Agharta & Pangaea @ 50

The thrilling end to Miles Davis' 70s psychedelic funk-metal era

Miles Davis — Agharta (original Japanese cover)

Miles Davis was in rough shape as 1975 began. He was having hip problems and suffering from ulcers, and he was doing a lot of coke. He’d managed to keep more or less the same band together since the summer of 1973, though: Pete Cosey and Reggie Lucas on guitars, Michael Henderson on bass, Al Foster on drums, and James “Mtume” Forman on percussion. Dave Liebman was the saxophonist from early 1973 through June 1974, when he was replaced by Sonny Fortune, and on March 30, 1974 (the Carnegie Hall concert released as Dark Magus), a third guitarist, Dominique Gaumont, joined the band. He’d stick around until the end of that year.

The band was busy for the first two months of 1975. They played a short string of West Coast dates in mid-January, then flew to Japan for a tour that began at Tokyo’s Shinjuku Kosei Nenkin Hall on January 22 and 23 and ended in the exact same venue on February 7 and 8. In between, they played Nagoya, Kyoto, Sapporo, Kokura, Osaka, Shizuoka, and Miyagi — 14 concerts in 18 days. On February 1, they played two shows (4 PM and 7 PM) at Festival Hall in Osaka, which were recorded by Columbia. There was a third show the following afternoon at 2 PM which was not recorded, as far as I know. These would be Davis’s final released recordings of the 1970s, though not his final concerts: he kept the band working throughout the summer, all the way to September. Then he disappeared into his apartment for five years.

But since none of the other Japanese concerts, or any of the US shows from spring and summer 1975, have been officially released, Agharta and Pangaea have come to represent the end of the line for Davis’s 1970s work. And frankly, that’s a damn good thing, because they are towering works, more ziggurat than tombstone.

Agharta contained the afternoon show. The original track listing, split across four sides of vinyl, was “Prelude (Part I)”, “Prelude (Part II)/Maiysha”, “Interlude”, and “Theme From Jack Johnson”. It came out in August 1975 in Japan, with head-spinning cover art from Tadanori Yokoo (who’d also done the art for Santana’s Lotus). The US edition, released in 1976, bore a somewhat less awesome cover, which was replicated when the album was finally released on CD in the US, in 1991, as part of the Columbia Jazz Contemporary Masters series. That version, with the track listing amended to “Prelude (Part I)”, “Prelude (Part II)”, and “Maiysha” on Disc 1 and “Interlude” and “Theme From Jack Johnson” on Disc 2, was the first one I heard.

Five years later, Agharta was reissued again in Japan, as part of the Sony MasterSound series, and that’s the one I own now, which I jokingly refer to as the “Ultimate Edition”. (The catalog number is Sony SRCS 9128/9, and you can still find used copies for sale.) It was remixed and remastered for a much clearer, more detailed sound, and nearly 10 minutes of additional material from the end of the concert was restored. The track listing for the MasterSound Edition ran “Prelude”, “Maiysha”, “Interlude/Theme From Jack Johnson”, with the final track/second disc now lasting almost 61 minutes.

The first thing you need to know is that none of the track listings are really accurate. The Davis band had several tunes it performed from roughly 1973-75 called things like “Funk”, “Tune in 5”, and “Turnaroundphrase”, but there were no studio versions released at the time — some are on the Complete On The Corner Sessions box — and they were never listed as such on live albums. For example, Dark Magus’s four sides were labeled “Moja”, “Wili”, “Tatu” and “Nne” (supposed to be one through four in Swahili, though two is actually “mbili”). But more accurate titles would have been “Turnaroundphrase/Tune in 5”, “Funk/For Dave”, “Vamp/Calypso Frelimo”, and “Ife/Turnaroundphrase/Tune in 5”.

So the actual first concert from February 1, released on Agharta, consists of a 32-minute “Funk/Agharta Prelude” and a 13-minute version of “Maiysha” (from Get Up With It) on Disc 1, and the second disc is actually a 60-minute medley of “Right Off” (from A Tribute to Jack Johnson), “Ife” (from Big Fun), and “For Dave”.

The band comes sliding out of the darkness on a low, threatening organ riff, quickly joined by taut funk guitar from Lucas and a snapping Foster backbeat. Davis isn’t playing trumpet at the beginning; he lets the energy build for about 90 seconds, then cuts everyone off with a piercing, shrill blast of synth lasting nearly 15 seconds. When the beat and the guitars come back in, he begins soloing in short, fanfare-like phrases, his wah-wah pedal making him sound like a chromed ribbon spiraling through the air. You can hear he’s having a rough time of it, though. His energy surges and flags almost from line to line, and after about five minutes, he’s done.

Sonny Fortune tags in, wailing on a big, showbizzy alto solo like something you might hear at an Earth, Wind & Fire concert. At several points, the band drops out behind him, leaving him pinwheeling in the air, and when Davis decides he’s heard enough, he hits the saxophonist with one of those whole-forearm-on-the-keyboard organ blasts, and it’s Pete Cosey’s turn.

The guitarist rips and claws his way through the music, laying down one of the nastiest solos of the entire 1970s, picking up where Jimi Hendrix left off and taking it all the way out to places even Helios Creed and Keiji Haino would fear to tread 20 years later. This is some scrowling, wet-cat-with-a-sparking-power-cable-in-its-mouth madness, and when the band drops out behind him, what he’s doing sounds like the music heard in the Do Lung Bridge scene from Apocalypse Now.

In a two-part DownBeat essay published in the late ’80s (and reprinted in his book Flyboy In The Buttermilk), Greg Tate writes, “While [Pete] Cosey and promethean firebreather Sonny Fortune dominate Agharta and Pangaea as soloists, these LPs are also magnificent ensemble works. Because by 1975 Miles, through his decades-old practice of paying cats to practice on the bandstand, had created the world’s first fully improvisational acid-funk band — by which I mean one capable of extemporaneously orchestrating motifs from Santana, Funkadelic, Sly, Stockhausen, Africa, India, and the Ohio Players…The band’s cohesion amidst sonic chaos knows no parallel in fusion, funk, rock, or either the black or white avant garde.”

And that cohesion is due more than anything to the work of electric bassist Michael Henderson, whose lines are as perfect an encapsulation of Amiri Baraka’s phrase “the changing same” as I can think of. Dubby, funky, loud but never ever distorted, perfectly aligned with Al Foster’s drumming and leaving plenty of room for Reggie Lucas’s one-chord vamps and Mtume’s conga accents, he as much as anyone guides the band from aggro funk to swinging rock and back seemingly at will. Davis plucked Henderson from Stevie Wonder’s road band, and he knew exactly what he’d gotten, even if the bassist wasn’t quite sure what the gig was when he took it.

There’s a passage starting about five minutes into “Interlude/Theme From Jack Johnson” where I swear Henderson has the band sounding like Grand Funk Railroad, and I mean that in a good way, and when Davis comes in, he plays his jazziest, bluesiest solo of the entire concert. For about 10 minutes, “Interlude/Theme From Jack Johnson” is some of the most down-home funk you’ll ever hear, constantly shifting and pulsing with life, but never abandoning a taut-but-swinging James Brown-live-in-Georgia groove. And amazingly, around 17 minutes into the piece, Davis plays a two-note figure on the organ that inspires Henderson to slip in the bass line from “So What”, the opening track to 1959’s Kind Of Blue — and Miles follows him, if only for a few seconds.

After that, things shift into a lower gear, where they stay for the remaining 40 minutes. The performances of “Ife” and “For Dave” are slow, drifting, and ominous; at times, there seem to be about three different synths going at once (Davis, Cosey, and maybe Henderson doing something with pedals?), and Fortune has switched from sax to flute. The MasterSound CD ends with nearly 10 minutes of sonic entropy, gentle cosmic pings and rattles floating from one side of the stereo field to the other as the whole assemblage drifts slowly to earth. It’s an incredible comedown from one of the most head-spinning musical journeys ever undertaken by anyone.

Miles Davis — Pangaea

Pangaea was recorded right after Agharta (the first show started at 4 PM and lasted until nearly 6; the second show began at 7 and ran just 90 minutes), but it’s a very different album. It’s much more bifurcated. The first half of the set is almost all hard funk, close to the aggression level of Dark Magus, recorded the previous year, while the second half is much driftier. The two tracks are misleadingly titled, again. The opener, “Zimbabwe”, actually begins with a medley of “Turnaroundphrase” and “Tune in 5” that eventually shifts, around halfway through, into “Zimbabwe” itself, signaled by a short six-note phrase from Davis that tells Henderson to lay down a dubby world-music groove, with Lucas providing one-chord chicken-scratch guitar alongside him. Davis’s subsequent solo is more emotional than Fortune’s, which is showbizzy and showoffy again, but then we get a Funkadelic-ass guitar riff that sends Reggie Lucas on a rocket straight up into the rafters. Eventually, the music reaches a crescendo, then drifts away with a long conga solo from Mtume. It ends so quietly that he can literally be heard whispering, “Shh…” into a microphone as the track ends.

The second piece, “Gondwana”, is a medley of “Ife” and “For Dave”, and the lead instrument is Sonny Fortune’s flute. Davis may be playing keyboards, but he’s not attempting to disrupt things. And when he takes a trumpet solo, it’s subdued, even mournful. According to his bandmates, Davis had become ill during the break between performances, and he let the band do most of the work throughout the second concert, especially its second half. One of my favorite portions of “Gondwana” is the distorted kalimba solo Pete Cosey takes right after Davis’s first trumpet solo ends. Eventually, they get back into the down-home funk zone they inhabited for a while on Agharta’s second disc, but it’s a little more rote, a little less engaged, and eventually Cosey takes over the show entirely, delivering a long, Band of Gypsys-esque guitar solo as the band vamps behind him. There are no dropouts or direction-shifting cues at any point; you could tell me Davis had entirely left the stage, and I’d believe it. (He does eventually play some more trumpet before the set ends.)

As I mentioned above, these weren’t Miles Davis’s final concerts of the 1970s. But by the time Pangaea was released in 1976 (only in Japan; it didn’t come out in the US until 1991, when it appeared on CD as part of the aforementioned Columbia Jazz Contemporary Masters series), he had already disappeared, and wouldn’t be heard from again publicly until 1981.

When Agharta was initially released, it was not greeted positively by critics. Robert Palmer in the New York Times and Gary Giddins in the Village Voice both ripped into it. But it underwent critical reassessment (including from Giddins) when Davis returned to public life in the early ’80s, and even more so a decade later when it and Pangaea were both issued on CD. Now, it’s properly seen as one of Davis’s greatest records (at least, among those who enjoy his electric music; there are still some cloth-eared fucks who don’t listen to anything he did after 1965, but it’s not up to the rest of us to enlighten those people).

Pangaea is slightly less mind-blowing than its predecessor/big brother, but it’s a very nice companion piece to Agharta. Again, the version to get is the Sony MasterSound edition, which adds three or four minutes of electronics and rhythm box to the end of the second disc; the catalog number is SRCS 9130/1, and used copies are out there.

For me, Agharta is tied with On The Corner as Miles Davis’s best album of the Seventies. If you’ve never heard it, well, I hope you’re in a chair with a seat belt.

That’s it for now. See you next week (or on Friday, if you’re a paying subscriber)!