Tag: Japan 1975

2.7 + 2.8.1975 Tokyo

On By Jeremy ErwinIn 1975, Audience Recording, Soundboard Recording

With 11 shows under its belt, the Miles Davis septet capped its final overseas journey with a trio of shows at Tokyo’s Koseinenkinkaikan Hall – the same venue where its tour of Japan began two weeks earlier. Though the tour’s justifiably remembered for the performances from Osaka that produced the Agharta and Pangaea live LPs, the rapid evolution of the band and the drastically different performances documented across this brief run of shows are equally stunning.

Whereas the septet went all-in on dark, heady abstraction in the tour’s opening nights in Tokyo, by the time it reached Kokura a week later its sets were tight, deeply funky, and outright jubilant. A few days on in Osaka, the band was simply untouchable in its technical prowess, performing as if guided by an invisible hand to produce a quartet of sets that remain futuristic nearly five decades after their final notes faded.

Back in Tokyo for the tour’s finale, the band is new again – radically reshaping familiar material with confidence and swagger, unafraid to truncate epics like “Ife” or “Zimbabwe” down to their essence, or playfully stretch tunes like “Maiysha” to 30 minutes and beyond with long passages of experimentation. A thrilling listen from start to finish, these final dispatches from Tokyo encapsulate everything that made this Japanese tour so exceptional.

Continue reading “2.7 + 2.8.1975 Tokyo” →

2.1.1975 Osaka

On By Jeremy ErwinIn 1975, Official Release

Miles Davis’ electric period is largely defined by the quartet of albums bookending his seven-year creative run – In a Silent Way and Bitches Brew, studio LPs laid to tape six months apart in 1969, and Agharta and Pangaea, live albums recorded during matinee and evening performances in Osaka, Japan on February 1, 1975. Whereas the 1969 LPs marked a pivot point in Miles’ career and created a template for an entire genre of music, Agharta and Pangaea remain firmly entrenched in the future. Music that’s defiantly unclassifiable and delightfully impenetrable.

Like the most rewarding live Miles tapes, such as his first gigs at the Fillmore West, the late ’71 show from Switzerland, or the septet’s gripping ’73 set in Pescara, the tapes from Osaka reflect a band possessed by forces unknown – creating music that travels far beyond any familiar terrain but executed with remarkable confidence and ease. While the septet hinted at some of its darker, headier, more sinister tendencies earlier in the Japanese tour, those elements don’t simply come into bloom here on the first of February, they propel the music itself.

The afternoon performance captured on Agharta is more upbeat, immediate, and frequently stunning, but the languid, unspooling sets documented on Pangaea reveal an equally compelling cache of riches. These are universes unto themselves. Whatever your preference, the best approach is to simply get lost in them.

Continue reading “2.1.1975 Osaka” →

1.30.1975 Kokura

On By Jeremy ErwinIn 1975, Audience Recording

When the Miles Davis septet began its 1975 tour of Japan with a pair of dates in Tokyo on January 22 and 23, the tapes revealed a band diving headlong into a sort of abstract, frighteningly psychedelic universe of its own making. The sets were often experimental to the nth degree, drifting well beyond familiar forms, tempos and melodic structures into a no-man’s land of beautiful soundscapes and atonal, sonic assaults. Thrilling stuff.

By the time the septet reached the southwestern end of the island a week later for a performance at the Kokura Civic Center (demolished in 2003 to make way for a city park), its raison d’être seems to have shifted dramatically. Though “Ife” remains the heady centerpiece of the night and one of the most thrilling versions on record, the vast majority of the set is wound tight, deeply funky and downright jubilant. With this the final concert before the performances recorded for the Agharta and Pangea live LPs, it’s fascinating to hear a version of the septet so different from the one documented just two days later.

Kokura Civic Center in the 1960s
Continue reading “1.30.1975 Kokura” →

1.22 + 1.23.1975 Tokyo

On By Jeremy ErwinIn 1975, Audience Recording, Broadcast Recording

Fresh off a week’s worth of warm-up shows in California, the Miles Davis septet landed in Tokyo for a three-week tour of Japan – Miles’ final overseas performances until the 1980s. The band’s last visit to Japan in June of ’73 marked a turning point for what was then a fairly new ensemble of musicians, including the debut of setlist staples, as well as the first appearance of Miles on organ and Mtume on the primitive Yamaha EM-90 drum machine – essential components of the band’s sound that would be warped beyond recognition by the time the septet returned to the island in January of ’75.

Rather than coast on the momentum of their excellent warm-up gigs at Keystone Korner and the Troubadour, the septet seems hell-bent on rebirth upon arrival in Tokyo. With both nights captured largely in full, the tapes reveal a quartet of sprawling, lurching, often messy sets in which the band favors heady abstraction over funk, often pushing both the music and the audience’s endurance to their breaking point. As the February 1st date that produced Agharta and Pangea looms on the horizon, hearing the septet begin to fully integrate the more experimental, sinister elements that would define those LPs makes these Tokyo tapes a thrilling listening experience.

Continue reading “1.22 + 1.23.1975 Tokyo” →