The Retrographer, Issue 28 (February, 2 0 1 8)

March 04, 2018

Westerman, Ought, Beach House, A.A.L., Khruangbin, Janelle Monáe, Natalie Prass, Kero Kero Bonito, Parquet Courts, Anna McClellan, Miles DavisThe Retrographer, Issue 38 (February, 2 0 1 8)

Bulletins

10 Songs for February, 2 0 1 8 – Listen to this playlist on Spotify and YouTubeListen to this playlist on Spotify and YouTube“Confirmation”, Westerman (Cymbal / YouTube) – The spiritual synth minimalism of the 1980s, always a companion of abstract art and high-end audio stores, seemed to snuff out after Hats and Wild Things Run Fast; Yet here’s a London artist who springs from it like it never stopped.“Desire”, Ought (Cymbal / YouTube) – Tim Darcy with another hallmark of the 80s: The oblique nostalgia for the simple grooves of a generation prior, Patrick Swayze and Jennifer Grey in a jukebox joint grinding like times were as simpler as they, too, imagined they were.“Lemon Glow”, Beach House (Cymbal / YouTube) – Trapgaze? How long until this loop joins the illustrious ranks of Beach House songs sampled for hip hop. Between them and Chromatics, DJ Dahi won’t have to dig in another crate again so long as he lives.“This Old House is All I Have”, Against All Logic (Cymbal / YouTube) – Nicolas Jaar’s latest is at some moments Caribou, sometimes DJ Shadow. But here, it’s got that Jamie xx thing, that Larry Levan thing, that “Father Stretch My Hands” Kanye taking on Pastor T.L. Barrett: The club is a cathedral.“Evan Finds the Third Room”, Khruangbin (Cymbal / YouTube) – A friend told me the other night that he thinks this second album is a letdown, but I’m not sure. Light and funky, I can imagine summer nights punctuated by this song’s hooky, intermittent, “Yes!”“Make Me Feel”, Janelle Monáe (Cymbal / YouTube) – What a lovely last image of Prince, riding bikes with Janelle at Paisley Park. He lives on, in a synth line he wrote for this song, in the hat tip to “Kiss”, and in the spirit of fluidity, loving weirdness, and making your ass move this song exalts.“Short Court Style”, Natalie Prass (Cymbal / YouTube) – Prass is subtly shedding the mousy affectation that divided listeners on songs like “Bird of Prey”; Not shed, however, is the superior songwriting and production, this time moved from Memphis closer to Studio 54, if maybe a little uptown.“Only Acting”, Kero Kero Bonito (Cymbal / YouTube) – With its bubbly bassline and Sarah Midori Perry’s sweet voice, KKB comes back in not so differently from 2016’s Bonito Generation. But then the Weezer guitars drop in, and before long we’re treated to some BABYMETAL screamo.“Almost Had To Start A Fight / In And Out Of Patience”, Parquet Courts (Cymbal / YouTube) – “The MTA took the first of it / the 20-minute delay wasn’t the worst of it”. Parquet Courts don’t really like being compared to the Strokes, but that’s just hipsters out hipstering hipsters: They’re just as witty, urbane, just as precisely interlocking, yet ferociously overheated.“Nail-Biting Song”, Anna McClellan (Cymbal / YouTube) – What 20-something doesn’t identify with this video? “Asking all the time ‘Who's in charge and who's getting paid?’ It should seem obvious, but I'm not sure how to play the game.” And then later on, “And now it starts to come unglued…”

One Album for February, 2 0 1 8

Miles Davis, “In a Silent Way” (Columbia, 1969) (Cymbal / YouTube)No movement in music is as centered around one personality as jazz is around Miles Davis. From his earliest days, playing with Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie, to his late career playing with Marcus Miller and John Scofield, few of the most important figures in the musical movement can’t claim to feel the personal, much less stylistic, gravity of Davis’ influence. The players he worked with, often because of his association, guidance, and platform, radiated out to imbue the genre with a sense of continuity that underpinned its decades of reinvention.

Maybe Miles’ most singular ability was identifying talent. By 1969, Davis had built recordings around players whose names would become hallowed within jazz, and whose own projects would push its boundaries: John Coltrane, Tony Williams, Wayne Shorter, Bill Evans, Ron Carter, Sonny Rollins, Philly Joe Jones, Herbie Hancock. He both had the ability to identify the sounds that would shape the future, while also letting the musicians who could provide those sounds stand out in the context of his constantly changing quintet.

Among the most historic inflection points in Davis’ hagiography was his move to electric instrumentation – today, Bitches Brew, On the Corner, Jack Johnson, Live-Evil and a slew of other albums continue to represent a high-water mark in experimentation for the genre. But this new chapter began with In a Silent Way, the album that ended his second great quintet and began his explorations in still-newer sounds.

In his “first great quintet”, Davis led the genre from bop, which stunningly obliterated the Great American Songbook with scintillating torrents of notes, to modal, or cool jazz, peaking with 1959’s Kind of Blue, a frontrunner for greatest jazz album ever made. In 1964, he evolved again with his “second great quintet”, which further dissolved the cultural grounding of the genre in a move to a “free jazz”, a style that seemed to play along with the air, reaching another pinnacle with his live performances at the Plugged Nickel.

Then, another shift. Between 1968’s Filles de Kilimanjaro and 1969’s In a Silent Way, relatively little changed in the way of personnel: Both featured Davis, along with Shorter, Hancock, Williams, Dave Holland, and Chick Corea, and Davis introduced the guitarist John McLaughlin, and Joe Zawinul. Even so, In a Silent Way demonstrated yet another inflection point.

The entire album was recorded in one session, on February 18th, 1969. Where Davis had explored modal music before – listen, for example, how the chords in Bill Evans’ composition “Blue in Green” or John Coltrane’s “Naima” move around an often-droning bass note – In a Silent Way took this concept to a new extreme, couching all of the album’s music in driving, largely monochordal drones. The album is broken into two tracks – one per side – “Shhh / Peaceful” and “In a Silent Way”. Both display a sonata form, passing through movements, stating and repeating ideas before moving onto new, yet related, ideas. Zawinul, Corea, and Hancock layer keyboards, the first instance of this texture that would come to dominate Davis’ work, and the result is an oceanic, droning piece, rife with texture and layering, though full of striking musical ideas.

Even with the inclusion of McLaughlin, it’s not immediately clear listening to In a Silent Way that Miles, as he said, “Wanted to make the sound more like rock.” This would be more obvious on the next album, Bitches Brew, which divided audiences and inspired a generation of musicians, but it was clear at the moment to Joe Zawinul, who wrote the album’s title track. In session, Davis got frustrated by the chords in the piece, and so he threw out the sheet music and told the musicians to just drone over the root, playing off the melody however they felt – his idea of how to toe into rock. This infuriated Zawinul, but gave potent fodder to Davis’ longtime producer Teo Macero to edit and reassemble the music to find the almost symphonic form it ultimately assumed.

But the drone elevates the distinct elements of In a Silent Way; the opening track’s dazzling electric piano runs sound like wind chimes, scintillating alongside a constant current of sixteenth notes on the hi-hat. Because the sound doesn’t exactly develop so much as change as each soloist takes their turn, like a reflective object under light, the most dramatic moments come when instruments pare back to reveal the gemlike ideas within the texture. Take at roughly six minutes into “Shhh / Peaceful”, a trilling lead line, obscured before by swelling voices of improvisation, is suddenly exposed, before being swallowed slowly up again, first by unison lines from McLaughlin, and then, minutes later, the whole chorus of voices in something like dinner party conversation.

The second side begins like a prayer or a daydream, shimmering in air as guitar and Rhodes exchange statements like a couple waking up. Miles enters with his lilting theme, but soon the moment is cut, dramatically, by Macero, to a hectic and altogether more lively movement, again defined by a mechanic drum part, this time built around rimshots, dotted with conspicuous moments of display. Just before 5 minutes in, Zawinul cuts in with a transfixing descending line he wrote for the session, one of the elements that wasn’t summarily cut. Again, this line is taken, then subsumed into the flowing density of the music.

In a Silent Way was utterly apart from Davis’ earlier work, but this made it consistent with his constant, if somewhat outsourced, trajectory. This was the nature of Davis’ career: Brilliant, exposed inflection points, swept into a constantly-changing stream. Always moving, always building, an always refracting combinatorial of voices, each distinct yet in conversation. And once, every now and again, his direction would become clear, just as it was changing again.

Best-Of Playlists

 Though these playlists are all on Spotify, not every song (including many of my favorites) is available to stream. To see which tracks are missing, go to "Preferences", scroll down to "Display Options," and then switch on "Show unavailable tracks in playlists."