As the last man pointed out too.
And don’t forget they owe it all to the great Fats Navarro.
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If anyone would like to listen to the Miles track Go Ahead John, please let me know whether your speakers produce a powerful phase effect from about 6 mins 40 secs.
Thanks
Jim
Which version of Go Ahead John? There are several on the Jack Johnson box, but maybe it’s available on one of those compilations I don’t have.
The one I’m listening to is from the LP Big Fun.
I thought it might be - I don’t have that. I probably have the same version on the JJ box but it’s probably remastered/remixed. The versions on the box are
GAJ part 1, 13.07
GAJ part 2a, 7.00
GAJ part 2b, 10.06
GAJ part 2c, 3.38
GAJ part 1 remake, 11.04
If you can identify your version from that, I’m happy to have a listen and see if I hear the phasing, but it wouldn’t be definitive.
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It’s rather amusing to think of so many people playing Big Fun this early in the morning! I’ve just played the track and can confirm the use of some heavy guitar effects from around 6:40. But then this was recorded in the period 1969-72 when guitar effects and heavy distortion were becoming rather common following Hendrix.
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Another Clive also listening to Go Ahead John! I cannot recreate the Big Fun version from the Jack Johnson box, as you can see from what follows. Following the list I posted earlier, the Big Fun version starts with 2b, cuts to a section that uses part 2a and 2c simultaneously, then a section that uses part 1 and part 1 remake simultaneously; finally ending with some of part 2b.
Most relevant to Jim’s initial query is the comment that ‘All of this was mixed with an automatic switcher that shot the guitar back and forth between each channel’.
There’s none of that phasing on the JJ box.
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Yes, the editing by Teo Macero plays with various studio techniques informed by his enjoyment of putting together Frankenstein-style pieces of music from different sessions to make them tell an overall story he liked.
Consciously or unconsciously influenced by Electric Ladyland (recorded 1967/68, released October 1968) - and which was to my mind always a jazz LP inter alia, especially in terms of its improvisational approach to music-making.
The album version of Go Ahead John I’m listening to is 28:27 long.
The wikipedia entry on this track is interesting:
“Go Ahead John” is an outtake from Davis’s Jack Johnson sessions. The recording is a riff and groove-based, with a relatively sparser line-up of Steve Grossman on soprano saxophone, Dave Holland on bass, Jack DeJohnette on drums, and John McLaughlin on guitar with wah-wah pedal.
It was one of the rare occasions in which Davis recorded without a musical keyboard. It was recorded in five sections, ranging from three to 13 minutes, which producer Teo Macero subsequently assembled in post-production four years later for Big Fun .
DeJohnette provides a funky, complex groove, Holland plays bass with one constant note repeated, and McLaughlin plays in a staccato style with blues and funk elements. According to one music writer, the track’s bass parts has “a trancelike drone that maintains” the predominantly Eastern vibe of the album.[9]
Davis’s trumpet and McLaughlin’s guitar parts were heavily overdubbed for the recording. The overdubbing effect was created by superimposing part of Davis’s trumpet solo onto other parts of it, through something Teo Macero calls a “recording loop”. Macero later said of this production technique, “You hear the two parts and it’s only two parts, but the two parts become four and they become eight parts. This was done over in the editing room and it just adds something to the music […] I called [Davis] in and I said, ‘Come in, I think we’ve got something you’ll like. We’ll try it on and if you like it you’ve got it.’ He came in and flipped out. He said it was one of the greatest things he ever heard”.
DeJohnette’s drums were also manipulated by Macero, who used an automatic switcher to have them rattle back and forth between the left and right speakers on the recording.[6] In his book Running the Voodoo Down: The Electric Music of Miles Davis , Davis-biographer Phil Freeman describes this technique as “100 percent Macero” and writes of its significance to the track as a whole, stating:
This doesn’t create the effect of two drummers. It’s just disorienting, throwing the ear off balance in a way that forces the listener to pay close attention. The drums cease to perform their traditional function. Jack DeJohnette’s beats, funky and propulsive on the session tapes, are so chopped up that their timekeeping utility is virtually nil. Macero has diced the rhythm so adroitly that we are not even permitted to hear an entire drum hit or hi-hat crash. All that remains are clicks and whooshes, barely identifiable as drums and, again, practically useless as rhythmic indicators. Thus, the pace is maintained by Dave Holland’s one-note throb and the occasional descending blues progression he plays. The feeling one gets from “Go Ahead John” becomes one of floating in space.[12]
Composition
Titled as an exhortation by Davis to McLaughlin,[5] “Go Ahead John” features a basic, blues motif, centered around E and B♭, as well as modulations introduced by Davis into the D♭ scale.[7] The recording begins with McLaughlin’s funky wah-wah lines, backing Grossman’s sharp, restrained playing, with Davis’s first trumpet solo entering at four minutes with scattered ideas.[6][8] In his book Milestones: The Music and Times of Miles Davis , Jack Chambers writes that the recording’s first 11 minutes and its closing four-and-a-half minutes "resemble Willie Nelson [from Jack Johnson ] as a head arrangement built on a riff, with the riff sustained this time by McLaughlin’s steady wah-wah in the background.[11] Approximately six minutes into it, McLaughlin’s guitar solo succeeds Davis’s first solo, as the band vamps.[6] Music journalist Todd S. Jenkins writes of this passage in the recording, “Thanks to the then-new wonders of noise gate technology, Jack DeJohnette’s drums and cymbals flit back and forth rapidly from left to right in the mix. With each switch, the guitar’s volume blasts in and out, over and over again, during McLaughlin’s relentlessly acidic solo”.[8] Following the passage, an unrelated theme opens with two minutes of a slow blues segment by Davis that is spliced into the recording, accompanied solely by occasional notes from Holland; According to Jack Chambers, Davis’s blues solo “becomes a duet with himself by overdubbing, and then builds into a quintet performance lasting ten more minutes”.[11] Phil Freeman wrote of this “doubling effect”, stating “Miles’s two solos fit together perfectly, creating a feel similar to that of New Orleans jazz, with two trumpets weaving intricate, complementary lines around each other”.[12]
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Well I would like to hear that Frankenstein version - unfortunately I think I have all the rest of Big Fun, mostly on the Bitches Brew sessions box set.
You can listen to the track/LP on YouTube (or Spotify?) and then buy a quality copy for your system if you like it?
Well, I had a listen to the Big Fun version on YouTube via the MusoQB (my hifi is essentially old school). Despite the limitations it did sound extraordinary at the beginning although it seemed that the mix became more conventional about a third of the way through (would you agree?).
Chet Baker Quartet - Chet Baker Quartet. - Sam Records RE (2012)
Beautifully packaged and pressed as usual by Pallas, Germany.
Remastered from original masters and sounding lovely. Not bad for £12.50
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Hi Clive
Just listened to Go Ahead John again while doing my daily stretching and weights routine.
Great track. From 6-12 mins it goes bonkers as McLaughlin does indeed go ahead.
Then the track settles into say another slowly mounting plateau/slope of increasingly pounding jazz rock voodoo funk eclectic crossover, with extremely sparse bass and intertwining trumpet solos and other sounds that float on an ocean of dismembered drum and cymbal sounds…that make DeJohnette sound like he had teleported himself into Motian’s imagination.
So if that’s conventional, then yes…it was indeed by then a convention for Miles’ ever changing roster of band jam members to play in that mantra-like repetitive evolving self-inventing groove style that Macero plundered pirate like to reconstruct the body of a track from the dismembered remains of tracks from the bands’ futurisitic pasts…
Yes, yes, yes!
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@PatM, I didn’t even kow this artest. Barney Wilen is wonderful. Played this one and « Jazz Meets India » where he co-perfoms. Splendid. Iver
Miles Davis - Ascenseur pour l’Échafaud [Original Motion Picture Soundtrack]
AllMusic Review by Michael G. Nastos [-]
Jazz and film noir are perfect bedfellows, as evidenced by the soundtrack of Louis Malle’s Ascenseur Pour L’Echafaud (Lift to the Scaffold). This dark and seductive tale is wonderfully accentuated by the late-'50s cool or bop music of Miles Davis, played with French jazzmen – bassist Pierre Michelot, pianist René Urtreger, and tenor saxophonist Barney Wilen – and American expatriate drummer Kenny Clarke. This recording evokes the sensual nature of a mysterious chanteuse and the contrasting scurrying rat race lifestyle of the times, when the popularity of the automobile, cigarettes, and the late-night bar scene were central figures. Davis had seen a screening of the movie prior to his making of this music, and knew exactly how to portray the smoky hazed or frantic scenes though sonic imagery, dictated by the trumpeter mainly in D-minor and C-seventh chords. Michelot is as important a figure as the trumpeter because he sets the tone, as on the stalking “Visite du Vigile.” While the mood of the soundtrack is generally dour and somber, the group collectively picks up the pace exponentially on “Diner au Motel.” At times the distinctive Davis trumpet style is echoed into dire straits or death wish motifs, as on “Generique” or “L’Assassinat de Carala,” respectively. Clarke is his usual marvelous self, and listeners should pay close attention to the able Urtreger, by no means a virtuoso but a capable and flexible accompanist. This recording can stand proudly alongside Duke Ellington’s music from Anatomy of a Murder and the soundtrack of Play Misty for Me as great achievements of artistic excellence in fusing dramatic scenes with equally compelling modern jazz music.
Dave
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AllMusic Review by Richard S. Ginell
Alternating between soprano, tenor and baritone saxes in this collection of straight-ahead jazz for the Japanese market, Barney Wilen refuses to be pinned down to a single tone quality or approach, even on the same instrument. Among other things, he mimics the lagging phrasing of Lady Day on “You’ve Changed” on soprano, “Blues Walk” bumps along agreeably on baritone while “Old Devil Moon” is sustained and humorous, and “Mack the Knife” is converted into a glacial smoky ballad with almost casual nonchalance. Throughout, Kenny Barron gets acres of well-turned solo space – it’s practically his gig, too – and Ira Coleman (bass) and Lewis Nash (drums) provide crisp underpinning. The further one goes in this collection, the more interesting and less predictable it sounds.
Dave
This is a great one by Barney Wilen. Have a listen to the track selected on the website - Port of Spain Shuffle - irresistible.
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Albert and I will settle on the settee today.
Both will snooze a bit ;he can chase rabbits in his dreams and I will spend some time with Basie’s New Testament band from the 50s.
I love that band Joe Newman, the two Franks and Sonny Payne.
Currently in Moodsville territory with Joe and Frank W.
Rain all you like we are content.
On Qobuz.
N
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listened to this last week. great
lp
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