Why Damon Albarn thinks Miles Davis changed music forever
Miles Davis once said, “I have to change, it’s like a curse.” And this was a trailblazing mantra ratified by his frequent drumming collaborator, the legendary Billy Cobham, who said that “everything was experimentation. There was not one moment that whatever was put on a piece of paper would not be changed.”
Davis was always looking for the new angle, always bravely running his finger along what is already known in search of the cutting edge. The enamoured the late jazz star with a slew of rockers, including notable mega-fans are: Jimi Hendrix, Nick Cave, John Lydon, Joni Mitchell, Iggy Pop, Damon Albarn, John Mayer, Paul Weller, Patti Smith, and Nina Simone to name but a lot.
This endless innovation and drive to the future is mirrored in what David Bowie said when he philosophically declared: “Tomorrow belongs to those who can hear it.” If rock music is about staying ahead of the curve while simultaneously staying true to snatching the surge rising from the void and giving voice to it, then Davis’ soulful propagation of fevered imagination is an ethos akin to the very best fuzzed pedalled leather-clad rockers that followed.
He was a pioneer and in the world of jazz where rules are meant to be broken, that meant messing with the form entirely. Bitches Brew upset legions of jazz purists upon its release before amassing a following and this sort of spiritual iconoclasm is what rock stars are always aiming to achieve. Prior to its release, Miles Davis was busying himself playing to 100 people if he was lucky in the mid-sixties, then he alchemically crafted ‘rock jazz’ and ended up performing alongside the likes of The Who and Jimi Hendrix in front of more than half a million people at the Isle of Wight Festival.
Aside from combining rock and jazz, why exactly did it sound so fresh? Well, in some ways, he saw the way soloing created layers and he invented a style of proto sampling. He would splice recordings in such a way that something new was created out of the mix as opposed to the session itself. This was well ahead of its time.
As Blur legend Damon Albarn told The Fader: “Miles Davis attacks. Some of it’s toxin and some of it’s anti-toxin, but you could listen forever because of the way it’s been put together… Miles was taking huge chunks of recordings and chopping them, then piecing them together. It seems like such an obvious evolution from there to where we are now, but that was like 10 or 15 years before the technology was available.”
As Teo Macero, the engineer and producer who worked closely with Davis, would explain: “Many times when I was working on a Miles album, and editing it, I would take everything from the very beginning of the session, any little fragment, I would mix it down and put it all together. And then finally (I’d) cut the material and put it all together using the three-machine splice technique with a lot of reverb machines and all kinds of techniques that we had at that time.”
Continuing: “One guy said he was going to take a record back because he heard the music going back and forth, left and right. Well, we had a machine that did that with Miles. I mean, if you listen to some of the tracks, you hear the shifting. You say ‘what the hell is going on?’”
This was revolutionary in many ways. It pushed boundaries of sound at the time, but it also pushed boundaries of taste and didn’t give a damn about the staunch conservatism of jazz puritanism. Now, Davis is considered a master well ahead of the pack, in part, because of this bold step forward. As Albarn proclaims: “And that’s exactly what a leader should do – you should hear a leader say, ‘And I’ve seen into the future’.”
