why do the guitars on prince of darkness album sound weird

Why do the guitars on prince of darkness album sound weird series#

'When you do anything too long, you either wear it out or lose interest. 'Soon as we get to the airport he say, Hello Miles, I say, C'mere Bob. If he tries to find a tone centre, he'll just fuck around. The key is already there! I say, Bob, when you start playing just try and finish what somebody's left.

There's certain numbers where he just stands up and goes doo-dur-dum- trying to find the key. I said, Bob, don't fish around for a tone centre. When I hear it again I think – damn, I thought that was too long. When you do it, it seems like forever if you're not doing it well.

'When you sing you can go dah-dah-da-daaaa and guys go doom-doom-doom in between that. Sell out your plans! Specially when you put all that time in. If I know I left a perfectly good spot for someone else to come in – like, there it is! – then sometimes they don't come in. I like to find a place to leave for someone else to finish it. If you jump on a horse and see he's on the wrong foot, you keep checking him until he gets to the fence – that's what I do when I'm playing. But it happens so fast that when you listen to it again, you tell where you check yourself. 'In my head, I'm saying – don't do that, do this. But when I hear it through, things that sounded bad for a long time sound bad only a few seconds. I keep playing and editing and playing and editing myself out … and I try and stop on a high point to leave someone else something to do. 'When I hear myself back,' he says, 'things seem to be shorter than what you think they are. Davis doctors them through the switchbacks of the sound: it's a dazzling concentration that must exhaust him. Live, Davis's band whip the material into a long, intricate, abstract fresco of badass flourishes, backbeat stomping and brief, violent solos. It sounds, still, like Miles no one else. Nobody could jive to the twisting Katia or the title track. You're Under Arrest is the brightest, airiest Miles LP for 20 years, a set tailored to radio possibilities – hence Time After Time and a pretty hum through Michael Jackson's Human Nature – without surrendering to faceless dance music. With his latest tour band, the music was warm and outgoing by contrast: horns and guitar improvised over taut, brittle rhythms, and in a centrepiece of Cyndi Lauper's Time After Time the trumpet sang as bittersweet as ever. The corner was turned with last year's Decoy: concise, stinging ferocity.

Why do the guitars on prince of darkness album sound weird series#

Through that record, and the subsequent Star People and We Want Miles, besides a series of dishearteningly variable gigs, Miles felt his way back via a mix of his splayed electric brew and a firmer, funkier sound. Illness and fatigue kept Miles out until the slow, painful comeback opened by The Man With the Horn. Yet the trumpet was still a parched little voice in the storm. His group got freakier, blacker, bloated with intensity, finally going supernova in the Japanese concerts of Agharta and Pangaea. Miles worked past his acoustic 60s quintet, a group that played as if it were suspended in vast, airless darkness, and soaked in the electric bath of Bitches Brew. It remains a voice as personal as Billie Holiday's, Louis Armstrong's, James Brown's, Michael Jackson's: a small, funky, hip, spare, wisely sinful sound. Through it all was the silvery swathe of the trumpet. Sketcher in Spain, and purveyor of various kinds of blue. Scuffler in and out of junk, then presiding maestro of the Great Quintet with Coltrane. Charlie Parker's hesitant partner in Bird's Savoy masterpieces from 1945 touchstone in the genesis of the Cool, four years later. A modern sound, terse, fresh-minted, newly-spoken – it always sounds like it was made just now. The Prince of Darkness, the little organiser, the cat everybody knows by one name – Miles.įorty years have seen a thousand changes in his music, yet it all retains the spearing imprint of an extraordinarily particular trumpet sound. He is the last, grandest and most imperious figure from a jazz tradition that has broken up in disarray. Miles is smiling, though, in the crescent of a particularly bright period. He grants me an hour or so in his Montreal hotel room. His eyes are mild but unbearably penetrating: he will look up from the pad, slowly, and freeze a question in its tracks. When he smiles, which is rarely, he frowns, too. When he laughs, it's like a gargle in the throat. His voice is a legendary rasp: words come out in a long guttural cough.