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Here come the Velvets.
Daily Archives: 04/10/2011
The Genius of Miles Davis – excerpt. via @joehalstead
“From early in his career, Miles was obsessed with the idea that a single note could convey all the beauty of music.
That idea started to take form in his one-off recordings from the late 1940s, when to most Americans he was nothing special — just another fast-blowing sideman who’d once played with Charlie Parker.
Jobs were scarce and he drifted around, on the cusp of celebrity but not truly finding it until he moved to Paris in 1949, where he was hailed as a jazz god. When he returned to the U.S., the contrast was unbearable, and Miles’ career almost went permanently off the rails.
Broke, bored and frustrated by a lack of creative momentum, he turned to heroin — a period in his life he would later call “a four-year horror show.”
Via Those Dark Horses, which I’m becoming a little bit obsessed with.
The power of a good gig, and why. By Bangs.
At least on some level, it's about escapism.
“The politics of rock ‘n’ roll, in England or America or anywhere else, is that a whole loft of kids want to be fried out of their skins by the most scalding propulsion they can find, for a night they can pretend is the rest of their lives, and whether the next day they go back to work in shops or boredom on the dole or American TV doldrums in Mom ‘n’ Daddy’s living room nothing can cancel the reality of that night in the revivifying flames when for once if only then in your life you were blasted outside of yourself and the monotony which defines most life anywhere at any time, when you supped on lightning and nothing else in the realms of the living or dead mattered at all.”
- Lester Bangs
