could never be said to be representative of any genre, though he damn near mastered them all.


Top Ten Albums

1. Agharta/Pangaea (both 1975)

Two double-CDs culled from one day in Osaka (the former the afternoon show, the latter the evening gig), Agharta and Pangaea collectively represent the pinnacle of Davis musical wanderings. Agharta, taking its name from the mythological underground city filled with the greatest wisdom mankind could ever learn, appropriately matches its title. Churning like the magma in the Earth's mantle, it unleashes sounds unlike any that have been heard before or since, the fullest extent of Davis musical exploration. After the eruption of the first show, Pangaea cools the lava to form a new supercontinent, resetting the Earth to coincide with the uncovering of our destiny. The music here isn't as blazing as Agharta's, but cooling lava can still melt you.

Davis sounds on the brink of his impending collapse on these records, his pinched, electric squeal the dying moans of a sonic Moses trying to enter the promised land he's taken his people to, only to be denied at the last moment. Around him, his virile band -- Pete Cosey (one of a handful of guitarists to ever launch off Hendrix in just the right way, exploring sonic wash over technical tedium), Sonny Fortune, Reggie Lucas, good ol' Michael Henderson, Al Foster and Mtume -- gathers as if waiting to bear his casket. Beautiful, terrifying, conquering, defeated. It's all here. Not for the faint of heart. (Note: in 2006 Sony Japan remastered these albums, which can be found floating around the Internet as rips from the out-of-print DSD-CD. The remastering is revelatory, rescuing these sonic journeys from muddled whump-whump bass and overheated treble. It says something about the nature of the music that contemporary technology just couldn't handle it.)

2. Kind of Blue (1959)

The highest selling jazz album of all time and such an essential work it should be included gratis in all desert island selections alongside the Bible and the complete works of Shakespeare, Kind of Blue more than lives up to its sterling reputation. Universally hailed by critics and appreciators of all music styles, Kind of Blue represents the pinnacle of Miles' modal efforts, each song beginning on a key, not a theme, allowing for greater range of exploration during group improvisations and individual solos. Yet the focus on modal, not chordal or harmonic, development made each exploration melodic, to the point that the album rewards whether studied intently or played as background music. It's one of the few times Davis' backing group -- incidentally one of his finest, with Coltrane, Cannonball Adderley, Bill Evans, Wynton Kelly, Paul Chambers and Jimmy Cobb contributing -- fully reflected Miles' own sound: cool, legato and beautiful. That unison makes the album listenable long after one nails down its variations.

3. A Tribute to Jack Johnson (1971)

Though Davis' mid-'70s material plunged the artist fully into soul-funk territory, A Tribute to Jack Johnson is by some degree the "rockiest" album he ever made. Opening on a downright sick riff by John McLaughlin, "Right Off" gives way to what is quite possibly Miles' strongest, boldest solo, the result of sobriety and a brief dedication to ultra-healthy living. The second side, "Yesternow," incorporates takes from a group take-off of "Shh/Peaceful," a modification of the bassline of James Brown's "Say It Loud — I'm Black and I'm Proud" and an edited version of the tune "Willie Nelson" recorded by a different lineup. Yet of all Miles' electric studio albums, this one sounds the least spliced together, the force of the music carrying a spontaneity and perfectly synchronized looseness to it that gives the illusion of being a single take. After Kind of Blue, Miles' purest record.

4. The Complete Live at the Plugged Nickel (recorded 1965, released 1995)

The second great quintet had only released one album together when then played seven gigs across two nights in December 1965, but you can tell from these complete recordings just why the lineup ended up Davis' longest lasting. With Miles himself slightly faltering, the rest of the band steps in, especially the boisterous Tony Williams on drums and a hopped-up Wayne Shorter looking to prove himself worthy of taking the spot vacated by John Coltrane. Packed into 8 CDs, these hours of music demonstrate exactly where Davis would take the quintet: forward through the past. They stick mainly to standards and classics from Miles' back catalogue, but each version played sounds different from the studio, and even the other versions heard at the club. After slamming free jazz for years, Miles starts to absorb some of it, freeing his compositions along harmonic and rhythmic lines. But he still directs his band through smooth jams, and his own solos sidestep the occasional weakness of his phrasing to overpower. Fair warning: your hard drive will not like you becoming a Miles Davis fan, but those lost gigabytes (oh yes, you'll measure Miles by the gig) are more than worth it.

5. Milestones (1958)

Following the brief dissolution of the first great quintet over money and drug issues, Miles let them back in and picked up Cannonball Adderley while he was at it in order to deliver his first great modal statement. Though it lives in the shadow of Kind of Blue, Milestones is nearly as worthy and features a white-hot band at its peak. As ever, Coltrane tends to start each song by lying down his sound, at which point Davis glides in and gently shapes those sheets in a direction as Paul Chambers saws his bass and Philly Joe Jones monitors the shifts in current to adjust the beat. More electric than Kind of Blue in tone, the album nevertheless has a stripped-down, classic tone that lets each song breathe. Essential.

6. In a Silent Way (1969)

Bitches Brew might have been the album to truly herald jazz fusion to an unsuspecting and unprepared world, but for my money Davis' first electric record holds more rewards. The sound of a band dipping its toe into the water to test its temperature, In a Silent Way is one of the quietest artistic revolutions I've ever heard. When Dylan went electric, he did so boisterously, scabrously, ready to take on anyone. But Dylan ultimately was only responsible to his own image. When Miles made the switch, some thought he took down jazz with him. Maybe they were right; Miles certainly did care for any kind of boundary after this. Heard today, I process only the gentle courage of the music, one figure drifting out into the darkness with a torch until he finds the way clear and calling the others to come to him until the next member of the party moves forward another hundred yards. Yet for the gentle nature of the album's probing, it still displays enough of Miles' restless invention that it still does not fit neatly into either jazz nor rock. Already, he was aiming beyond such labels.

(The degree of evolution and softly radical change in these two sidelong pieces is reflected by the strength of the Complete In A Silent Way Sessions box set, by some degree the strongest of all the mammoth sets documenting the creation of Miles' electric albums. Taking some piece from Filles de Kilimanjaro (the preceding second quintet album that was outright fusion in every way save electric instrumentation), alternate takes and revealing jams, the set demonstrates the astonishing pace with which Miles and co. advanced their already adventurous sound, even as it points toward the huge leaps to follow.)

7. Porgy & Bess (1958)

Davis scarcely looked back from his time at Juilliard, but he acknowledged the influence his brief formal education on his understanding of music theory. One of the clearest examples of that impact is Davis' take on Porgy & Bess, the Third Stream opera by George Gershwin, one that respects the original but emphasizes the ethnic flavors Gershwin sprinkled into his operatic gumbo. The best of Miles' collaborations with Gil Evans, Porgy & Bess is one of the most enduringly entertaining, complex and captivating of Davis' classic records. As ever, Miles does not settle for simply capturing the feel of the past, instead adding new dimensions, new interpretations, Davis' lyricism forging subtle new paths just as adroitly as the passages of Kind of Blue.

8. On the Corner (1972)

Always resentful of jazz's position in the public consciousness as something for the arty and elite, Miles constantly sought new ways to add current flavors to his music. On the Corner marked the first time Miles managed to fully jump ahead of the curve and predict a trend rather than work with one. With its title and finger-snappin' cover right out of a Fat Albert cartoon, On the Corner gave some idea as to its musical contents, but no one could have anticipated the sounds coming from the vinyl. Not only infused with soul and funk, On the Corner took Teo Macero's (a man deserving of Sir George Martin-esque veneration) editing skills to their zenith, piecing together fragments of hot, sulfuric sludge into one of Davis' most forward-thinking albums. Not only does it show Miles finally achieving his wish of becoming the Sly Stone and George Clinton of jazz, the album also lays down all new sounds. Hip-hop, dance music, even post-punk can be heard in its ragged, angular soundscapes and unexpected moments of swing. It's as scathing as Bitches Brew, and as revolutionary, but by now Miles and his crew (whomever they might be, for the lineups shifted all over these four numbers) had worked out the kinks, and one could tell they knew exactly what they were doing.

(Just as the In a Silent Way sessions proved fruitful, the box set of On the Corner provides hours of pleasure, incorporating all the outtakes that made fine cuts of their own on vault-airing releases Big Fun and Get Up With It and adding enough alternate takes to set the mouth watering. The box set for Bitches Brew contained a great deal of superfluous material, the one for A Tribute to Jack Johnson the most relevant to seeing how the final music was made (yet also the most boring save for a few fascinating takes), but the sets for In a Silent Way and On the Corner, though perhaps the ones that cheat most brazenly by widening the time interval to include material that simply fits with the final music and not just the relevant sessions, offer the greatest insights into Miles' electric growth.)

9. Birth of the Cool (recorded 1949/1950, released 1957)

Comprising three sessions in 1949 and 1950 with an orchestral nonet, Birth of the Cool's belated release in 1957 did nothing to detract from its forward-thinking prescience. Of course, by the time this compilation came out, Miles had moved far beyond, having already pumped out classics with his first quintet that found the harder edges around this sound, but other players scrambled to imitate it. Even today, it's easy to see why someone would be glad to copy it after Daivs himself had grown bored of the sound; hell, it'd be a joy to nail down this sound 20 years after the man passed on. Birth of the Cool has all the hallmarks of the classic Miles sound: smooth enough to go down without a fuss but with an after kick that makes your whole chest burn.

10. Sketches of Spain (1960)

After Cannonball Adderley and John Coltrane departed Miles' band following Kind of Blue, Miles decided to morph the sound of that album to compensate, turning his ear to Spanish folk music after hearing a classical arrangement of the Concierto de Aranjuez. With Gil Evans, Davis crafted one of his finest modernist pieces, a work so respectful of the traditions it recreates that, if you close your eyes to sway with the piece, you start to think that you'll be in Barcelona when you open them. Backed by 19 musicians, Miles proved his leadership abilities once and for all. Plus, he would not sound as in command of his own playing for another decade; check the solo on "Saeta," his best until "Right Off" blasted out of speakers in 1971. One of Davis' most popular albums, it remains so for a reason.