Music for Writing A Thesis

Have you ever heard He Loved Him Madly? Calm, spatial ambient jazz by Miles.

Here's an interview with Brian Eno discussing Teo Macero's production techniques.

ME: Some of my colleagues call the music of the Paul Motian Trio "Ambient Jazz", because sometimes this trio brings the music to such a level of subtlety, it's really just one or two notes lingering around in the air. I understand that there are a few classic jazz productions that had a big influence on you, like for example Teo Macero's production of Miles Davis' He Loved Him Madly.

BE: Well, you know how that record and one or two others from that period were made? I read an interview with Teo Macero, and it was very, very interesting, because I was so fascinated by these records. I really wanted to know how they were made. I don't often read interviews with musicians or producers, cause they're usually so uninteresting. There's nothing worth reading. But Teo Macero was very, very interesting. He told the story of how those records were made. Which is that Miles Davis would put together a group of people often, who hadn't played together before, take them into the studio, and there was just playing for a day, for hours and hours on end. And then off they go, and Teo Macero would then be left with hours of tapes, and he would go through and find little pieces, often repeat little pieces, which is very radical in jazz to use the same section a couple of times over. I mean, I don't think anybody had ever thought of doing that before. And it's a very interesting idea, to take something that is all accidents and chance events, and then make it all happen again. So suddenly you think 'Hold on - we've been here before.' It's like a strange deja-vu thing.

But what really interested me in those things: he did something that was extremely modern, something you can only do on records, which is, he took the performance to pieces, spatially. Now, those things were done across by a group of musicians in a room, all sitting quite close to another, like we are. But they were all close-miked, which meant that their sounds were quite separate from one another. And when Teo Macero mixed the record, he put them miles apart. So this is very very interesting to listen to a music, where you have the conga player three streets down the road here, you have the trumpet player on a mountain over there, the guitar player - you have to look through binoculars to see him, you know! Everybody is far away, and so the impression that you have immediately, is not that you are in a little place with a group of people playing, but that you're on a huge plateau, and all of these things are going on sort of almost on the horizon, I think. And there's no attempt made by Teo Macero to make them connect with one another. In fact he deliberately disconnects them form one another.

This is a very modern feeling for me in music, where you think of the music as a place where a lot of things can go on. They don't have to be going on together, in the sense that they don't have to be locked to one another. And the thing I've most disliked about a lot of recent music, particularly music done on sequencers, is that it's totally locked. Do you know what I mean? Every single thing is not only locked, but bolted and nailed and hammered together. So the music is so tight, there's no drift in it at all. And one of the things that one likes about live music, I think, is the fact that things drift apart and then come back together. And when they come back together, it's very very dramatic. It's fantastic. And then they drift again apart in their own worlds, and then suddenly they join again.

The rest is here.

This period of Miles career serves as the inspiration for my thesis. Roundabout anyway. I was looking into writing a thesis on Hunter S. Thompson and the performance of authorship when I came across Lester Bangs. I read this amazing review Bang's wrote about Miles Davis' On the Corner where he was essentially trying to figure out why he was still listening to something that he had initially reviewed as "the absolute worst album this man ever put out." It is a wonderful look at a critic interrogating their own response to a work of art - realizing that sometimes we don't like a work of art because we don't like what it says about us, about our culture and the way the world is. That sometimes as Josette Feral writes - "the art work judges us."