After the release of Bitch­es Brew in 1970, Colum­bia Records pushed Miles Davis to play a series of dates at the Fill­more West and East sup­port­ing major rock bands like Neil Young and Crazy Horse, the Grate­ful Dead, and the Steve Miller Band. Miles “went nuts,” Columbia’s Clive Davis lat­er remem­bered. “He told me he had no inter­est in play­ing for ‘those fuck­ing long-haired kids.’”

The reac­tion does not reflect Miles’ atti­tude toward all the music enjoyed by long-haired kids, especially—it should go with­out saying—the psych rock he embraced and trans­formed in the ear­ly sev­en­ties. Miles admired a hand­ful of rock musi­cians, and none more so than Jimi Hen­drix, whom he dis­cov­ered, notes the short excerpt from The Miles Davis Sto­ry above, through gui­tarist John McLaugh­lin.

As McLaugh­lin tells it, Davis was dumb­found­ed when he first saw Hen­drix play on film in D.A. Pennebaker’s doc­u­men­tary Mon­terey Pop. “As the 70s dawned,” Tim Cum­ming writes at The Guardian, Hen­drix had his Band of Gyp­sys, and Davis was in the audi­ence for their leg­endary new-year set at Fill­more East, mar­veling at Machine Gun and the pow­er­ful drum­ming of Bud­dy Miles.”

Miles’ appre­ci­a­tion of Hen­drix, James Brown, and Sly Stone birthed the album Jack John­son in 1971, a “con­cen­trat­ed take on rock and funk that defies cat­e­go­riza­tion.” As you can hear in “Right Off, Pt. 1” above, it was also a return to the blues, a lega­cy he shared with Hen­drix. “Jimi… came from the blues, like me,” Davis wrote in his auto­bi­og­ra­phy. “We under­stood each oth­er right away because of that. He was a great blues gui­tarist.”

In the year before Hendrix’s death, the two jammed at Davis’ house and planned to record an album, though it nev­er came to pass. The idea remains an impos­si­bly com­pelling musi­cal what-if. (So does the time Hen­drix invit­ed Paul McCart­ney to cre­ate a super group with Miles Davis.) “Some things are sim­ply beyond con­cep­tion,” writes Kol­lib­ri Terre Son­nen­blume in an appre­ci­a­tion of Live-Evil, Miles’ most direct chan­nel­ing of Hen­drix. As Davis him­self lat­er wrote, “By now I was using the wah-wah on my trum­pet all the time so I could get clos­er to that voice Jimi had when he used a wah-wah on his gui­tar.”

Davis “lift­ed musi­cal ele­ments from Hendrix’s oeu­vre,” notes Son­nen­blume, point­ing out the many spe­cif­ic ref­er­ences through­out the album’s four live and four stu­dio tracks. The first song on the album, “Sivad,” kicks things off with an aggres­sive solo almost right off the mark:

First-time lis­ten­ers often mis­tak­en­ly assume they are hear­ing a gui­tar com­ing in at the 49 sec­ond mark, but they’re wrong. That squeal­ing, dis­tort­ed sound, chat­ter­ing with rabid feroc­i­ty, lung­ing like a rabid dog and cir­cling like a dervish – com­plete with what sounds for all the world like a pick-glis­san­do – is com­ing out of Davis’ horn, not McLaughlin’s gui­tar. 

Hendrix’s death upset Miles deeply. “He was so young and had so much ahead of him,” he wrote. It’s hard even to imag­ine what might have lay ahead for both of them in the stu­dio, but Davis’ take on Jim­i’s musi­cal per­son­al­i­ty might give us a good idea of where they were headed—into ter­ri­to­ry far beyond the blues, jazz, rock, world-funk, and any oth­er genre label you might care to name.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

In 1969 Telegram, Jimi Hen­drix Invites Paul McCart­ney to Join a Super Group with Miles Davis

Lis­ten to The Night When Miles Davis Opened for the Grate­ful Dead in 1970

When Jazz Leg­end Ornette Cole­man Joined the Grate­ful Dead Onstage for Some Epic Impro­vi­sa­tion­al Jams: Hear a 1993 Record­ing

Jimi Hen­drix Arrives in Lon­don in 1966, Asks to Get Onstage with Cream, and Blows Eric Clap­ton Away: “You Nev­er Told Me He Was That F‑ing Good”

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

Jazz instru­men­tal­ists who “play the changes” have learned to make impro­vi­sa­tion look easy. In live per­for­mance, the audi­ence shouldn’t see the years of study and prac­tice behind what Willie Thomas calls at Jazz Every­one, “a sys­tem that com­bines the basic jazz lan­guage with the impor­tant music the­o­ry con­cepts” and at the same time “allows a play­er to focus on how the music fits the tune and not the chord sym­bols and scales that often incum­ber per­for­mance.”

That may seem like a wordy expla­na­tion, but Thomas is care­ful to expli­cate the cliché “play the changes” for max­i­mum mean­ing, draw­ing on over forty years of expe­ri­ence him­self learn­ing the prin­ci­ple as a “use­ful tool for self expres­sion through jazz music.” The idea of play­ing to the tune may seem fun­da­men­tal­ly obvi­ous, but the more one devel­ops as a stu­dent, the far­ther away one can get from lived expe­ri­ence.

How might musi­cians apply ideals about ensem­ble play­ing to actu­al ensem­ble play­ing? For answers to this ques­tion, we might turn to jazz leg­end Chick Corea, mem­ber of Miles Davis’s band dur­ing the path­break­ing In a Silent Way and Bitch­es Brew ses­sions; play­er in and leader of more Gram­my-win­ning ensem­bles than per­haps any­one else (he’s col­lect­ed 23 awards so far); and “one of the jazz world’s most thought­ful and lucid cham­pi­ons.”

This descrip­tion comes from a Chris­t­ian Sci­ence Mon­i­tor write-up of Corea’s appear­ance in a two-hour Q&A ses­sion at Berklee Col­lege of Music in 1985, where the pianist and jazz fusion key­board mas­ter had stu­dents pick up the typed hand­out above at the door. He begins with the sim­plest, but most impor­tant advice, “Play only what you hear,” then elab­o­rates in 16 rules which you can read in full below.

Corea’s pri­ma­ry metaphor is architectural—performance, he says, is about cre­at­ing spaces and taste­ful­ly fill­ing them. Doing this well requires seri­ous study and prac­tice. Then it requires remem­ber­ing some basic rules, or Chick Corea’s “Cheap But Good Advice for Play­ing Music in a Group.” My favorite: “always release what­ev­er ten­sion you cre­ate.” Like much of you we find here, it’s good all-around advice for every endeav­or.

1. Play only what you hear.
2. If you don’t hear any­thing, don’t play any­thing.
3. Don’t let your fin­gers and limbs just wander—place these inten­tion­al­ly.
4. Don’t impro­vise on endlessly—play some­thing with inten­tion, devel­op it or not, but then end off, take a break.
5. Leave space—create space—intentionally cre­ate places where you don’t play.
6. Make your sound blend. Lis­ten to your sound and adjust it to the rest of the band and the room.
7. If you play more than one instru­ment at a time—like a drum kit or mul­ti­ple keyboards—make sure that they are bal­anced with one anoth­er.
8. Don’t make any of your music mechan­i­cal­ly or just through pat­terns of habit. Cre­ate each sound, phrase, and piece with choice—deliberately.
9. Guide your choice of what to play by what you like—not by what some­one else will think.
10. Use con­trast and bal­ance the ele­ments: high/low, fast/slow, loud/soft, tense/relaxed, dense/sparse.
11. Play to make the oth­er musi­cians sound good. Play things that will make the over­all music sound good.
12. Play with a relaxed body. Always release what­ev­er ten­sion you cre­ate.
13. Cre­ate space—begin, devel­op, and end phras­es with inten­tion.
14. Nev­er beat or pound your instrument—play it eas­i­ly and grace­ful­ly.
15. Cre­ate space—then place some­thing in it.
16. Use mim­ic­ry sparsely—mostly cre­ate phras­es that con­trast with and devel­op the phras­es of the oth­er play­ers.

via Nate Chi­nen

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Thelo­nious Monk’s 25 Tips for Musi­cians (1960)

Wyn­ton Marsalis Gives 12 Tips on How to Prac­tice: For Musi­cians, Ath­letes, or Any­one Who Wants to Learn Some­thing New

John Coltrane Draws a Pic­ture Illus­trat­ing the Math­e­mat­ics of Music

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

Record­ed at Abbey Road stu­dios by Alan Par­sons, who had pre­vi­ous­ly worked on The Bea­t­les’ Abbey Road and Let It Be, Pink Floyd’s The Dark Side of the Moon broke almost as much son­ic ground as those albums. “The band chose the world-renowned stu­dio, as it was home to, at the time, some of the most advanced record­ing tech­nol­o­gy ever pro­duced – includ­ing the EMI TG12345 mix­ing con­sole,” writes Antho­ny Sfirse at Enmore Audio.

Par­sons made taste­ful yet total­ly spaced-out use, as the Poly­phon­ic video above shows, of syn­the­siz­ers, stereo mul­ti­track record­ing, and tape loops. Then there’s David Gilmour’s leg­endary gui­tar tone—so essen­tial to a cer­tain kind of music (and to Pink Floyd cov­er bands) that gui­tar ped­al design­er Robert Kee­ley has built an entire “work­sta­tion” around the gui­tar sounds on the album, even though most play­ers, includ­ing Gilmour, will tell you that tone lives in the fin­gers.

The album is a per­fect syn­the­sis of the band’s strengths: epic song­writ­ing meets epic exper­i­men­ta­tion meets epic musicianship—three musi­cal direc­tions that don’t always play well togeth­er. The late six­ties and sev­en­ties brought increas­ing com­plex­i­ty and the­atri­cal­i­ty to rock and roll, but Pink Floyd did some­thing extra­or­di­nary with Dark Side. They wrote acces­si­ble, riff-heavy, blues-based tunes that also set the bar for philo­soph­i­cal­ly exis­ten­tial, wist­ful, melan­choly, sar­don­ic, funky, soul­ful, psy­che­delia, with­out sac­ri­fic­ing one for the oth­er.

How the band went from cul­ti­vat­ing a cult under­ground to spend­ing 741 weeks—or 14 years—at the top of Billboard’s albums chart after the release of their “high con­cept lyri­cal mas­ter­piece” in 1973 is the sub­ject of a series of eight videos pro­duced by Poly­phon­ic. See the first, which cov­ers “Speak to Me/Breath,” at the top, and oth­ers below. New videos will be released on the Poly­phon­ic YouTube chan­nel soon.

The approach is an admirable one. Too often the great­ness of clas­sic albums like Dark Side of the Moon is tak­en for grant­ed and glossed too quick­ly. The album’s mas­sive com­mer­cial and crit­i­cal suc­cess seems proof enough. We may not know much about Pink Floyd our­selves, but we acknowl­edge they’ve been thor­ough­ly vet­ted by the experts.

But if we want to know our­selves why crit­ics, musi­cians, and fans alike have heaped so much praise on the 1973 album—and shelled out hard-earned cash by the mil­lions for records, con­certs, and merchandise—we might learn quite a lot from this series.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

How Pink Floyd’s “Com­fort­ably Numb” Was Born From an Argu­ment Between Roger Waters & David Gilmour

When Pink Floyd Tried to Make an Album with House­hold Objects: Hear Two Sur­viv­ing Tracks Made with Wine Glass­es & Rub­ber Bands

Pink Floyd Films a Con­cert in an Emp­ty Audi­to­ri­um, Still Try­ing to Break Into the U.S. Charts (1970)

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

There may be no instru­ment in the clas­si­cal reper­toire more mul­ti­di­men­sion­al than the cel­lo. Its deep silky voice mod­u­lates from moans to exal­ta­tions in a sin­gle phrase—conveying dig­ni­fied melan­choly and a pro­found sense of awe. Hear­ing a skilled cel­list inter­pret great solo music for cel­lo can approach the feel­ing of a reli­gious expe­ri­ence. And no piece of solo music for cel­lo is greater, or more pop­u­lar­ly known, than Johann Sebas­t­ian Bach’s Cel­lo Suite No. 1 in G Major. Bet­ter known as the “Pre­lude,” the first of six Baroque suites Bach com­posed between 1717 and 1723, the piece has appeared, notes the Vox Ear­worm video above, “in hun­dreds of TV shows and films.”

You’ve heard it at wed­ding and funer­als, in restau­rants, in the lob­bies of hotels. “It’s so famous, that if you don’t remem­ber its title, “you can just google ‘that famous cel­lo song’ and it will invari­ably pop up.” What is it about this piece that so appeals? Its con­stant, rhyth­mic move­ment con­ceals “what’s most com­pelling about it”—its sim­plic­i­ty. “The whole thing just takes up two pages of music, and it’s com­posed for an instru­ment with only four strings.” The Ear­worm video goes on to explain why this enor­mous­ly pop­u­lar, decep­tive­ly sim­ple piece is “con­sid­ered a mas­ter­piece that world-class cel­lists… have revered for years.”

Bach’s cel­lo suites “are the Ever­est of [the cello’s] reper­to­ry,” writes Zachary Woolfe at The New York Times, “offer­ing a guide to near­ly every­thing a cel­lo can do—as well as, many believe, chart­ing a remark­ably com­plete anato­my of emo­tion and aspi­ra­tion.” World-class cel­list Yo-Yo Ma has in fact been trav­el­ing the world play­ing these pieces to bring peo­ple togeth­er in his “Days of Action.” He recent­ly released the video below of the Pre­lude, demon­strat­ing the out­come of a life­time of engage­ment with Bach’s cel­lo music.

Ma plays this piece as “the musi­cian of our civic life,” writes Woolfe, appear­ing at col­lec­tive moments of both grief and cel­e­bra­tion, “to make us cry and then soothe us.” What we learn in the Vox video is that the cel­lo suites come from music designed to lit­er­al­ly move its lis­ten­ers. “With­in each suite are var­i­ous move­ments named for dances.” Cel­list Alisa Weil­er­stein demon­strates the Prelude’s beau­ti­ful sim­plic­i­ty and helps “decon­struct” the piece’s ide­al suit­abil­i­ty for the instru­ment “clos­est in range and abil­i­ty to express to the human voice.”

What’s inter­est­ing about Bach’s six cel­lo suites is that they were writ­ten by a non-cel­list, “the first non-cel­list com­pos­er to give the cel­lo its first big break as a lead actor,” writes musi­col­o­gist Ann Wittstruck. He drew on Baroque social dances for the form of the pieces, which increase in com­plex­i­ty as they go. The pre­lude is loos­er, with arpeg­gios cir­cling around an open bass note that gives the first half “grav­i­tas.”

As the piece shifts away to the dom­i­nant D major, then to “cloudy” dimin­ished and minor chords, its mood shifts too; with­in sim­ple har­monies play a com­plex of emo­tion­al ten­sions. Its sec­ond half wan­ders through an impro­visato­ry, dis­so­nant pas­sage on its way back to D major. Weil­er­stein walks through each tech­nique, includ­ing a dis­ori­ent­ing run down the cello’s neck called “bar­i­o­lage,” which, she says, is meant to cre­ate a “feel­ing of dis­or­der.”

Per­haps that’s only one of the rea­sons Bach’s Pre­lude res­onates with us so deeply in a frag­ment­ed world, and fits Ma’s har­mo­nious inten­tions so well. It’s a piece that acknowl­edges dis­so­nance and dis­or­der even as it sur­rounds them with the joy­ful, styl­ized move­ments of social dances. Music crit­ic Wil­frid Mellers described Bach’s cel­lo suites as “mono­phon­ic music where­in a man has cre­at­ed a dance of God.” But they were not rec­og­nized by his con­tem­po­raries with such high praise.

Com­posed “just before Bach moved to Leipzig,” Woolfe writes, “the cel­lo suites, now musi­cal and emo­tion­al touch­stones, were lit­tle known until the 1900s. It was thought, even by some who knew of them, that they were mere­ly études, noth­ing you’d want to per­form in pub­lic.” Now, the most famous cellist—and per­haps most famous clas­sic icon—in the world is trav­el­ing to six con­ti­nents, play­ing Bach’s cel­lo suites in 36 very pub­lic con­certs. Learn more about his Bach project here.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

How a Bach Canon Works. Bril­liant.

Watch J.S. Bach’s “Air on the G String” Played on the Actu­al Instru­ments from His Time

Down­load the Com­plete Organ Works of J.S. Bach for Free

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

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via Twist­ed Sifter

Relat­ed Con­tent:

A His­to­ry of Rock ‘n’ Roll in 100 Riffs

Ital­ian Street Musi­cian Plays Amaz­ing Cov­ers of Pink Floyd Songs, Right in Front of the Pan­theon in Rome

Icon­ic Songs Played by Musi­cians Around the World: “Stand by Me,” “Redemp­tion Song,” “Rip­ple” & More