The best “worst” jazz album of all time
The nature of art means you have to run towards failure to reach success somewhere along the way. Creating music can be messy and tiring, and can reflect a pocket of discomfort in your life that seeps, one way or another, into your art.
Jazz is no different, though poor quality might be less obvious in a genre so typified by taste. Take a walk into your local city and you might still be able to find a group of cigarette-puffing music fans sparring over the merits of bebop jazz over smooth jazz, or why jazz fusion is a sickening insult to form. The kicker? None of them is right or wrong.
Despite this, one jazz album was released to almost unanimous criticism. In 1972, when Miles Davis released On the Corner, within only a few weeks, a deluge of scathing responses had circulated widely. In the words of one critic, the project was “repetitious crap”, and another called it “an insult to the intellect of the people”.
The slander wasn’t just reserved for the critics. Saxophonist Dave Liebman, who can be heard on the record, remarked that he “didn’t think much of it”. Paul Buckmaster, the British composer and arranger who supplied musical sketches for the sessions, deemed it his “least favourite Miles album”.
Some might call this confrontational sound “punk”, and, in fact, the drummer of the Noisettes, Jamie Morrison, deemed it a huge influence for the post-punk band. “I love the rhythm section, and the way you’re just thrown into the music at the beginning. It’s really punk in its attitude. It’s so offensive, and pushes boundaries at the same time,” he shared.
While the album garnered no attention for a good few decades, it slowly came to be the main influence for a huge and varied pool of artists. Paul Miller, known as hip-hop musician DJ Spooky, was influenced by the production of Teo Macero, and this showed up in the hip-hop community when it first arose in the early 1990s. An album that went largely underground had the time and energy to lay its roots everywhere, after all, and the marvellous extended rhythm section only helped with this motive.
It might not be an easy-going listen, but it is breathlessly futuristic. The unique texture at the heart of the “repetitive crap” caught the eye of plenty of other influential bands. I’ll try to list them: Radiohead, Underworld, Sonic Youth, Red Hot Chili Peppers, David Byrne, Squarepusher… need I go on?
A critic’s job is to be a master of their own taste, and, by extension, the general taste of the modern age. But very few critics can prognosticate the life of an album as it persists into the future of music, across vast and varied disciplines.
The critics on Davis’ back weren’t exactly wrong when they vilified this work, calling it the “worst” of his discography, and of the jazz world in general, but considering its eventual influence impacting the ways we consume the art we do, it’s not a big leap to deem it the “best” jazz album, too. Oh, how the spice of life is in the nuance of it all.
