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If the Columbia boxed sets of Miles Davis’ fusion period, such as The Complete Jack Johnson Sessions, prove anything, it’s what a hack producer Teo Macero is. He is on record as protesting the release of the many tracks that were the raw materials for releases like Jack Johnson, Big Fun, Directions, and Get Up With It, on the grounds that these sessions were never meant to be heard. That is perfectly understandable considering that the unedited sessions are vastly superior to the hacked up and stitched together Frankenstein monsters that were commercially released.
Davis himself is partially to blame for allowing such mutilation, but Teo is clearly the villain of the piece. Artistically speaking, it would have been wisest to simply release the best version of each of the tunes (in some cases there are many as six), or possibly fuse together two takes of the same tune. Maybe the suits at Columbia were partly to blame, not wanting to dump that much product on the market. Whatever.
When the original Jack Johnson came out, I thought that it wasn’t very good, and I was right, but the sessions are a whole other story.
What you’re listening to is an essential chapter in the birth of fusion as John McLaughlin (guitar), Michael Henderson (bass), Jack DeJohnette (drums) and a revolving cast of keyboardists invent and develop grooves out of thin air, with Miles blowing coolly intellectual arabesques and Steve Grossman spewing out frenzied Coltranesqe lines on soprano sax.
If that was all there was to The Complete Jack Johnson Sessions, it would be more than enough, but there’s also a slow blues (Archie Moore) and a boogie woogie tune (Right Off) that prefigure Miles’ comeback in the early 80s, Star People; the reflectively spacey jazz (Yesternow) that’s a glance back at A Silent Way; Konda, which reaches even farther back to Filles de Kilimanjaro; the incomparably rich tone poems Nem Um Talvez, Selim and Little Church, all of which were penned by the great Brazilian composer Hermeto Pascoal; and the free jazz freakout The Mask.
At least six distinct musical styles are represented in the contents of this one box. It’s a frickin’ musical feast!
Personally, I find it’s a bit problematic to listen to all of the different versions of the tunes straight through. The solution is either to program the tunes you want to hear or create several mix CDs.
Anyway, however you slice it, the music included in this box is fantastic. Thank God Columbia has released it and the other box sets or we would’ve remained largely ignorant of the enormous and profound legacy of Miles’ fusion period.
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