Miles Davis - On The Corner (1972 US Columbia Vinyl LP Gatefold, First Pressing)

Miles Davis - On The Corner | Vinyl LP Gatefold - 1972 US Columbia First Pressing (KC 31906)

Davis was explicit about what he wanted. The young Black audience had moved to rock and funk, and he wanted them back. What he made to get them was not a funk record in any conventional sense. Paul Buckmaster, the British cellist and arranger who had scored records for Elton John, David Bowie and the Rolling Stones, had introduced Davis to Karlheinz Stockhausen the same year, and Davis took to it immediately, reportedly keeping a cassette of Stockhausen's Hymnen in his Lamborghini. What appealed to him was the treatment of music as a process of addition and elimination rather than a sequence of themes and solos. Buckmaster described his own contribution as an attempt to combine strange space music with street music, and he supplied sketches that Davis largely discarded, using them as starting points and nothing more. The result is two sides built on locked, circumscribed grooves. On the opening twenty-minute sequence the bass plays the same handful of notes throughout while tabla, sitar, congas, wah-wah guitar and electric keyboards move in and out of the mix. There are no solos in the traditional sense, no heads, no beginnings or endings. Teo Macero assembled the finished pieces from tape.

The critical response in 1972 was brutal. Reviewers called it repetitious and an insult to the intellect, and it became one of Davis's worst-selling albums. Even some of the participants were unconvinced: Dave Liebman said he did not think much of it, and Buckmaster later described it as probably his least favourite Davis record. Davis deliberately left the musician credits off the sleeve so that listeners would come to it without preconceptions, which meant that for years nobody outside the sessions knew with any certainty who was playing. The reappraisal took decades, and it arrived through musicians rather than critics. The rhythmic construction, the density, the treatment of the studio as an instrument and the refusal to resolve anything all became foundational for later electronic and hip-hop production, and Columbia eventually issued the six-disc Complete On the Corner Sessions in 2007.

Recorded at Columbia's New York studio on 1 June, 6 June and 7 July 1972. This is the 1972 US first pressing on Columbia KC 31906 in gatefold sleeve.