Just over 20 years following the death of Miles Davis, we revisit this Relix feature that explores the On The Corner sessions._

On the Corner is Miles Davis’ most adventurous and brilliantly provocative album. Thirty-five years later, it’s been reissued with over three hours of new material.

From 1972 to 1975, Miles Davis made his most complex, most aggressive, most unforgiving and occasionally most beautiful music, and it’s often been given short shrift in the past by jazz critics who’d never been able to adjust to the screaming electric-ness of it all. Pete Cosey’s howling, post-Hendrixian guitar solos; Michael Henderson’s thumping, ultra funky basslines; Al Foster’s crashing cymbals and huge kick drum; and Miles’ own trumpet, fed through a wah-wah pedal until it sounded like an infant battling a cat in a hurricane – for folks who’d found the psychedelic swirls of Bitches Brew and In a Silent Way too much, On the Corner was absolutely the end of the line. For many, it was the peak, the most creative and endlessly fascinating music of the epic Davis catalog. And it’s finally getting its due with an epic six-CD boxed set, The Complete On the Corner Sessions.

The title’s a little misleading. Yes, the raw recordings that made up that 1972 album are here. But they’re surrounded by over three hours of previously unreleased studio jams, as well as tracks that wound up on Big Fun and Get Up With It.

Five years ago or so, I interviewed some of the players from the early ‘70s bands for my book Running the Voodoo Down: The Electric Music of Miles Davis, trying to gain some insight into what Miles was thinking back then. Saxophonist Dave Liebman was one of them – he’d been recruited on a few hours notice to replace Steve Grossman for the On the Corner recording sessions in June of ‘72, receiving the phone message while in the dentist’s chair. His soprano sax is the first solo heard on the album, a weird, squiggly stream of notes that doesn’t have anything to do with the pulsating groove behind it, but somehow manages to fit. There’s a reason for that disjunction, too.

Liebman recalls getting to the studio “around 12:30 p.m. It looked like [Miles] was giving directions and instructions, and he signaled me to come in, through the glass, ‘cause I was standing out in the hall. And he made a motion to play – to take the horn out – and he was talking to Jack [DeJohnette] or something, saying some things. I recognized a lot of the guys. The cast was three keyboards, a whole bunch of drummers, and so forth. They started playing, he pointed me to a mic and just gave me the signal to play. I had no idea what they were playing. It wasn’t like there were headphones or anything and most of the instruments were electric and plugged in [to the soundboard], so all I heard was a lot of tapping and percussion sounds on drums. And it wasn’t like I walked in and anybody set me up with microphones or anything.”

That kind of spur-of-the-moment jamming, with the resulting tapes to be culled later by Davis and Producer Teo Macero, was the rule, not the exception, and had been since 1969 or so. “We’d get in there playing, and Teo would have the tapes rolling,” recalls bassist Michael Henderson, who was recruited from Stevie Wonder’s band in 1970 and stayed with Davis for five years. “A lot of that happened. We started, and wherever it went from there, it went. Miles would start off, and we knew when we were going to end a piece or start a new piece because he’d give us code phrases, and we knew what to do from that point.”

“What Teo did on In a Silent Way was cut out all the lollygagging,” says producer Bob Belden, who’s overseen all the boxed sets of Miles’ electric material, The Complete On the Corner Sessions included. “He essentially got it to where the guys were locked in and hittin’ it. And the same thing with On the Corner, because I have some of the session reels, and it took ‘em awhile to get the vibe. And what Miles would do is go into the studio and work on one or two grooves. And he’d get it and do something on it, and he’d go on to the next thing. And they’d get something after a while, do something, and then go on again. So [Teo was] able to trick you into thinking something exists naturally, when it’s not really there. It’s a kind of sonic alchemy.”

That’s what makes the new boxed set so fascinating. On the Corner is a patchwork album that combines the fruits of a couple of recording sessions from June of ‘72 with overdubbed handclaps, radical tape editing and an approach to the mixing board unprecedented in jazz, and much rock, of that era. Macero was bringing in techniques used in dub reggae, and later in hip-hop as well, collaging the sounds in ways nobody would have thought of, or dared, even a few years earlier. In Belden’s words, “they were utilizing what was at that time pop technology,” employing all the high-tech gadgetry at Columbia’s disposal (including some devices Macero invented himself to perform specific, unprecedented bits of audio magic) in defiance of jazz’s traditional aesthetic of documenting a single perfect performance from beginning to end. There are moments on the record when the most prominent sound is those handclaps, or an intensely repetitive, hypnotic hi-hat. Meanwhile, Miles’ own trumpet is swallowed up by the sound of the band, a ribbon of sound running through a rattling, squealing horde of other noises. And yet, there’s always a system and an idea at work.

“I think he wanted a change from the Bitches Brew/ In a Silent Way kind of thing, but he didn’t necessarily have a real way of doing it,” says Liebman. “Although the album itself is scattered, the tunes themselves are pretty organized.” Indeed, “Black Satin,” the five-minute track that ends the album’s first half, has quite a pretty melody, and the looping structure might have been adaptable to radio or the dance-floor, had Miles been willing to let it be just a little bit less chaotic and disorienting. (A different mix of the track, titled “The Molester,” was released as a single – presumably it wasn’t that different, though, since it went nowhere commercially and isn’t included in the box.)

A hell of a lot of music is, though. The Complete On the Corner Sessions is a six-CD set containing all the music from On the Corner and Get Up With It, plus one track from the compilation Big Fun (which gathered four long pieces from as many sessions, circa 1969-74) and both sides of the ultra-rare non-album single “Big Fun/ Holly-wuud” never featured on any compilation until now.

Beyond that, as with 2005’s The Complete Jack Johnson Sessions, there’s an avalanche of previously unreleased material. Miles was phenomenally productive during these years, recording faster than Columbia Records could release the albums and touring all over the world, including gigs opening for the Steve Miller Band and Neil Young and a summer co-headlining jaunt with Santana. Consequently, both the Jack Johnson box and this one contain enough ready-for-release material for at least five or six more albums, even given that during his electric era, Miles was given to double-vinyl statements of purpose. (Only in 1969’s In a Silent Way, 1970’s A Tribute To Jack Johnson and 1972’s On the Corner were single albums; they were outnumbered by Bitches Brew_, In Concert: Live at Philharmonic Hall_, At Fillmore, Black Beauty, Big Fun, Get Up With It, Dark Magus, Agharta and Pangea, double discs all.)

On The Complete Jack Johnson Sessions, it was possible to hear the album-side-long jams “Right Off,” “Yesternow” and “Go Ahead John” (a psychedelic, bluesy showcase for guitarist John McLaughlin, from Big Fun ) coming together over the course of multiple takes. Four and five short versions of each track appeared on the discs, some being bridge sections that started from nowhere and ended just as abruptly. Macero cut these together, taking a bit from this one and a bit from that one, looping themes and occasionally, in the case of “Go Ahead John,” playing two sections simultaneously so that Miles appears to be in a trumpet duet with himself. The result is not only a window into the producer’s creative process, but a series of incredibly valuable snapshots of a killer band at work, building an entirely new groove as informed by Jimi Hendrix’s Band of Gypsys and by Sly and The Family Stone as by anything going on in jazz.

A big part of this change was due to bassist Michael Henderson, recruited by Davis from Wonder’s road band when he was just 19. “Miles brought me in there to funk the band up,” recalls Henderson. “He wanted to feel the groove, feel it moving. He brought me in that band for that specific reason.” Consequently, though the kid learned to appreciate Davis’s past glories, he knew better than to try and bring them up on the bandstand. Henderson recalled being told by Davis, “If you swing, I’ma fire you!”

“He was bored with jazz,” says the bassist. “He was at the point where he told me and a couple of the other guys that if he ever had to go back and play that shit, he would die.”

On The Complete On the Corner Sessions, Henderson’s bass is often dominant, especially on previously unreleased tracks like the 11-minute “Jabali,” the nearly 15-minute “Chieftain” and the combined 25 minutes of two versions of “Turnaround” a piece based on a melodic hook the band frequently used to break up long jams onstage, but which had never been heard in a studio version until now.

When recording, the mid-‘70s band – which included Chicago-based lead guitarist Pete Cosey (most notable for his work on Muddy Waters’ amp-frying Electric Mud before joining Davis in 1973), saxophonist Liebman (later replaced by Sonny Fortune), drummer Al Foster, percussionist Mtume, second guitarist Reggie Lucas and, for a while in 1974, third guitarist Dominique Gaumont – was much more restrained and sparse in their sound than onstage, where the volume was like a physical force and the momentum was headlong. In the studio, they explored sound and groove, allowing solos to become genuine lead-instrument explorations, by the guitarists in particular. The unedited versions of On the Corner tracks, while they aren’t as chopped up as the Jack Johnson component parts were – clearly, Miles knew pretty much what he wanted going in, and got it with relative ease – do allow the listener to hear that, above all, this was a band at work, not just a bunch of musicians plugged into a soundboard making noises for someone else to collate and assemble. There was an organic process taking place.

Henderson seemed to understand intuitively what was up – it was something similar to James Brown’s conduction of The JBs, the 1969-70 lineup of his band that featured Bootsy Collins on bass. “This was a man coming into his own,” he tells me unequivocally, “realizing this is where it’s gonna be going. On the Corner was for himself.”

“From ¹⁹⁷² on, whenever we recorded, and whenever we did live gigs, the music was pretty hectic and pretty crazy,” says Liebman. “But there were some great moments, and a direction kind of came together,” he continued. “By the time I left the band in mid-1974, and I guess on the records Pangea and Agharta, you hear something happening. But then it was cut short by him leaving the stage for five years.”

However, Liebman seems conflicted about what he and Miles accomplished together. “Miles really wanted to control the situation,” he reflects now. “He didn’t allow or encourage or ask for input from other members, as he had in previous bands. He didn’t say, ‘Bring in a tune,’ or ‘Write a tune.’ It was all his game, and he did everything. And I think that was a lot for him to take on.”