On the Corner

On the Corner
Studio album by Miles Davis
Released October 11, 1972[1]
Recorded June 1, 6 and July 7, 1972
Studio Columbia Studio E, New York
Genre
Length 54:54
Label Columbia
Producer Teo Macero
Miles Davis chronology
Live-Evil
(1971)Live-Evil1971		 On the Corner
(1972)		 Black Beauty
(1973)Black Beauty1973

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

Recording sessions for the album featured a changing lineup of musicians including bassist Michael Henderson, guitarist John McLaughlin, and keyboardist Herbie Hancock, with Davis playing the electric organ more prominently than his trumpet.[8] Various takes from the sessions were then spliced together using the tape editing techniques of producer Teo Macero. The album's packaging did not credit any musicians, an attempt to make the instruments less discernible to critics. Its artwork features Corky McCoy's cartoon designs of urban African-American characters.

On the Corner was in part an effort by Davis to reach a younger African American audience who had largely left jazz for funk and rock music.[9] Instead, it became one of his worst-selling recordings and was scorned by establishment jazz critics at the time of its release.[9][10] It would be Davis's last studio album of the 1970s conceived as a complete work; subsequently, he recorded haphazardly and focused instead on live performance before temporarily retiring from music in 1975.[11]

The critical standing of On the Corner has improved dramatically with the passage of time.[4] Many outside the jazz community later called it an innovative musical statement and forerunner to subsequent funk, jazz, post-punk, electronica, and hip hop music. In 2007, On the Corner was reissued as part of the 6-disc box set The Complete On the Corner Sessions, joining previous multi-disc Davis reissues.

Background

Davis performing in Germany, 1971

Following his turn to fusion in the late 1960s and the release of rock- and funk-influenced albums such as Bitches Brew (1970) and Jack Johnson (1970), Miles Davis received substantial criticism from the jazz community.[3][12] Critics accused him of abandoning his talents and pandering to commercial trends, though his recent albums had been commercially unsuccessful by his standards.[12] Other jazz contemporaries, such as Herbie Hancock, Cecil Taylor, and Gil Evans defended Davis; the latter stated that "jazz has always used the rhythm of the time, whatever people danced to".[12] In early 1972, Davis began conceiving On the Corner as an attempt to reconnect with the young African-American audience which had largely forsaken jazz for the groove-based music of Sly and the Family Stone and James Brown.[12] In an interview with Melody Maker, Davis stated that

"I don't care who buys the record so long as they get to the Black people so I will be remembered when I die. I'm not playing for any white people, man. I wanna hear a black guy say 'Yeah, I dig Miles Davis.'"[12]
On the Corner was partly inspired by the musical concepts of Karlheinz Stockhausen (pictured in 1980).

Also cited as an influence by Davis was the work of experimental composer Karlheinz Stockhausen, in particular his forays into electronic music and tape manipulation.[13][14] Davis was first introduced to Stockhausen's work in 1972 by collaborator Paul Buckmaster, and the trumpeter reportedly kept a cassette recording of the 1966–67 Hymnen composition in his Lamborghini sports car.[14] Some concepts from Stockhausen that appealed to Davis included the electronic sound processing found in Hymnen and the 1966 piece Telemusik, and the development of musical structures by expanding and minimizing processes based on preconceived principles—as featured in Plus-Minus and other Stockhausen works from the 1960s and early 1970s.[15] Davis began to apply these ideas to his music by adding and taking away instrumentalists and other aural elements throughout a recording to create a progressively changing soundscape.[15] Speaking about Stockhausen's influence, Davis later wrote 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.[16]

The work of Buckmaster (who played electric cello on the album and contributed some arrangements) and the "harmolodics" of saxophonist Ornette Coleman would also be an influence on the album. In his biography, Davis later described On the Corner with the formula "Stockhausen plus funk plus Ornette Coleman."[17] Using this conceptual framework, Davis reconciled ideas from contemporary art music composition, jazz performance, and rhythm-based dance music.[15]

Recording and production

Bassist Michael Henderson was a fixture throughout the recording sessions.

Recording sessions began in June 1972. Both sides of the record consisted of repetitive drum and bass grooves based around a one-chord modal approach,[3][2] with the final cut culled from hours of jams featuring changing personnel lineups underpinned by bassist Michael Henderson.[12] Other musicians involved in the recording included guitarist John McLaughlin, drummers Jack DeJohnette and Billy Hart, and keyboardists Herbie Hancock and Chick Corea.[5] On the Corner utilized three keyboardists like Bitches Brew while pairing Hart—who had played in Hancock's Mwandishi-era band—with DeJohnette and two percussionists. Hancock's reed player, Bennie Maupin, played bass clarinet and Dave Liebman was recruited as saxophonist.[15] Jazz historian Robert Gluck later discussed the performance:

"The recording functions on two layers: a relatively static, dense thicket of rhythmic pulse provided by McLaughlin's percussive guitar attack, the multiple percussionists, and Henderson's funky bass lines, plus keyboard swirls on which the horn players solo. Segments of tabla and sitar provide a change of mood and pace. Aside from 'Black Satin,' most of the material consists of intense vamps and rhythmic layering."[15]

Compared to Davis' previous recordings, On the Corner found the musician playing the trumpet scarcely,[18] instead often playing keyboards.[12] It also saw his producer, Teo Macero, employ cut-and-splice tape editing procedures (pioneered in the late 1960s on In a Silent Way) to combine various takes in creating a single cohesive work.[2][10] which also allowed Macero and Davis to overdub and add effects.[2] Some of the musicians expressed misgivings about the unconventional musical direction of the sessions: Liebman opined that "the music appeared to be pretty chaotic and disorganized,"[3] while Buckmaster stated that "it was my least favorite Miles album."[2]

Packaging and release

The album cover featured an illustration by cartoonist Corky McCoy depicting ghetto caricatures, including prostitutes, gays, activists, winos, and drug dealers.[12] The packaging only featured one stylized photograph of Davis, and was originally released with no musician credits, leading to ongoing confusion about which musicians appeared on the album. Davis later admitted to doing this intentionally:[19] "I didn't put those names on On the Corner specially for that reason, so now the critics have to say, 'What's this instrument, and what's this? ... I'm not even gonna put my picture on albums anymore. Pictures are dead, man. You close your eyes and you're there."[12]

Upon its release, the album's commercial success was as limited as that of Davis's albums since Bitches Brew, topping the Billboard jazz chart but only peaking at #156 in the more heterogeneous Billboard 200.[20] Paul Tingen wrote that "predictably, this impenetrable and almost tuneless concoction of avant-garde classical, free jazz, African, Indian and acid funk bombed spectacularly, leading to decades in the wilderness. As far as the jazzers were concerned, it completed Davis's journey from icon to fallen idol."[2]

Reception and legacy

Initial response

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.[2] Saxophonist Stan Getz proclaimed "that music is worthless. It means nothing; there is no form, no content, and it barely swings."[12] 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,"[12] concluding that "I'd like to think that nobody could be so easily pleased as to dig this record to any extent."[3] Eugene Chadbourne, writing for jazz magazine CODA, described it as "pure arrogance."[3] In his 1974 biography of Davis, critic Bill Coleman described the album as "an insult to the intellect of the people."[12]

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."[18] 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.[8]

Later reappraisal

Professional ratings
Review scores
SourceRating
AllMusic[21]
Alternative Press4/5[22]
Christgau's Record GuideB+[8]
Down Beat (1983)[23]
Down Beat (2001)[23]
Encyclopedia of Popular Music[24]
MusicHound Jazz4/5[25]
The Penguin Guide to Jazz[26]
The Rolling Stone Album Guide[27]
Rolling Stone Jazz Record Guide[28]

Despite remaining outside the purview of the mainstream jazz community, On the Corner has undergone a critical rehabilitation in recent years, with many critics outside jazz characterizing it as "a visionary musical statement that was way ahead of its time".[2] In 2014, Stereogum hailed it as "one of the greatest records of the 20th Century, and easily one of Miles Davis' most astonishing achievements," noting the album's mix of "funk guitars, Indian percussion, dub production techniques, loops that predict hip-hop."[10] According to Alternative Press, the "essential masterpiece" envisioned much of modern popular music, "representing the high water mark of [Davis'] experiments in the fusion of rock, funk, electronica and jazz".[22] Fact characterized the album as "a frenetic and punky record, radical in its use of studio technology," adding that "the debt that the modern dance floor owes the pounding abstractions of On the Corner has yet to be fully understood."[29] Pitchfork described the album as "longing, passion and rage milked from the primal source and heading into the dark beyond."[30] In a positive review for The Wire, critic Mark Fisher wrote that "the passing of time often neutralises and naturalises sounds that were once experimental, but retrospection has not made On the Corner’s roiling, febrile, bilious stew any easier to digest."[17]

On the Corner was cited by SF Weekly as prefiguring subsequent funk, jazz, post-punk, electronica, and hip hop music.[31] According to AllMusic's Thom Jurek, "the music on the album itself influenced - either positively or negatively - every single thing that came after it in jazz, rock, soul, funk, hip-hop, electronic and dance music, ambient music, and even popular world music, directly or indirectly." [32] Writing for The Vinyl Factory, Anton Spice described it as "the great great grandfather of hip-hop, IDM, jungle, post-rock and other styles drawing meaning from repetition."[33] BBC Music reviewer Chris Jones expressed the view that the music and production techniques of On the Corner "prefigured and in some cases gave birth to nu-jazz, jazz funk, experimental jazz, ambient and even world music."[34] Stylus Magazine's Chris Smith wrote that the record's music anticipated musical principles that abandoned a focus on a single soloist in favor of an emphasis on collective playing: "At times harshly minimal, at others expansive and dense, it upset quite a few people. You could call it punk."[35] Fact named On the Corner the 11th best album of the 1970s,[29] while Pitchfork named the album the 30th best album of that decade.[30]

Track listing

All songs written by Miles Davis.

Side one
No.TitleRecording dateLength
1."On the Corner/New York Girl/Thinkin' One Thing and Doin' Another/Vote for Miles"June 1, 197220:02
2."Black Satin"July 7, 19725:20
Side two
No.Title...Length
3."One and One"June 6, 19726:09
4."Helen Butte/Mr. Freedom X"June 6, 197223:18

Personnel

References

  1. ↑ Miles Davis.com
  2. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 Tingen, Paul (2007). "The Most Hated Album in Jazz". The Guardian. Retrieved May 24, 2016.
  3. 1 2 3 4 5 6 Silverman, Jack. "Jazz saxophonist Dave Liebman comes to Nashville to revisit Miles Davis' explosive and polarizing On the Corner". Nashville Scene. Retrieved August 22, 2016.
  4. 1 2 Reynolds, Simon (2011). Bring the Noise: 20 Years of Writing About Hip Rock and Hip Hop. Soft Skull Press. p. 182. ISBN 1-59376-460-X.
  5. 1 2 Segal, Dave. "A Fusion Supreme". The Stranger. Retrieved March 16, 2017.
  6. ↑ Mandel, Howard. Miles, Ornette, Cecil: Jazz Beyond Jazz. Routledge Books, 2010. p. 75.
  7. ↑ "Miles Davis". Juxtapoz (48–53). High Speed Productions. 2004. Retrieved March 16, 2017.
  8. 1 2 3 Christgau, Robert (1981). "Miles Davis". Christgau's Record Guide: Rock Albums of the Seventies. Ticknor & Fields. p. 103. ISBN 0-89919-025-1. Retrieved August 22, 2016.
  9. 1 2 Chinen, Nate (October 2007). Review: The Complete On the Corner Sessions. JazzTimes. Retrieved on February 12, 2011.
  10. 1 2 3 Freeman, Phil. "Miles Davis Albums From Best to Worst." Stereogum. November 6, 2014.
  11. ↑ Freeman, Philip (2005). Running the Voodoo Down: The Electric Music of Miles Davis. Hal Leonard Corporation. pp. 10, 178. ISBN 1-61774-521-9.
  12. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 Chambers, Jack (1998). Milestones: The Music and Times of Miles Davis. Da Capo Press. pp. 235–38.
  13. ↑ Miles Davis first heard Stockhausen's music in 1972, and its impact can be felt in Davis's 1972 recording On the Corner, in which cross-cultural elements are mixed with found elements." Barry Bergstein "Miles Davis and Karlheinz Stockhausen: A Reciprocal Relationship." The Musical Quarterly 76, no. 4. (Winter): p. 503.
  14. 1 2 Hart, Ron. "Miles Davis The Complete On the Corner Sessions". PopMatters. Retrieved March 20, 2017.
  15. 1 2 3 4 5 Gluck, Bob (2016). "Miles Davis's Increasingly Electronic 1970". The Miles Davis Lost Quintet and Other Revolutionary Ensembles. University of Chicago Press. pp. 107–8. ISBN 022618076X. Retrieved March 23, 2017.
  16. ↑ Miles, New York: Simon & Schuster, 1989, p. 329
  17. 1 2 Fisher, Mark (2007). "There's No Ruler to Measure That Inch". The Wire.
  18. 1 2 Gleason, Ralph (2011). "On The Corner by Miles Davis | Rolling Stone Music | Music Reviews". rollingstone.com. Retrieved June 27, 2011.
  19. ↑ Feather, Leonard (1972). From Satchmo to Miles. Da Capo Press. p. 248.
  20. ↑ http://www.allmusic.com/album/on-the-corner-mw0000197892/awards
  21. ↑ Jurek, Thom (2011). "On the Corner – Miles Davis | AllMusic". allmusic.com. Retrieved June 27, 2011.
  22. 1 2 Alternative Press: 104–106. November 2000.
  23. 1 2 Alkyer, Frank; Enright, Ed; Koransky, Jason, eds. (2007). The Miles Davis Reader. Hal Leonard Corporation. pp. 280, 338. ISBN 142343076X.
  24. ↑ Larkin, Colin (2011). "Miles Davis". Encyclopedia of Popular Music (5th ed.). Omnibus Press. ISBN 0857125958.
  25. ↑ Holtje, Steve; Lee, Nancy Ann, eds. (1998). "Miles Davis". MusicHound Jazz: The Essential Album Guide. Music Sales Corporation. ISBN 0825672538.
  26. ↑ "Acclaimed Music – On the Corner". Acclaimed Music. 2010. Retrieved June 27, 2011.
  27. ↑ Considine, J. D. (2004). "Miles Davis". In Brackett, Nathan; Hoard, Christian. The Rolling Stone Album Guide. Simon & Schuster. p. 215. ISBN 0-7432-0169-8.
  28. ↑ Gilmore, Mikael (1985). Swenson, John, ed. The Rolling Stone Jazz Record Guide. USA: Random House/Rolling Stone. p. 58. ISBN 0-394-72643-X.
  29. 1 2 Kelly, Chris; Lea, Tom; Muggs, Joe; Morpurgo, Joseph; Beatnik, Mr; Ravens, Chal; Twells, John (July 14, 2014). "The 100 best albums of the 1970s". Fact. Retrieved September 21, 2016.
  30. 1 2 "Top 100 Albums of the 1970s". Pitchfork. June 23, 2004. Retrieved March 21, 2016.
  31. ↑ "The Top 15 Most Cocaine-Influenced Albums of All Time: The Complete List". SF Weekly. May 4, 2012. Retrieved May 21, 2016.
  32. ↑ Jurek, Thom (2011). "The Complete On the Corner Sessions – | AllMusic". allmusic.com. Retrieved August 8, 2011.
  33. ↑ Spice, Anton. "An introduction to the electric sound of Miles Davis". The Vinyl Factory. Retrieved March 20, 2017.
  34. ↑ Jones, Chris. "Review of Miles Davis The Complete On the Corner Sessions. BBC Music. 2007.
  35. ↑ Smith, Chris (2011). "Miles Davis – On The Corner – On Second Thought – Stylus Magazine". stylusmagazine.com. Retrieved June 27, 2011.
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