One autumn in New York, in 1972, the most famous jazz musician in the world tried to take a right turn at 60 mph off the West Side Highway and totaled his Lamborghini Miura. A bystander found Miles Davis with both legs broken, covered in blood and cocaine. Even after the crash, Miles had a bleeding ulcer, a bad hip, nodes in his larynx, and a heart attack while on tour in Brazil. He spat blood onstage, his legs in so much pain he had to work his wah-wah and volume pedals with his hands, and offstage, he self-medicated with Scotch and milk, Bloody Marys, Percodan, and more cocaine. “Everything started to blur after that car accident,” Miles later wrote.
His trajectory up to that point was a blur of a different hue. From teen sideman to Charlie Parker’s bebop revolution to a solo career that’s better compared to Pablo Picasso than other jazz musicians, Miles instigated entire paradigm shifts in music. Or, as he hissed to a matron at a White House dinner in the 1980s: “I’ve changed music five or six times.” Most narratives point to iconic albums like Birth of the Cool, Relaxin’ With the Miles Davis Quintet, Kind of Blue, Sketches of Spain, Miles Smiles and Bitches Brew, but his 1974 album Get Up With It hangs like an ominous storm cloud over them all, the one that fans of his other works might hesitate to name, his last studio album before he fell mute for the rest of the decade. Like Orpheus grieving in the underworld or Marlow going up the river, Miles went to a place that forever altered his DNA. When he finally returned to the studio, he never sounded the same.
Starting with Bitches Brew in 1970, Miles proceeded to drop eight double albums as well as audacious efforts like A Tribute to Jack Johnson and On the Corner, each one deploying a strategy that undercut his audiences’ expectations. With Get Up With It, Miles began the most defiant shift of his storied career, dropping a totemic yet untidy leviathan that rebuffed jazz fans and critics alike. Each song careens between extremes, as Miles presages everything still to come: ambient, no wave, world beat, jungle, new jack swing, post-rock, even hinting at the future sound of R&B and chart-topping pop. For many modern fans, it’s his heaviest era, but Miles himself offers little insight into his mindset of that period, the music barely mentioned in his 1989 book Miles: The Autobiography. Instead, he writes: “I was spiritually tired of all the bullshit…I felt artistically drained, tired… And the more I stayed away, the deeper I sank into another dark world.”
The sessions that comprise Get Up span four years and include a roster that reflects Miles and the transitory nature of his ever-molting priorities: Herbie Hancock, Keith Jarrett, Billy Cobham, Al Foster, Airto, John McLaughlin, Reggie Lucas, Pete Cosey, James Mtume, David Liebman, and many more appear. Behind them sat producer and editor Teo Macero, who shepherded hours of sessions and chaos into something majestic. The stabilizing force, however, was teen bassist Michael Henderson, lifted from Stevie Wonder’s band and dropped in to anchor each iteration of Miles’ groups for the next seven years. Deemed too simplistic a player by the jazz cognoscenti, Henderson’s funk vamps function like simple machines, wedging between the beats to pry open more space, each cycling riff tightening like a screw.
By this point in the ’70s, Miles was moving away from jazz fusion’s popularity to something more primal and sanguinary. His band grew more Afrocentric, and thanks in no small part to his wife of one year Betty Davis (née Mabry), Miles started listening to Jimi Hendrix, James Brown, and Sly and the Family Stone. But he also had an ear tuned to Aretha Franklin, Ann Peebles and—in one of his inimitable turns of phrase—told DownBeat magazine, “If Al Green had one tit, I’d marry that motherfucker.”
Still, beneath all that, another sound was stirring, one that hearkened back to his East St. Louis childhood. Early in his autobiography, Miles talks about “That roadhouse music, or what some call honky-tonk…that shit that they play in black ’bucket of blood’ clubs…the fights that were likely to jump off in those clubs.” Moving towards the downbeat of funk also meant moving to that ur-throb pulsing beneath it like a pulmonary vein. “I was trying to play the music I grew up on now, that roadhouse, honky-tonk, funky thing that people used to dance to on Friday and Saturday nights,” he wrote of his impetus for much of the ’70s. “It has to get down inside your body, up into your blood before you can do it correctly.” So Miles got Hancock, Jarrett, and McLaughlin to submit to the jerky strut of “Honky Tonk” and hopped on “Red China Blues,” a bit of Sonny Williamson-meets big band boilerplate that serve as the album’s obvious outliers.
During these sessions, Miles began to seek an emphasis on rhythm above all else. “Miles left post-bop modernism for the funk because he was bored fiddling with quantum mechanics and just wanted to play the blues again,” Greg Tate posited in his essay “The Electric Miles.” For the remainder of the ’70s, Miles was one of reduction as well as negation. For all of its two-hour runtime, Get Up barely features his trumpet, a trend already reflected in his live shows of the time. After decades of the finest pianists in jazz serving as his sidemen, Miles himself moved to the electric organ.
Miles’ organ playing didn’t have the nuance, shade, and heights of his trumpet, but with the electric organ, vast new chasms opened up to him: seismic drones, durative noise blasts, a sense of deep space and foreboding void that the trumpet otherwise punctures. Dark arts arose from his keys, as Sly Stone’s bassist of the time recalled during one coke-fueled night: “[Miles] got on Sly’s organ and started to voice these nine-note, ethereal crazy chords. Sly…came out yelling, ’Who in the fuck is doing that on my organ? Miles, get your motherfucking ass out…Don’t ever play that voodoo shit here.’”
Rather than run the voodoo down, now Miles could conjure it all by himself. How else to get that vertiginous, heart-strangling fear and magnificent malefic-ness of “Rated X”? Full of dread and a speedball of drums, conga, and tabla, it’s a track that plays with the ideas of no wave, post-punk, and techno at its most brusque. But Macero’s editing style (dropping out the rhythm section entirely and letting the keys levitate in mid-air) also anticipates the modern horror movie aesthetic, the flickering cuts akin to the terror of an approaching tornado, bloody machete, or unmoored jet turbine. For the better part of “Maiysha,” Davis’ keys act as breezy as any other jazz organ trio (think Groove Holmes or Big John Patton), though ten minutes in, lead guitarist Pete Cosey enters and the two hit a tone kin to electrocuting a tomcat.
In Cosey, Miles found a sparring partner unlike any other. There had been the likes of Parker, Coltrane, Shorter, even McLaughlin in the past, but only Cosey could range wider and push Miles deeper, from country blues to Muddy Waters, microtonal tunings to Hendrix at his most atonal. Cosey was an imposing force with his thick shades, towering afro, and an array of pedals and synthesizers that melted futuristic noise and old ghosts together that made him demiurge to metalheads, noiseniks and punks alike. Hearing Cosey and Miles trade solos on the furious “Mtume” is like relishing the bloody spray of each landed blow in a heavyweight fight. Miles veered in tone from lines chopped like a coke rail to higher than a chemtrail. To Cosey, the music warranted such extremes. “That music was about life,” he said in one interview. “It dealt with cleansing. It dealt with rising and falling. It was extremely cerebral, but it was earthy at the same time.”
Get Up With It’s crushing emotional gravity comes from two 32-minute pieces that are unlike anything else in Miles’ catalog, much less the history of jazz, ranging from despair to rage, pride to anguish, ecstasy to abject sadness. There’s the frenzy of “Calypso Frelimo,” which takes its name from the Mozambique political party seeking independence from Portuguese colonial rule. It sounds like a riot in the middle of a block party. Miles layers his wah-wah horn and electric organ into an ebullient Caribbean theme as Henderson holds down the low-end with Mtume and drummer Al Foster. Densely polyrhythmic yet melodically slick, with incandescent solos from Miles, Cosey and tenor saxophonist Dave Liebman race through the din. They never break away from the matrices that band lays down, they illuminate every hectic angle of it.
For a certain generation, the triplet bass figure that Henderson drops ten minutes in feels instantly familiar. It brings up images of your childhood living room as well as a subterranean realm, so closely does it resemble Koji Kondo’s theme for the underworld levels of “Super Mario Bros.” Tate calls the work a “dub fugue,” centering on that cavernous bass throb and a telling juxtaposition of Caribbean elements and European ones that reflects back on the title itself. The massive piece suggests a Pangaea that connects the Caribbean rhythms of reggae and calypso to African-American jazz and back to Africa herself.
And then there’s the elegy of “He Loved Him Madly.” Recorded a month after the passing of Duke Ellington, its title taken from a Christmas card greeting Duke sent to Miles the year before. It both summons the ghost of Duke’s “jungle style” big bands and anticipates the forsaken pall of dark ambient. Assembled from five separate takes, Macero wove the seemingly aimless recordings into a magnum opus, one that Brian Eno later hailed as “revolutionary,” finding in its half-hour descent “the ‘spacious’ quality I was after” for his own future ambient work.
It’s a eulogy to Duke that seems to emanate from across the River Styx. Mtume’s congas flutter like bats across the stereo field, Cosey spins out cobwebs on guitar, with Macero’s spacing suggestive of a gaping void in the center of the piece. Miles looms around C-minor on organ, and when his muted trumpet finally sounds at the midway point, he channels longtime Ellington trumpeter Cootie Williams, seeming both close as a whisper and a distant wail. Erotic and ethereal at once, a second solo comes as the band starts to quicken, only to have it all turn phantasmagoric by song’s end.
Less than a year after Get Up With It’s release, Miles plunged deeper into “another dark world,” one where no sound escaped for the next seven years. Lurid stories abound about his reclusive, sordid, filthy lifestyle holed up in his Upper West Side brownstone during those years, as well as numerous run-ins with the law and fears of his imminent demise in the press. He had burned a bridge, one that had led him to the brink of madness. “You can’t know how terrifying it is to be in the middle of all of that, it’s endless sound,” he confessed to one interviewer at the time. “Music is a curse.”
During that same span, his Get Up With It bandmates also stepped away from that endless sound, instead infiltrating the realms of R&B and pop, scoring frothy hits ranging from “You Are My Starship” to “Never Knew Love Like This Before.” Guitarist Reggie Lucas worked with a new singer named Madonna, writing “Borderline” and producing her debut album. And together with percussionist Mtume, they formed the funk band Mtume, responsible for that ode to gumilingus, “Juicy Fruit.”
The demented, paranoid, self-imposed exile of Miles Davis was a tragedy, a genius turned into a man as shell-shocked as any Vietnam War veteran. When he returned to the studio in 1981 with the turgid and slick The Man With the Horn and his subsequent ’80s work, Miles sounded like a doppelgänger of his former self. He and his band had willingly gone to the darkest places of the soul during Get Up With It and—as he notoriously did to his audiences at his peak—now he willingly turned his back on it. Dipping into elevator music takes on “Time After Time” and “Human Nature,” Miles also continued to play the blues, but a more bloodless version of them. Much like Sly Stone before him, Miles ventured into the heart of darkness with Get Up With It and wrestled with the devil for his gun. But in coming out on the other side of this music, Miles and his band were irrevocably transformed. Or as he would realize near the end of his life: “You don’t change music, music changes you.”
