mai lyst

luka

Well-known member
i had a look to see if eshun dissects it but he seems to be just tripping out over those kitschy klarwein covers
 

luka

Well-known member
On the Corner is a studio album by American jazz trumpeter Miles Davis. It was recorded in June and July 1972 and released later that year by Columbia Records. The album continued Davis's exploration of jazz fusion, bringing together funk rhythms with the influence of experimental composer Karlheinz Stockhausen and free jazz saxophonist Ornette Coleman.

this doesnt explain it
 

luka

Well-known member
On the Corner was panned by most critics and contemporaries in jazz; according to Tingen, it became "the most vilified and controversial album in the history of jazz" only a few weeks after its release.[1] Saxophonist Stan Getz proclaimed "that music is worthless. It means nothing; there is no form, no content, and it barely swings."[11] Jazz Journal critic Jon Brown wrote, "it sounds merely as if the band had selected a chord and decided to worry hell out of it for three-quarters of an hour,"[11] concluding that "I'd like to think that nobody could be so easily pleased as to dig this record to any extent."[2] Eugene Chadbourne, writing for jazz magazine CODA, described it as "pure arrogance."[2] In his 1974 biography of Davis, critic Bill Coleman described the album as "an insult to the intellect of the people."[11] In a positive review for Rolling Stone, Ralph J. Gleason found the music very "lyrical and rhythmic" while praising the dynamic stereo recording and calling Davis "a magician". He concluded by saying "the impact of the whole is greater than the sum of any part."[17] Fellow rock journalist Robert Christgau later suggested that jazz critics were not receptive to On the Corner "because the improvisations are rhythmic rather than melodic" and Davis played the organ more than trumpet. Regarding the appeal its music had for rock critics, he praised "Black Satin" but expressed reservations about the absence of a "good" beat elsewhere on the album.[7]
 

luka

Well-known member
Even critics who had celebrated Bitches Brew recoiled from On the Corner. Some accused Miles of selling out in pursuit of a younger audience – and Davis said in his autobiography that he had turned to funk so that he would be remembered after he died - but On the Corner is so far from being an act of populism that it is hard to imagine how Miles expected any audience for it at all.

mark fisher got it. you have to start by acknowledging just how alien this thing is.
 

luka

Well-known member
you can see from the wiki entry just how recent this reapprasial is. kode 9 said it invented drum and bass or something and all of a sudden its every fact reviewers favourite album
 

luka

Well-known member
Rate Your Music (Album Info and User Reviews)

Best of All-time Lists, Best of Decade Lists, etc.
Chuck Eddy (USA) - The Accidental Evolution of Rock'n'Roll (1997) No Order
Fast 'n' Bulbous (USA) - The 1000 Best Albums of All Time (Updated 2015) 550
Pitchfork (USA) - Top 100 Albums of the 1970s (2004) 30
WOEBOT (Matthew Ingram, USA) - The 100 Greatest Records Ever (2005) 15
David Toop (UK) - Ocean of Sound: Aether Talk, Ambient Sound and Imaginary Worlds (1995) No Order
Elvis Costello - 500 Albums You Need (2000) No Order
FACT (UK) - The 100 Best Albums of the 1970s (2014) 11
The Wire (UK) - 100 (+30) Records That Set the World on Fire (1998) No Order
Spex (Germany) - The 100 Albums of the Century (1999) 56
Jazz Magazine (France) - 50 Years of Black Music (2013) No Order
MUZIQ (France) - 200 Records for a Dream Collection (2007) No Order
Il Mucchio Selvaggio (Italy) - 100 Essential Jazz Albums (2004) No Order
Ratings
All Music Guide (USA) - Album Ratings 1-5 Stars 5 Stars
MusicHound (USA) - Album Ratings 0-5 Bones (1998-99) 4 Bones
Robert Christgau (USA) - Consumer Guide Album Grade B+
Rolling Stone Album Guide, Ratings 0-5 Stars (USA, 1979 and/or 1983) 3 Stars
Rolling Stone Album Guide, Ratings 1-5 Stars (USA, 1992) 3.5 Stars
Martin C. Strong (UK) - The Great Rock Discography 7th Edition, Ratings 1-10 7
The Penguin Guide to Jazz on CD (6th Ed., 2002), Ratings 1-4 Stars, or a Crown 2.5 Stars
Virgin Encyclopedia of Popular Music (UK) - Album Ratings 1-5 Stars (2002) 3 Stars
Le Guide du CD (France) - Ratings from 1 to 4 Stars & "GOLD" (1991-1997) 3 Stars
Music Story (France) - Album Ratings 1-5 Stars 5 Stars


These critics also liked the following albums:

Artist Album Year Buy from
Amazon
Art Ensemble of Chicago
Les Stances a Sophie
1970

Don Byron
Tuskegee Experiments
1992

Sam Cooke
Night Beat
1963

Eric Dolphy
Out to Lunch!
1964

Herbie Hancock
Sextant
1973

Charles Mingus
Charles Mingus Presents Charles Mingus
1960

Charles Mingus
Let My Children Hear Music
1972

Max Roach
We Insist! Max Roach's Freedom Now Suite
1961

Arthur Russell
World of Echo
1986

Pharoah Sanders
Karma
1969
 

luka

Well-known member
But if a jazz composer wants to make a rock album, or an electronic album, or an ambient album, or an experimental album (like in this case)? Would you still tag it as a "jazz album"?

Very ahead for his time, Miles Davis mixed art music with jazz/funk music, two opposite styles.

The result is "On the Corner", a noisy nightmare with jazz and tribal tints, in which you can't recognize nothing like a melody riff or something like it. It's a magmatic long suite, heavy and disturbing.

I've heard a lot of people defend this record as being "misunderstood", claiming that it isn't a jazz record and is at heart, an avant-garde funk album. There is only one problem with that: Miles and his crew didn't know how to play funk.

Miles simply could not play funky music (this music does not groove and is not danceable)... in his autobiography he states that he was trying to reach the R&B market (young blacks) and that Columbia messed up because they promoted this record to jazz stations instead of R&B stations ... he must have been really lunchin' by then IMHO because no R&B station would ever have played something like this ... had this record not had his name associated with it ... it would never have been released

:crylarf::crylarf::crylarf:
 

luka

Well-known member
As someone who was greatly influenced by Bangs' great (and still not reprinted) essay Free Jazz / Punk Rock, I was shocked by "Kind of Grim," which dismisses Miles' 1972 recording On the Corner as "garbage," "the absolute worst album this man ever put out." "On this experiment in percussion and electronics," Bangs wrote in 1976, "what little actual trumpet you could pick out of the buzz-whiz and chockablocka was so distorted as to be almost beyond recognition." But because On the Corner wasn't simply "an off-note unaccountably put on record," but the beginning of a series of releases that included such other depressing "horseshit" as Big Fun and Get Up with It, Bangs claimed that "this music indicat[ed] that something was wrong with the progenitor, that he was not [merely] indulging himself or tapped out or merely confused," but that Miles was "sick of soul."

Five years later or, if you count Free Jazz / Punk Rock, three years later, Bangs was claiming that On the Corner was "something genuinely new," "the first jazz of the Eighties." Instead of being dead, of "having no discernible emotion in it," On the Corner is "almost obscenely, frighteningly alive." And this "change of mind" doesn't fail to implicate Bangs himself. He makes sure his readers know that, back in 1976, he "couldn't even hear it, much less feel its cold flame and realize its intentions," and "we could only grow into it [...] as time caught up with us and we caught up with Miles."

But this new-found appreciation is not an occasion for self-congratulation. No, far from it: back in 1976, Bangs writes, "there was something wrong with me [...] I was sweeping some deep latent anguish under the emotional carpet, or not confronting myself on some primal level." He'd dismissed On the Corner because "it exposed me to myself, to my own falsity, to my own cowardice in the face of dread or staved-off pain." And this, precisely, is the value of reading Lester Bangs so long (22 years!) after his death: like Miles' music, his writhing "will pry [pain] out of your soul's very core when he hits his supreme note and you happen, coincidentally, to be a bit of an open emotional wound at the moment yourself. It is this gift for open-heart surgery that makes him the supreme artist" -- or, if you will, the great moralist -- "that he is."
 

luka

Well-known member
Paul Miller, aka electronic and hip-hop musician and producer DJ Spooky. "I'm highly influenced by the collage process producer Teo Macero applied on the album,"
 

luka

Well-known member
those twisted lozenges of bass and wah-wah
i'm thinking of one and one in particular. and the opening and snapping shut of mechanical jaws.
 

luka

Well-known member
all these discreet but interlocking machine parts compressed air hissing with the in and out of pistons
 

luka

Well-known member
"A swarm operates as a unit," says Stephen Crampton, CEO of Swarm Systems, an autonomous-systems startup based in Hertfordshire. "It has a mission that it has to carry out, and it is self-reconfiguring so that if one drone gets taken out, the others autonomously change their behaviour to complete the mission."
 

luka

Well-known member
By 1972's On The Corner, the counter culture's boundless psychic spaces had suffered contraction. On The Corner is implosive, seething with volcanic but caged energies: it's jazz's answer to There's A Riot Goin' On. In the funk of Sly Stone and James Brown, Miles found a perfect musical analogue for the early Seventies 'the world is a ghetto' vibe. The bulk of the album consists of feverish, minimal-is-maximal varations around a single bass and guitar riff. The sulphurous fizz of the polyrhythms, the viscous malignancy of the bass, rhythm guitar that etches livid weals in your frontal lobes, wah-wah riffs that coil and bristle like rattlesnakes, or choke on their own venom: this is the sound of paranoia, totally wired, uptight, and coked to the gills. You feel like the air's burning in your lungs, like your heart's hammering against your ribcage and your nerves have turned to cheesewire.

reynolds in 1990
 

luka

Well-known member
On The Corner is one of the dozen albums (for a list, send a SAE) that anyone interested in the outer limits should own, or be owned by.

what are the others please?
 
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