We Want Miles

Sound DNA

• Jazz
• Jazz Fusion

• gritty
• swaggering
• nocturnal

About

Miles Davis’ strength, aside from his singular trumpet-playing, was putting together great bands—a strength that shines through on his late-career release <i>We Want Miles</i>. The trumpeter had “gone electric” in the late 1960s, and courted larger audiences as a result. But in the mid-1970s, Davis entered an unhealthy five-year seclusion in his Manhattan apartment on West 77th Street (which, decades later, would officially be renamed Miles Davis Way). In 1981, Columbia unveiled a new studio effort, <i>The Man With the Horn</i>, featuring a leadoff track (“Fat Time”) that featured the core comeback band: guitarist Mike Stern, tenor and soprano saxophonist Bill Evans (not to be confused with Davis’ former pianist), electric bassist Marcus Miller, and drummer Al Foster. This lineup, alongside new percussionist Mino Cinelu, took to the stage in Boston, New York, and Japan, resulting in 1981’s live double album, <i>We Want Miles</i>. These are long, vamp-based jams, but there’s something more compact and accessible in the music compared to the pre-hiatus live documents <i>Agharta</i> and <i>Pangaea</i> (both of which also featured Al Foster, the common thread between these periods). The funky snap and pop of Miller’s bass, the fluent mix of bebop and screaming rock from Stern’s solid-body guitar—these elements, and these players, pointed toward a new kind of 1980s fusion, with more nods to straight-ahead jazz vernacular than to 1970s psychedelic abstraction. All the while, of course, Davis’ horn—alternately lyrical, sparse, and cuttingly virtuosic—remains at the center. “Jean-Pierre,” represented here in two versions, serves as the band’s de facto theme song. Other <i>We Want Miles</i> standouts include “Back Seat Betty” and “Fast Track”—both of which had appeared on <i>The Man with the Horn</i>—and the Gershwins’ “My Man’s Gone Now,” which Miles recorded with Gil Evans two decades before on <i>Porgy and Bess</i>. At 20 minutes, “My Man’s Gone Now” is the longest track on <i>We Want Miles</i>, and one of its most adventurous—an intriguing melange of slow groove and swing that suggests how readily the two could coexist.

via Apple Music

Tracklist

Credits