_On The Corner_ era live radio broadcast
September 14, 1972
Paul's Mall, Boston, Massachusetts
MILES DAVIS
Miles Davis- trumpet
Carlos Garnett- soprano saxophone
Reggie Lucas- guitar
Khalil Balakrishna- electric sitar
Cedric Lawson- keyboards
Michael Henderson- bass guitar
Al Foster- drums
James Mtume- congas, percussion
Badal Roy- tabla
introduction 0:00
Black Satin (M. Davis) 1:14
Chieftain (M. Davis) 11:43
Rated X (M. Davis) 21:21
Honky Tonk (M. Davis) 26:59
Right Off (M. Davis) 36:43
Sanctuary [theme] (W. Shorter-M. Davis) 50:27
closing titles 51:14
WBCN-FM radio broadcast
In 1972 Miles Davis made one of the most controversial albums of his career. _On The Corner_ was Miles' attempt to connect with the music of the streets by combining the cyclic funk rhythms and mutating bass lines of James Brown and Sly Stone with African polyrhythms, Indian exoticism, the concepts of Ornette Coleman, and the avant garde of Stockhausen. The resulting music was a dense, seething, harmonically static brew, with a huge cast of players- unidentified in the album's artwork- flitting in and out of the sound mix. It's dark, mysterious, and challenging.
Columbia had no idea what to do with it, jazz critics were divided, even Miles' contemporaries struggled to make sense of it; "That music is worthess," Stan Getz told Dan Morgenstern, "It means nothing; there is no form, no content, and it barely swings." Worse still, despite decent initial sales, it struggled to reach its target audience of young, black, urban listeners.
Miles' working bands over the last few years usually sounded very different to their studio counterparts but this 1972 group sounds much closer to the music included on _On The Corner._ Henderson and Mtume were holdovers from the 1971 band and had been involved in the LP sessions along with Roy, Garnett and- possibly- Foster (the exact personnel for _On The Corner_ is still debated), while Lucas and Lawson took part in studio recordings later that year. The nine piece line up was the largest working band that Miles had led since the days of the Birth Of The Cool nonet in the late 1940s but this is obviously a very different ensemble: dense, amplified, electronically manipulated, abstract.
The Indian instrumentation was characteristic of the _Corner_ music. Balakrishna and Roy had been playing together in an Indian restaurant that was frequented by John McLaughlin, who introduced them to Miles. Balakrishna appeared on pieces from late 1969 but this was the first time that Miles had introduced tabla and Balakrishna's electric sitar into the live band. From 1967 Danelectro had manufactured their Coral electric sitar, a guitar-like instrument that had found favour as an exotic effect on late 60s/ early 70s soul records by Freda Payne, Stevie Wonder, The Delfonics, and The Spinners. The Coral had a special bridge that approximated the buzzing sound of a sitar, plus a set of resonating strings that produced sympathetic overtones.
The basement of Cinema 733 on Boylston Street, Boston housed two music venues: The Jazz Workshop and Paul's Mall. Miles had previously played at the Workshop but the expanded, amplified post-Corner band moved across to the larger, rockier Paul's Mall venue. "All the electrical equipment and all that sound was too much for small jazz club(s) like the ones jazz was mostly played in," Miles noted in his autobiography.
This recording comes from a Thursday night radio broadcast on WCBN-FM, the first of a four night run (there's also a poor quality audience recording from the same engagement). This was a difficult band to record but, to my ears, the radio engineers made a better job of capturing its dense textures than the rather dynamically flat official recording made by Columbia two weeks later and released as _Miles Davis In Concert._ These recordings have been issued on a number of bootlegs but not always complete and occasionally off speed. I made some tweaks to the audio, bringing out some of the high end, decluttering the midrange and rebalancing the stereo field. I used an AI program to reduce the volume of two bursts of ear-splitting feedback during the introduction. I also found the recording to be a little dry so I took the liberty of adding a small amount of reverb.
_On The Corner_ was released in the autumn but Miles' efforts to promote the record had a major setback when, on October 18, he suffered a horrific automobile crash that left him with compound fractures in both legs. Concerts for the remainder of the year had to be cancelled. This edition of the band was short lived- even with the the enforced lay off and a couple of changes in personnel the core line up lasted just nine months. It would take another quarter century for this important, revolutionary music to be reevaluated.
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