Exquisite Corpses

Frank Lowe’s recent passing really gave me pause. Not because I was unaware that he had been recovering from a variety of cancer treatments, and certainly not because I cherish any illusions about the rate of attrition among and improvised music practitioners in general and jazz musicians in particular. Bessie Smith, Eric Dolphy, Dave Tough, Larry Young, even Peter Kowald felled by heart disease – all these figures died relatively young, and as the official myths and established rumors have it, because of some institutional stupidity on the part of the American health care system.

No, what really got me about Lowe’s death – the sheer musical loss was something I felt, with a mixture of anger, vehement resistance to sentimentality, and heavy-shouldered resignation – was when I saw the saxophonist’s New York Times obituary (penned by Ben Ratliff). As with any obituary, after the subject’s accomplishments were summarized, observance was made of the departed’s survivors. In Lowe’s case, the survivors enumerated came to two sons, one an aspiring musician himself. But there was no mention of Carmen Lowe, the woman I presume was (is?) his wife, and the woman who was the seamstress responsible for the quilts that adorn the covers of Frank’s two mid-1980’s Black Saint releases. Carmen’s absence seemed even more noteworthy to me given that Lowe, and admirably so, seemed to go out of his way over the course of his career to collaborate with creative female musicians: Amina Claudine Myers, Geri Allen, Bertha Hope, Cindy Blackman, Alice Coltrane, Jayne Cortez. And, if Carmen was his wife, couldn’t we say that she too had collaborated with him, and in a profound way? Was Lowe himself a widower, however; that is, has he survived Carmen? Was Carmen his sister? Or is she just a woman who is protective of her anonymity -- unlikely as that seems given her being credited for her work on Frank’s albums? Or, if Frank and Carmen had been separated / divorced, had the falling-out been so unpleasant that she had severed all ties with Frank?

The purpose of all this speculation, this squinting through the options as the barrel of a revolver lolls from click to chamber to click, looking for the bullet that will explode my riddle, lies in the fact that the jazz widow is often an important and powerful figure. Think of Sue Mingus buttering up the Library of Congress (how many of those original scores she donated are really from Jimmy Knepper’s pen?) and launching tactics against Mingus bootleggers that would make Peter Grant chuckle and raise a pint in her honor. There’s also Laurie Pepper, who, via posthumous releases and through her careful editorial oversight of Art’s autobiography (Straight Life), has installed herself as Art Pepper’s intimate of first resort. Justifiably so, you may say, and she at least has not blocked the legitimate release of material, but... The Monk family and the Coltrane estate have both recently begun to take charge of their patriarch’s personal archives. Even Chan Parker, Bird’s widow, and Carol Tristano, Lennie’s daughter, have done much to shape successive generations of listeners’ perceptions of those musicians. But what about those more difficult personalities, those jazz musicians who crossed the line into [semi-]celebrity and the attendant insanity and who left behind shattered families, ruined friendships, and apprentices whose admiration for their masters is not tempered by trust. Take Stan Getz (though apparently his children have caused Verve some headaches) or Billie Holiday, who left behind only a line-up of ex-husbands; to describe several of those men as cut-rate pimps would be to extend a undeserved compliment. But the ultimate example of this phenomenon is Miles Davis, the imp, the GQ-endorsed provocateur, the prince of the perverse. The great alienator.

Hence Sony maintains its sinecure as the guardian of that strange orphan Miles Davis. He is one of their “legacy artists”, as record company insiders say, one of their cultural “piece[s] of the rock”. The label’s just-minted The Complete Jack Johnson Sessions 5-disc set gives me occasion to think about the legitimacy of such endeavors. Did Miles ever mean for audiences to hear this music? Is it unreasonable to consider that one reason why the vast majority of this music has gone unheard for such a long time is that Miles was unhappy with it and deemed it unworthy of release? Of course, this is far from a new issue. Supposedly Charlie Parker was furious that the infamous Dial version of “Lover Man” ever made it to wax. But the age of compact digital media has only further empowered record companies to circumvent their artist’s wishes. How “alternate” is an alternate take anyway? “Alternate takes”, along with “improved” remastering, are one of the inducements record labels offer those of us who have already bought iterations of these albums. Yes, the Miles boxes do offer a wealth of material. They are full of riches, you may even say. But how is it that the release of a new Miles Davis box set, or yet another edition of Blue Train or Bill Evans’ rehearsal tapes are now events and yet jazz critics and fans can, with a perfectly straight face, state that Wes Montgomery was “raped” after his death by both A & M and Pacific Jazz. Both labels issued cash-in records in the late 60’s, dredging up whatever odds and ends they could find and even repackaging old sessions with new cover art, and, more problematically, new overdubs. What gives? Where is the line to be drawn? It's almost as if archaeology were a casual activity, or, more to the point (IMHO), as if the only people who listened to jazz and to whom labels can really market their products are scholars, and as if each release were a dissertation waiting to happen. If we complain about Wynton Marsalis filling the music with formaldehyde and sealing it behind thick glass in a climate-controlled room, then what are the record labels doing with these releases that is all that different and any less joyless? Well, the key difference is that Sony is apparently -- neutrally granting us access to ALL there is -- allowing us to draw our own conclusions. But I say it’s not as transparent as all that. We’re being asked to make a new consumer investment. We’re being asked to surrender some aesthetic principles that I for one am not yet comfortable raising the white flag for: namely, the idea that one can assemble wholeness out of leftovers. Do the chips and flakes struck from the stone by the sculptor as he strikes the blows that will free the form he sees innate in the material constitute a sculpture all their own? Can the footage that slips down onto the cutting room floor be spliced together to make a film, or isn’t the footage’s importance really that it has been cut? The art of making is as much an art of taking away as it is one of putting in. We’re also being asked to accept that there is new proof of Davis’s genius here, as if we cannot trust the conclusions we may have already reached based on the records we know and have known. I say this as an owner of several Miles boxes, many Mosaic records sets, and an assortment of other augmented issues of favorite albums, from Tijuana Moods to Skip Spence’s Oar. What are these artifacts if not talismans of both the raw and the rotten, as Levi-Strauss indexed them? Or are they simply rotten things that have been subjected to some alchemical process that purports to transform the rotten into the raw, as if rawness could be recovered, re-conferred?

The six successively presented takes of “Willie Nelson” that open the Jack Johnson box set are an excellent case in point. All shards, not a one of them a complete performance in the sense that any one presents us with a verifiable beginning, middle or end, this presentation emphasizes how “Willie Nelson” could easily be a film score cue. There’s the synchronized sprocket-hole beat, the tight unison voicing for muted trumpet and bass clarinet, the jabbing theme... maybe there’s no key here, only a vague coherence around old and speedy stock footage of boxers at blows. Compare this conservation of harmonic, melodic and rhythmic movement with the hyperactive sprawl of Bitches Brew. In fact, there’s a connection, by dotted line, from “Willie Nelson” back to an earlier quintet experiment, “Nefertiti”. If there is any soloing here, it is mostly happening in the rhythm section, blurts from drums and guitar (echoed by a scream-pitched Fender Rhodes). The horns offer little fillips, nothing sustained. These several takes also give the listener a better sense of the revolution Motown bassist Michael Henderson hipped Miles and company to. Old complaints aside, its not that Henderson lacked chops or ideas. Its just that his chops and ideas were grounded to a totally different grid. How else could he get away with creating what is essentially a one-note – not, mind you, a pedal point – bass line for part 2 of “Go Ahead John”, UNLESS he listened to himself within the ensemble through a brushy baffle of distortion? But, more than anything, these 6 successive takes introduce a tedium that is virtually unique to our age of exhaustive documentation.

We live in a culture where rot is celebrated, as it is in David Fincher’s Fight Club: Philadelphia slum buildings crumble; sunlight is tinged green with mold and corrosion; the faces of starlets and leading men alike are reverse-rouged to a pallor under black blood, stubble and acne, all ideologies are rancid. Is this the only way we can cope with the implications of sensuousness now? This original Jack Johnson is, from a certain perspective, a great scab of music. This box set picks that crust off and a glut of music comes oozing out, opaque as blood, sticky as pus. Glamour, deluxe packaging, new liner notes (by your favorite critic), original session photographs… No matter how it much it dresses up Mile’s muse of the time (a mere 5 months in the first half of 1970) by dressing it down, Sony’s make-over of these recordings are still only possible because Miles is dead. The body is cold, life goes on, there’s a big difference between your memory and a memorial, isn’t there? And why be morbid? Get back out there on the market, mingle, there’s no law against that, is there? If the work is the table at which artist and audience meet to negotiate the terms of whatever experience is being exchanged, then how fair is it to suddenly introduce an arbitrator, and to change the terms of the discussion?

Appropriately enough, Sony does not really approve of the first individual to court this music. Teo Macero’s refusal to bow out gracefully – first exposed to the public eye with the Bill Laswell Miles remix projects and the Bitches Brew box set – has made the situation, if not awkward, at least more complicated. Although these “complete” sets present Miles’ music in its unexpurgated, unprocessed glory, in superficial contravention of Macero’s own insistent claims that the music is his as it is Miles', they call more attention to the producer’s intentions. Once heard, the edits on “Honky Tonk” or the disorienting cross-fades on “Go Ahead John” cannot be erased from one’s memory. Yes, the new remixed (rather, de-mixed) versions of the former, with Jack DeJohnette’s brilliant drum-breaks collage restored to full audibility, is the more impressive listen, but the patchouli-soaked version you hear on Big Fun is still more, well, “fun” – more entertaining. What happens to entertainment under the magnifying glass of critical scrutiny? Does it just crumple and smoulder away? Or does it look exactly the same as it always has, only bigger?

In some ways, the Jack Johnson album represents the apotheosis of Macero as a visionary in his own right: the man who understood the album format, who dug and could exploit the rock dynamics of the day, and who really grokked that the freakiest freak out is not generated from purely unfettered jamming, but from applying careful torque to a simple design. Its too bad Teo has such unsophisticated PR amanuenses at his disposal. Again, although the putative “stars” of this release are the previously unissued work takes of performances like “Willie Nelson”, “Right Off” and “Yesternow”, one could also follow their respective character arcs up to the final album mixes, long familiar to us old Miles-philes, which close the box set. These versions then sound the loudest, most ecstatic crescendo of Macero’s triumph, a climax, or like the finished product emerging, en-haloed, to the accompaniment of glee club hosannas in an instructional film on the wonders attributable to the American assembly line. If only Teo had a manifesto, or knew the lingo that has crystallized around some newer forms of improvised music. We know little about Macero’s actual working methods, from his gear to his philosophy of sound generation. Whereas the painstaking methods and cracked ingenuity of Stockhausen and Xenakis are a significant aspect of the music they made, and “made” in a very material sense, like Old World guildsmen plying their craft in the midst of the post-war world’s rubble. Teo? I’ve heard him called a “hack”. To me, that is as insulting as referring to Jimmy Lyons as the Igor to Cecil Taylor’s Frankenstein.

In the end, Miles unleashed the music, Macero shaped it – but neither owns it now. “We”, Miles’ fans and obsessors, we don’t own it either. Perhaps we own an attitude towards it, a feeling for it, a reaction to it. But that’s a little like saying you own your own nose. Sony, they are the ones who own IT – not just Miles’ music, but even his now trademarked likeness (the slightly pot-bellied silhouette playing a trumpet of exaggerated length), and perhaps most crucially, his philosophy of experimentation. Miles and Macero… the question of who decided what is important, I think, because Jack Johnson really is the template for all that follows in Miles’ 70’s work, not Bitches Brew or In A Silent Way, the latter of which had a much more powerful influence on contemporary artists of the time. It’s not just that this material filled out Davis releases up until the time of the epochal Get Up With It, or that its themes that would last until the final Japanese concerts documented on Agharta and Pangaea, or that Michael Henderson survived these sessions and the Cellar Door gigs documented on Live-Evil to become the bling-bling medallion dangling around the throat of Miles in his funky brother guise, or even that Sonny Sharrock, more so than John McLaughlin, points the way to Pete Cosey… It's that Jack Johnson is finally where Miles – with Macero’s assistance – breaks away from the compositional structures he tried to subjugate earlier in his career via reduction (Kind of Blue) and drastic abstraction (the Plugged Nickel performances). Jack Johnson truly is the occasion on which Miles’ past collides with his future. I’ve already noted the connection to “Nefertiti”, but consider too the Hermeto Pascoal collaborations. Colorful and brightly melancholic, they hark back to the great collaborations with Gil Evans. Listening to the whistles and bells – literal ones – on tracks like “Konda” and “Little Church”, all I could think of was Gil Evans as goat-herder. Much has been made of how James Brown’s influence brought a new warp to Miles’ already slightly demented musical perspective, but it is surprising to think about how little of this material released during Davis’ lifetime actually made explicit reference to “funk” as a denotative style. If Miles was interpreting anyone at this time, it was, as always, himself. “… Miles’ past collides with his future….” Yes, this music is really Miles’ “middle-aged” music, not the slightly lumpy and pallid work of the 1980’s. Middle age is a time of crisis, not stagnation. “Middle age” sounds to me like an attempt to euphemize what that time in one’s life really is, which is that one is truly most in the midst of living. These Jack Johnson sessions deserve better than to be treated as part of the fossil record. To advertise this as “The Greatest Rock and Roll Album Ever”, though totally within the spirit of Miles the taboo-slayer, is nonetheless to quell the music as it is to breath new fire into it. If “jazz”, as we are continually told, utterly played out as a musical form, then “rock and roll” has been dead from the shoulders north ever since Bono began tarting himself up as “MacPhisto” (or pick your own example). And why is it that Davis’ most “accessible”, “sell-out”, “Rock”-inflected music is among his most inscrutable?

We may be beneficiaries of Sony’s crassness, Miles’ arrogance, and Macero’s egotism – though I do wonder how many of these they actually sell – but, if so, we are also victims of our own gluttony. Perhaps its that I would like to think better of myself as a consumer than my acquisition of this box set allows. Wouldn’t I rather my money go towards artists who are doing vital work in a contemporary idiom, who are struggling, who will never – well, a probabilistic “never” – be the target of a hostile takeover by Sony, EMI, BMG, et. al.? On which side of the balance sheet do we tally the indulgences of this set? I tell myself its one of life’s slaps to the back of the head that sometimes you only know how good something is by how guilty the experience of it makes you feel.

~Joe Milazzo