'Caution, back end swings out when turning' says the sign on the back of the lorry carrying rolls of turf down Kentish Town high street whilst I sit drinking coffee - reminding me of the fact that Joe Tex's Ain't Gonna Bump No More (With No Big Fat Woman) was a recent earworm - then it turns and damned if the end didn't swing right out whilst the cab passed a corner on which nobody was standing, unlike Corky McCoy's cartoon depiction of On The Corner types for Miles Davis's album - the gallery of stereo-types (hustler, whore, jive hipsters and liberated brother parody) - this ain't New York, this is London Ta-a-hn - still, I think of Miles Davis having listened to the BBC documentary about him gone electric...
...just because someone posted this photo on Facebook last night...
...MD with ELP - christ - who said he sold out? Keith Emerson having killed himself recently I won't speak ill of the dead - suffice to say ELP's music has never meant anything to me. Where was I? On The Corner. You know MD went electric and you know that some said it was a sell-out, right? Bitches Brew? Of course, any Jazz 'purist' would wrinkle their nose at someone electrifying their acoustic world but Davis didn't just plug it in, he wired it totally weird, creating a writhing amplified monster that crawled up the purists' collective backside and chewed them alive from the inside. Boys, if you must, in your self-appointed holiness, stick the Sell-Out-label in anyone try the smooth Fusion mob that came a few years later and tell Freddie Hubbard he should have still been doing what he was doing ten years ago instead of playing half the notes and earning ten times the amount of money.
The idea of MD wanting to somehow get in with the Rock crowd always amuses me - to think that his aim may have been that but his methods were anything but ingratiating. So Bitches Brew sold huge amounts - with what? Cheap easy R&B riffs and a Funk-by-numbers-back beat? Not exactly. Not at all. Turns out, as the witnesses in the BBC doc testify, most of what went on when MD entered electric crazyland was directionless, other than the occasional cryptic command from Him. Get the right heads together, free their asses and their fingers and lips will follow; none of which really explains how MD was able to get what he did out of John McLaughlin, Jack DeJohnette, Dave Holland and the rest. After all, get most musos to 'jam' and the results would be awful, your worst 'supergroup' nightmare blues riffing for an hour, perhaps (who shouted "Cream!"?).
Now Don Cheadle's biopic, Miles Ahead is about to open in UK cinemas he's doing the publicity rounds, turning up on The One Show the other week, of all places (well, they (the common herd) know Don from his Hollywood hits so he's actually less of a stranger to them than he is to me). Even so, I nearly choked on my dinner when they showed a clip of MD playing 'live' and electric - blimey! What went wrong there? Doesn't the producer know that this is prime time TV and thousands of families are gathered in front of the set wanting to be entertained (and, yes, informed of certain social problems) - not made to endure that noise! "Is that Jazz?" A bemused viewer asks herself. "Oh, it's not what I thought it was, then." Funnier still than my imaginary-but-surely-real-too scenario was co-host Matt Baker expressing surprise that the man depicted in Cheadle's film could be difficult yet play so beautifully...
...well, come on, you wouldn't expect Matt to be familiar with MD's total output, would you?
So MD lands in UK living-rooms...also on the street, assuming there are film posters around. I know one was seen at a tube station. But what would a Jazz ignoramus make of that poster? Who's the black freak dressed like...what...I dunno. Perhaps DC's name will be enough to get some of them into the cinemas. I haven't seen it yet and don't hold up much hope for anything other than the novelty of seeing someone do a good impersonation of Him. That'll do. Then I want to see Forest Whitaker as Sun Ra...
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