Miles Davis Jack Johnson Mobile Fidelity MFSL 1-440 180g LP

Miles Davis Jack Johnson

Mobile Fidelity MFSL 1-440

audiophile 180g Vinyl LP

limited numbered edition

made in USA

Miles Davis' A Tribute to Jack Johnson is the best jazz-rock record ever made. Equally inspired by the leader's desire to assemble the "greatest rock and roll band you have ever heard" as well as his adoration of Johnson, Davis created a hard-hitting set that spills over with excitement, intensity, majesty, and power. Bridging the electric fusion he'd pursued on earlier efforts with a funkier, dirtier rhythmic approach, Davis zeroes in on concepts of spontaneity, freedom, and identity seldom achieved in the studio. Mobile Fidelity's sterling reissue brings it all to fore with unsurpassed realism.

Right Off

Yesternow

Indeed, utilizing wah-wah and distortion, guitarist John McLaughlin comes on here with a nasty edge, slashing style, and vicious streak that allows A Tribute to Jack Johnson finally cross the divide between rock and jazz. Davis puts both feet in the former camp and permanently erasing any gap. In addition to highlighting McLaughlin's ripping performances, Mobile Fidelity's 180g LP showcases the headliner's white-hot trumpet solos like never before. Bristling with exuberance, Davis' high-register passages explode with authority and commanding presence. Around him, a barrage of urgent backbeats, knifing riffs, and three-dimensional bass lines emerge amidst an ink-black background.

The least-well known true masterpiece of Davis' career, the 1971 record – like Bitches Brew, seamlessly assembled from sessions by producer Ted Macero – was a victim of scant promotion. But to those that heard it, among them critic/musician Robert Quine and renowned writer Robert Christgau, A Tribute to Jack Johnson surpasses everything that came before. Davis treated it as a personal manifesto: An opportunity to salute the championship boxer admired for his threatening image to the establishment and taste in clothes, cars, women and music. Davis explains in the liner notes his affinity for Johnson – a stance revealed in the music, which simultaneously hits with a prize fighter's brutal force and reflects the graceful elegance with which a pugilist navigates the ring.

Producer and journalist Michael Cuscuna may have summed up the record's significance in 2003: "The dense textures introduced and developed the prior fall on the Bitches Brew recording sessions gave way to a lean, stripped-down, guitar-heavy sound. There was now only one drummer, and that kept the groove more pronounced and defined. The three-keyboard configuration appears only on the last session; the rest have none, one, or two, and they are used sparingly."

By any measure, A Tribute to Jack Johnson is a monster album. Experience it the way Davis would've wanted you to hear it.

Miles Davis' boundlessly influential On the Corner was so far ahead of its time upon release in 1972, the jazz cognoscenti rejected its groundbreaking concoction as middling in nature. Yet time has a way of righting wrongs and shifting views by adding needed context and perspective to visionary ideas, music, and approaches – the likes of which fill Davis' boldest and most controversial – undertaking. Designed to bring the focus back on the groove and bottom-end frequencies, the funk-loaded On the Corner revolutionized jazz. It also set new standards for record production, presaging remixing and electronica by more than a decade. And the work has never sounded more thrilling.

On the Corner/New York Girl/Thinkin' One Thing and Doin' Another/Vote for Miles

Black Satin

One and One

Helen Butte/Mr. Freedom X

Mastered from the original master tapes and pressed at RTI, our numbered edition 180g LP of On the Corner exposes the internal mechanisms, free-associated playing, and then-unmatched studio techniques in vivid audiophile-grade sonics. The low end, crucial to every composition here, is both heard and felt, with locked-in bass lines and low-range percussion conveyed as taut, solid, and visceral passages. You can even discern the multiple levels of rhythm Davis employed on complex tracks such as "Black Satin," as On the Corner stands as his first effort to use overdubbing and multiple tape machines. New degrees of spaciousness and airiness – equally important to the musique concrete arrangements – give the impression Davis and Co.'s creations float in space. Instruments are portrayed in three-dimensional manners, rhythmic loops retain tonal purity, and horn solos skitter across an extra-wide soundstage that takes listeners into Columbia's Studio E. MoFi's LP reissue captures Teo Macero's innovative production – and the trumpeter's cutting-edge aural collages – in definitive fashion.

Heavily inspired by Sly and the Family Stone, On the Corner portrays street vibes and remains Davis' Blackest-sounding record. The conscious attempt to connect with youthful audiences tapped into rock and funk is evident not only on the colorful cartoon cover art depicting hot-pants and zoot-suit revelers, but in the music's emphasis of recurring drum and bass grooves. Distinct from Davis' earlier fusion experiments, the record's long-misunderstood set dials back improvisation in favor of beats, loops, and atmospherics that generate trance-like effects. While Davis utilizes his band for core duties – Chick Corea and Herbie Hancock prominently figure – he also relies on an all-star cast of sidemen for concentrated soloing and additional support.

With rhythm providing the basic foundation, other notes fall into place, with their positioning steered by Macero and Davis' editing-room techniques. Looking to the manipulation-based work of Karlheinze Stockhausen and teaming with Stockhausen disciple Paul Buckmaster, Davis re-imagines what grooves constituted and could accomplish throughout On the Corner. The shapes of the songs become completely transformed as they progress. Faint melodies, spacey chords, chunky riffs, wah-wah fills, and repeated motifs bounce in and out of a sonic funhouse that wouldn't be out of place at a Harlem block party. Exotic, intrepid, and filled with Davis' "jungle sound," On the Corner remains daringly hip more than four decades later.