[acid-jazz] Jack Johnson/Children On The Corner

From: Bob Davis (earthjuice_at_prodigy.net)
Date: 2003-10-18 20:46:04

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    These people in the UK have got it going on.
    Connecting the dots between Miles Davis " - Jack Johnson" and Children On The Corner -
    "Rebirth".
    They also had the good sense to interview Soul-Patrol's Very Own "ULTIMATE FUNKATEER

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    MICHAEL HENDERSON - CHILDREN ON THE CORNER
    http://www.davisind.com/redirect/?d=newsletter_cotc
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    http://www.guardian.co.uk/arts/fridayreview/story/0,12102,1064093,00.html

    Keep On Playing It: The story of the Jack Johnson Sessions

    1970 marked a key turning point for Miles Davis, the year he embarked on some of his most
    radical and controversial music, abandoning Jazz and the expansive textures of Bitches Brew
    for a concentrated take on rock and funk that defies categorisation. Jack Johnson, recorded in
    1970 and released to little fanfair in 1971, marked that turning point. Thirty three years on,
    Sony Legacy are releasing the Jack Johnson Sessions, a five-disc set covering four months of
    continuous recording, and containing over three hours of new music.

    Released as the soundtrack to a boxing documentary on the legendary black heavyweight champion
    whose flamboyance and attitude Davis closely identified with, the original album can be heard
    as a rallying call to racial freedom and personal emancipation that emerged from an
    increasingly polarised era; Nixon in the White House, Black Panthers on the streets, troops in
    Vietnam, riots at Kent State. As the 70s dawned Hendrix had his Band of Gypsys, and Davis was
    in the audience for their legendary new year’s set at Fillmore East, marvelling at Machine
    Gun, and the powerful fatback drumming of Buddy Miles. Add some Sly Stone basslines, the
    unhinged fuzz guitar of John McLaughlin, and the critical mass of Davis’ own rigorous
    conceptualism, and
      Jack Johnson was the result.

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    MICHAEL HENDERSON - CHILDREN ON THE CORNER
    http://www.davisind.com/redirect/?d=newsletter_cotc
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    It is a record galvanised by boxing, funk, politics, black power, hard rock and the white heat
    of a creative peak in the recording studio that extended from early 1969 to the summer of
    1970. Afterwards, Davis would take to the road and stay away from the studio until a new modus
    operandi was reached with the alien funk of On the Corner in 1972.

    The original album’s two tracks, Right Off and Yesternow, were drawn from a single 17th April
    session edited and spliced with recordings from February by producer Teo Macero. The boxed set
    puts the original release beside the original sessions, along with almost 20 previously
    unreleased tracks, many named after boxers such as Davis’ friend Sugar Ray Robinson,
    underlining the jabbing, muscular nature of this new music.

    In 1970, Davis was clean and healthy, and at the height of his powers, as Dave Holland, his
    bassist from 1968 to 1970, testifies. ‘He had a trainer who travelled with the band. He used
    to go to the gym every day. He was in his 40s, and that’s prime time for musicians, when you’
    re strong and all your faculties are there. He was playing incredibly.’

    With the likes of Keith Jarrett, saxophonist Steve Grossman and bassist Michael Henderson
    making their debut with Miles on these recordings, listening to the sessions is akin to
    eavesdropping on musicians talking among themselves. It’s also a music where process rather
    than a complete performance is the dominant aesthetic, and the set reflects that. No less than
    six versions of Willie Nelson, draped in the echoplex guitar of Sonny Sharrock, open Disc One,
    and the pattern of multiple takes and permutations continues throughout.

    ---------------------------------------------------------------
    MICHAEL HENDERSON - CHILDREN ON THE CORNER
    http://www.davisind.com/redirect/?d=newsletter_cotc
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    As a screen on which to project the contours of the original album, shot through with new
    colours and phrasings from the original sessions, the set offers the aural equivalent of 3-D
    vision, offering unprecedented insights into the musical intelligence that went into its
    creation. But with mistakes and doodles included in the mix, are these private explorations
    really for public consumption, decades later?

    Despite producing the original sessions, Teo Macero was not involved in putting the set
    together, and is a d a m EMAIL souljazzant they should never have been released in this form. ‘I hate it,’ he
    says, ‘I think it’s a bunch of shit, and you can quote me on that. And I hope you do. It’s
    destroyed Miles and made him sound like an idiot. It’s a terrible thing to do to an artist
    when he’s dead. Those records were gems, and you should leave them as gems.’

    While Macero accuses Sony of exploiting rather than preserving Davis’ legacy, Dave Holland is
    more equivocal. ‘As a scholarly study it’s very interesting,’ he says, ‘but sometimes a part
    of me feels it violates the privacy of the musical process, so it’s a tough one to call.’

    Invasive or not, there is remarkable music throughout the set, with all the edginess of
    unexplored territory. ‘They were almost like recorded rehearsals,’ he remembers, ‘Different
    combinations of musicians, and never a sense that we were making a particular record. It was
    Miles in the studio doing a number of different things he had ideas about. It was a work in
    progress and very loose in a disciplined way.’

    The sense of alchemical risk-taking is evident all over the set, and for lovers of Miles’
    once-dismissed 70s catalogue, it’s a revelation to witness the development of a sound that
    remains so radical and unique. ‘Every time we went into the studio,’ says Holland, ‘we’d
    always be with other people, or it wouldn’t be the whole band, or we were working with
    material that wasn’t that familiar. We were reading this stuff for the first time.’

    Inspiring and challenging, but also a source of frustration for Holland, who wanted Miles to
    record the live band. ‘I really wanted to get what I thought was the hot playing on record.
    And it wasn’t like that in the studio, it had a more searching, exploratory kind of feeling. I
    felt I never got into 4th gear, but what Miles wanted was a more supportive role from the
    bass, where the bass ordered the music in a certain way.’

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    MICHAEL HENDERSON - CHILDREN ON THE CORNER
    http://www.davisind.com/redirect/?d=newsletter_cotc
    ---------------------------------------------------------------

    With Holland pulling away towards free jazz – he would soon leave to form a band with Chick
    Corea and Anthony Braxton - Davis turned to 19-year-old Michael Henderson for the solid,
    mesmeric bass figures he was looking for. He hired Henderson from Stevie Wonder’s band, going
    backstage at a gig in New York to tell the singer in his rasping whisper, ‘I’m takin’ your
    fuckin’ bass player,’ and calling on him at rehearsals, leaving Stevie Wonder’s horn section
    speechless. With Henderson’s background in Motown, however, he had barely heard of Miles
    Davis. That would soon change. ‘He flew me into New York and I stayed over at his house,’ he
    remembers, ‘He cooked me some of his special cow tongue, white fish gumbo wit
     h shrimps, potatoes, and all these herbs and spices. It was an incredible dish.’

    Thee following day, he, drummer Jack DeJohnette, guitarist John McLaughlin and others gathered
    in Miles’ living room for rehearsals. ‘But what we played there was completely different from
    what we played in the studio the very next day.’ What they did play was Right Off, the
    incendiary jam that opens Jack Johnson. ‘John started playing and I answered that and then
    Billy [Cobham] joined in. We were just warming up like fighters do to get ready for what we’d
    done the day before. It was a hell of a groove, and the next thing I know is Miles is out
    playing with us. And we just kept on playing.’

    The result was one of Miles’ great solos, going the full fifteen rounds against bass, drums
    and guitar, as rock n roll as it gets but with Miles’ fierce musical intelligence guiding and
    defining the performance around him with that edge of cryptic unpredictability he engineered
    with his musicians. ‘He had conversations with everyone he worked with,’ remembers Henderson,
    who must have faced a steep learning process, at least in attitude, from Motown to Miles.
    ‘What not to do, look out for this, but be yourself and just listen to it. He’d say here it
    is, this is the way I see it, but you do what you do.’

    Holland concurs with that legacy of concentration and loose invention. ‘Miles was looking for
    musicians to fill in the gaps. I think he always worked that way. He might have a bass line in
    mind, a groove he wanted to deal with, and then we’d come up with something for it. There were
    lots of different ideas and it was wonderful to be part of that process of working on things
    to be put together that way.’ His very presence seemed to mould what could have been
    directionless jams into musical shape, and with the boxed set listeners can hear it at source
    ‘He’d grab the essence of something,’ says Holland, ‘and really make something out of that. He
    was brilliant at that.’

    For Michael Henderson, now fronting Children On the Corner, a collective of ex-Davis’ sidemen
    from the 1970s re-exploring that era, Jack Johnson was the initiation into six years of music
    history that the 21st century is still coming to grips with. ‘A lot of people have tried to do
    that music without really understanding how it was done,’ he says. ‘Being the bass player
    there, you get to work out that kind of stuff. And Miles knew what he was doing. He wasn’t
    guessing. What we were doing was untouchable, and we knew that at the time. It was what it
    was. It was unique, and with a life of its own.’

    Tim Cumming

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    MICHAEL HENDERSON - CHILDREN ON THE CORNER
    http://www.davisind.com/redirect/?d=newsletter_cotc
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     _________
    Bob Davis
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