"I know what I've done for music, but don't call me a legend. Just call me Miles Davis.”

Thanks to everyone for showing up and kicking off the Season Six and the inauguration of the Stugats II. I was going to begin a Lodge version of “Curious Guy” with Train over the film deaths of Giovanni Ribsi and stock footage of Run Silent, Run Deep, but instead thanks to the leftist idealists at NPR I’m inspired to write about the Rock N’ Roll Hall of Fame ceremony tonight, and more importantly give major accolades to a series of work by what I consider to be perhaps the greatest recorded musician of all-time (this is non-debatable). Please do yourself a favor and check out the NPR piece here , excellent work as always.

As many of you know, musically, the last year for me has been spent in deep exploration of what is slowly becoming my favorite record of all-time, or what’s known on the street as Bitches Brew. Following is some thoughts and opinions about Mr. Miles Davis and how he single-handedly changed the face of music and ruined it all at the same time, or as I like to call it the Physical Graffiti-effect.

As many of you know, thanks in part to this piece, the works of Jimi Hendrix are the primary canon in the musical section of my scriptures. That is until I saw the movie Collateral. Thanks to the incredible ability of Michael Mann to interject the appropriate music at key moments to match the desired mood, I discovered a sound that immediately grabbed me by my THC-roots and swung me right into a transcendental unconscious-methadone state(all right!!!.)

This is not the first time Mann has had this effect on me, nor is it foreign to other members of this Lodge (queue the Queen and Flash soundtrack). This time around Mann’s musical gift to me via a semi-dramatic, semi-action movie was a little more substantial than the last time:

"The sailors and pilots, the soldiers and the law,The pay-offs and the rip-offs,
and the things nobody sawNo matter if it's heroin, cocaine, or hash,You've got
to carry weapons 'cause you always carry cash There's lots of shady characters,
lots of dirty dealsEvery name's an alias in case somebody squealsIt's the lure
of easy money, it's got a very strong appeal."

-Glenn Fry
“Smuggler’s Blues”

Anyway, twenty years later, Mann sets up a scene in Collateral where hit man Cruise and soon to be dead bartender discuss the wonders of Miles and his appearance at this particular club, meanwhile a song "Spanish Fly" plays in the background. Minor movie moment transcends to musically revolutionary milestone. It wasn’t because of a good hook or any of the other numerous elements I find appealing about music. Certain artists signify specific emotions and words that describe everything you need to know about the artist and their sound, Neil Young=honest, Zeppelin=self-indulgent, the Dead=culture, Springsteen=blue collar, Whitney Houston=Sadie Hawkins '88 whether or not these descriptions accurately display’s the artist themselves or their music is subjective and basically meaningless, the “assumed” description” usually matches the actual description. I’m sure Jimmy Page is actually a down-to-earth guy once you get past the leather pants (gigggity).

The one word description meshes with Miles in one aspect in another it is completely impossible to give one word. During the 17min 34sec of “Spanish Fly”, you can move between metaphysical relationships of ionic atoms to the consistency of peanut butter at 88 degrees Celsius. Only the term, “free”, or any derivitive of the meaing independent/self-autonomous could ever be associated with the sounds that were created by Miles during his exploration into revolutionizing how people view the relationship between jazz and rock n’ roll. I’ve experienced certain parts of Hendrix that dabbled with this “freedom”, Herbie Hancock touched on it very briefly with Headhunters and Thrust , but I now understood who owned it and made it his bitch(sorry, somewhere my 8th grade English teacher just got a spike of pain in her back).

Released in ’69, combing just seven songs on the original double-disc release, Bitches Brew, allows for the meditation and expansion of anyone that appreciates music that operates w/o vocal harmony and traditional arrangement, but instead explores the space in-between notes. Miles once said “Don't play what's there, play what's not there,” this semi-cliché unfortunately is surprisingly sparse in the realm of jazz and rock. Both genres experiencing the greatest decade in the previous twenty years, with Jazz in the 50s and Rock in the 60s.

It’s impossible to isolate any one song from Bitches Brew, “Spanish Fly” gets points for being the first track that I ever heard from it, but separately it only robs the collective sound heard when listening from initial record crack to final pop. Following Bitches Brew, Miles embarked on a collection of work that continued to channel the extremely creative with extremely talented. This period of recordings are captured in the epic In a Silent Way & The Jack Johnson recordings. I’m still in the process of discovery, so by no means believe that I see the Alpha and Omega with his breadth of recordings.

Typically defined as “fusion”, meaning the “fusing” of jazz and rock, which in today’s vernacular brings up images of bass players wearing sweat bands and Neal Pert drumming in a 360 degree kit, (please reference: Rush, Yes, Dream Theater, etc...) Miles wasn’t trying to create a label for a genre, neither did he give a damn about defining his style, “I'll play it first and tell you what it is later.” Taken from his wife’s rock influence and his love of Hendrix’s sound, Miles worked out a sound that was so good that nobody was ever going to do it better than him, and much like the rock fall-out following Zeppelin’s Physical Graffiti, the imitators tainted the original image, hence the Physical Graffiti-effect that Bitches Brew had on the newly coined “fusion” genre that quickly became clichéd by no fault than overexposed imitators.

“Fusion” is the reason that a plaque of Miles will be heading to Cleveland, jazz was not something that Miles was going to keep to a traditional arrangement, “ 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 other dead things that were once considered artistic.” The ability of most musicians to define their sound within a genre usually determines their hall credibility, (whatever that is). What stands tallest with Miles is that he created a genre that defined a sound. If the purpose of music is truly to evoke emotion and feeling, than I can think of no better artist that fits the description of musician better than Miles. Even though the influence of Hendrix led Miles to create a record in God’s own collection, it was Miles that ultimately had the ability (and time) to push music further, even if the end result of the genre is less than desirable.