Recording History
As with many of the Miles Davis boxed sets, the overall title is rather misleading. The On the Corner boxed set covers three years of sessions, from March 1972 to May 1975, and contains music with different styles, concepts, approaches and personnel. Similarly, The Complete Bitches Brew Sessions includes all of the sessions Davis recorded between August 1969 and February 1970, although the actual Bitches Brew sessions took place over just three days in August 1969.
The sessions for the 1972 album On the Corner were recorded in June and September 1972. On the Corner was scorned by critics at the time of its release and was one of Davis' worst-selling recordings. Its critical standing has improved with the passage of time; today it is seen as a strong forerunner of the musical techniques of hip hop, drum and bass, and electronic music.
Davis claimed that On the Corner was an attempt to connect with a young black audience which had largely forsaken jazz for rock and funk. While there is a discernible rock and funk influence in the timbres of the instruments employed, from a musical standpoint the album was a culmination of sorts of the musique concrète approach that Davis and producer Teo Macero (who had studied with Otto Luening at Columbia University's Computer Music Center) had begun to explore in the late 1960s. Both sides of the record were based around simple, repetitive drum and bass grooves (the track delineations on the original album were arbitrary), with the "melodic" parts snipped from hours of meandering jams. These techniques, refined via the use of computers and digital audio equipment, are now standard amongst producers of electronically-based music. Davis also cited the contemporary composer Karlheinz Stockhausen (who was later falsely rumored to have recorded with the trumpeter in the late 1970s) and Paul Buckmaster (who played electric cello on the album and contributed some arrangements) as musical influences on the album.
Read more about this topic: The Complete On The Corner Sessions
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