Tomorrow's Unknown Known Life: What Live-Evil Means To Me
IASPM CA
By Sean Steele
There is a phenomenon that occurs when driving through farmland. Passing rows of crops while in motion on a highway provides a series of lines and patterns that shift as you pass. The road provides a forward motion, a direction, and the parallel lines spread outward to the horizon. In my 20s I spent several summers travelling across North America, and whenever I recall these trips there seems to be a firm connection between driving in the country and listening to Miles Davis' 1971 album Live-Evil. It must have been while gazing out a car window watching rows of corn or a slowly fading sunset that I first heard this unique and incredible record.
Sunset in the American Southwest, Summer 2010. Photo by Sean Steele.
The record is a fusion of a live album and a carefully constructed series of compositions. Live-Evil blends the excitement of live improvisation and exploration with the editing and splicing made possible in a recording studio. Live-Evil strikes a compelling balance between free-form exploration and studio manipulation. It widened my sense of what it was possible to do with music, combining many of my favourite aspects of jazz, funk and psychedelic rock. Between the edited sections of Davis and his band playing free-form psychedelic jazz-rock are additional compositions by Brazilian musician Hermeto Pascoal, and these dream-like renditions were an early personal introduction to ambient music, a genre that has since come to occupy a central place in my life.
Here is one such example of these ambient interludes:
Music connects to memory. There are songs and albums that can transport me to another time and place, and, more importantly, to another version of myself. Certain music has the ability to send me back to outgrown patterns of thought and earlier phases of my self-identity. Live-Evil reconnects me to road trips. Over the course of several summers I criss-crossed the continent five times. There is a transiency to travel that reflects an exciting restlessness I hear in Miles Davis and his band. They seem to be searching in sound for something, some elusive downbeat, a funky momentary collision of rhythm and melody. I was searching for many things as friends and I drove from one end of America to the other. I went in search of an imaginary era I gradually realized could not be found because it never existed in the first place. In my musical life, I was also searching for a kind of radical freedom through improvisation – a telepathic connection between musicians who can swoop and turn, rising and falling in a collective expression of sonic freedom and communication. Through my North American wanderings, I sought an ever-renewing sense of novelty, and to me there is a kind of parallel sense of discovery that is apparent every time I listen to Live-Evil.
Road trips and Live-Evil are parallels in my mind because they both make me think of searching. Whether the search is for some imaginary vision of America or my belief that the improvisations on the album were unedited examples of some extraordinary musical telepathy, the excitement of discovery was enough to get back in the car or pick up the guitar once again. There is always the next note, the next melodic idea, just as there is always the next small town, the next big city, the next highway. And just as Live-Evil is not a genuine live album, but a studio reconstruction, so too were my trips never an authentic journey into the heart of a place, but rather shallow impressions of a place seen in motion. With both improvisational music and travel, there is a nascent sense of promise, a suggestion that something impossible is, perhaps, possible. Live-Evil is not an untouched live album, and this realization subverted my original vision of magical musical telepathy. While driving across America, the discovery of any real place always subverted the vision I had prior to arriving. Both my road trips and Live-Evil reside in this space between the real and the imaginary.
Driving through New Mexico, Summer 2010. Photo by Sean Steele.
This album opened up entirely new sonic landscapes for my young ears for several reasons. One, it strengthened my artistic sense, into something approaching conviction, that improvisational music was the music for me. There was something uniquely thrilling to me about the fearless sense of exploration in sound occurring on these recordings.
The second way that Live-Evil expanded my musical consciousness was through its unique existence as both a live record and a meticulously crafted studio album. Initially I had been under the false impression that the hairpin turns made by the band on the lengthy live tracks were proof that these musicians possessed the ability to move as a unit and turn on a musical dime. Not so. Or, at least, not quite to the extent that we hear on Live-Evil. Instead, these live recordings were edited, spliced, and re-mixed by producer Teo Macero.
Teo Macero and Miles Davis outside Columbia Recording Studios, New York, 1971. (Creative Commons)
Live-Evil redefined my understanding of the relationship between live and recorded music. I began to hear the potentials of a medium that (to borrow Brian Eno's phrase) allows musicians, producers and engineers to “paint with sound.” Tape was a canvas upon which Miles Davis (trumpet), Gary Bartz (soprano saxophone, flute), John McLaughlin (electric guitar), Keith Jarrett (electric piano, organ), Michael Henderson (electric bass), Jack DeJonnette (drums) and Airto Moreira (percussion) painted. Equally important to the performances of these musicians, I realized, were the audio engineers capturing these sounds, and the producer who spliced together magic moments of musical exploration into a coherent whole.
Mile Davis at the Cellar Door, Washington DC, 1970. Source: http://dailyjazz.blogspot.com/2006/01/cellar-door-sessions-again.html?m=0
The record combines live recordings made at the Cellar Door in Washington DC with additional sessions at the Columbia B studio in New York. The bulk of Live-Evil is a series of edits and splices of the live recordings, with the New York sessions providing the ambient pieces that bridge the longer jams. Macero's bold edits create unique sonic fusions that highlight the band's exploratory powers. What results is a kind of sonic juxtaposition that connects Davis' earlier cool sounds of the 1950s (the ambient pieces recall the smooth composed sounds of 1960's Sketches of Spain) with his rhythmically based rock-funk-jazz fusion experimentations of the late 1960s and early 1970s. What I had begun to realize through delving into the creation of Live-Evil was the collaborative potentials of working with people who were differently talented but equally passionate about trying new things, about experimenting and always pushing ahead to try and find unexplored territory – as if through the manipulation of recorded sound a kind of hidden desert highway could be discovered.
The song “Funky Tonk” is comprised of seven edits made to music performed during the third set at the Cellar Door on December 19, 1970. Listen here:
Through juxtaposition, sudden turns, and dramatic shifts in dynamics, Macero created compelling narratives out of free-form improvisation. Macero used recording technology to assemblage a collage that modified the actual concert, re-forming it like metal melted down and repurposed. What emerged was a new musical invention that, to my ears, combines some of the most exciting qualities of live improvisational performance with the malleability of recorded sound. Tapes can be edited, spliced, cut, sped up, slowed down, processed with effects, and mixed to sound much different that than it might have sounded for audience members present at the live performance. The combination is innovative because it takes a non-malleable sonic situation and reforms it, through technology, into something that both highlights the organic communication of these musicians and the malleability of sound made possible by the recording studio.
Live-Evil lives somewhere between the studio and the club, between the excitement of discovery and the craft of the audio engineer. To me it is a beautiful synthesis of the planned and the unplanned. The album exists as a series of parallels in motion, with the spontaneous and arranged co-existing. The title of the record itself is a parallel, a reversal of meaning through the use of opposites. The live sets were reformed into new improvisational compositions, just as corn rows are formed and reformed while in motion. Patterns and inversions create meaning through juxtaposition, whether through the combination of studio/live or the phenomenon of motion/stillness while driving past static objects. The album cover, by French painter Mati Klarwein, is a surreal representation of parallels and reversals, dreams and nightmares.
Live-Evil album cover painting by Mari Klarwein.
The live inverts into evil, turning in on itself as a live album to become a bastardization, an evil twin to the untouched recording of a live performance. Both the cover and the music present a mythological realm of contrasts, a balance of forces. The beautiful inverts into the grotesque, its monstrous opposite. The music is alternatively beastly and gentle, subterranean and ethereal. The record oscillates between ferocious funk, futuristic fusion, and serene contemplation. But Live-Evil also subverts these binaries by combining them. The live and the artificial are integrated into new forms of recorded sound.
Travel takes imaginary places and real places to create fusions of fantasy and fact. My memories of driving across America are filtered through my present state, creating a synthesis of lived experience and romantic visions of another time in my life. The balance of these forces of memory create my sense of America in ways that parallel the way I hear a balance of the composed and the improvised in Live-Evil. Many privilege the raw excitement and ephemeral qualities of live music and the pure record of the unique event over a crafted studio album. Teo Macero and Miles Davis seem to be seeking a new ways to think through this live/studio distinction, and to me their attempt resulted in a sleight of hand (a sleight of ear?) that presents the illusion of the live through the edited.
As with the yin-yang symbol, contrast provides the forward motion to life, pushing us onward through the cyclical journey of time. The music of Live-Evil is full of forward motion, full of contrasting sounds and moods, and this forward motion will always remind me of road trips. Some searching quality of the music offers parallels to my own search, my own private desire for balance between the beautiful and the grotesque, the spontaneous and the arranged. Whether driving down a desert highway or travelling along corridors of sound while listening to this album, Live-Evil continues to inspire me to seek some elusive balance between the real and the imaginary.
Sean Steele is a PhD Candidate in the Humanities at York University in Toronto. He holds an MA in the Humanities from York University, a BA in Philosophy and History from Concordia University in Montreal, and a diploma in music (jazz studies) from VIU (Vancouver Island University) in Nanaimo, BC. Sean's dissertation explores intersections between popular music, religion and culture, with a focus on popular music performance events as sites of secular forms of the sacred. Sean is also a musician and a writer. He performs in the rock band Zuffalo and records his own music under the name Mareotis. His scholarly writing has appeared in The Journal for Unschooling and Alternative Education, Rock Music Studies, The Journal for the Academic Study of Religion, and online through the International Association for the Study of Popular Music, including a previous auto-musicology. His poetry has appeared in the Toronto literary publication Sewer Lid.