After the release of Bitch­es Brew in 1970, Colum­bia Records pushed Miles Davis to play a series of dates at the Fill­more West and East sup­port­ing major rock bands like Neil Young and Crazy Horse, the Grate­ful Dead, and the Steve Miller Band. Miles “went nuts,” Columbia’s Clive Davis lat­er remem­bered. “He told me he had no inter­est in play­ing for ‘those fuck­ing long-haired kids.’”

The reac­tion does not reflect Miles’ atti­tude toward all the music enjoyed by long-haired kids, especially—it should go with­out saying—the psych rock he embraced and trans­formed in the ear­ly sev­en­ties. Miles admired a hand­ful of rock musi­cians, and none more so than Jimi Hen­drix, whom he dis­cov­ered, notes the short excerpt from The Miles Davis Sto­ry above, through gui­tarist John McLaugh­lin.

As McLaugh­lin tells it, Davis was dumb­found­ed when he first saw Hen­drix play on film in D.A. Pennebaker’s doc­u­men­tary Mon­terey Pop. “As the 70s dawned,” Tim Cum­ming writes at The Guardian, Hen­drix had his Band of Gyp­sys, and Davis was in the audi­ence for their leg­endary new-year set at Fill­more East, mar­veling at Machine Gun and the pow­er­ful drum­ming of Bud­dy Miles.”

Miles’ appre­ci­a­tion of Hen­drix, James Brown, and Sly Stone birthed the album Jack John­son in 1971, a “con­cen­trat­ed take on rock and funk that defies cat­e­go­riza­tion.” As you can hear in “Right Off, Pt. 1” above, it was also a return to the blues, a lega­cy he shared with Hen­drix. “Jimi… came from the blues, like me,” Davis wrote in his auto­bi­og­ra­phy. “We under­stood each oth­er right away because of that. He was a great blues gui­tarist.”

In the year before Hendrix’s death, the two jammed at Davis’ house and planned to record an album, though it nev­er came to pass. The idea remains an impos­si­bly com­pelling musi­cal what-if. (So does the time Hen­drix invit­ed Paul McCart­ney to cre­ate a super group with Miles Davis.) “Some things are sim­ply beyond con­cep­tion,” writes Kol­lib­ri Terre Son­nen­blume in an appre­ci­a­tion of Live-Evil, Miles’ most direct chan­nel­ing of Hen­drix. As Davis him­self lat­er wrote, “By now I was using the wah-wah on my trum­pet all the time so I could get clos­er to that voice Jimi had when he used a wah-wah on his gui­tar.”

Davis “lift­ed musi­cal ele­ments from Hendrix’s oeu­vre,” notes Son­nen­blume, point­ing out the many spe­cif­ic ref­er­ences through­out the album’s four live and four stu­dio tracks. The first song on the album, “Sivad,” kicks things off with an aggres­sive solo almost right off the mark:

First-time lis­ten­ers often mis­tak­en­ly assume they are hear­ing a gui­tar com­ing in at the 49 sec­ond mark, but they’re wrong. That squeal­ing, dis­tort­ed sound, chat­ter­ing with rabid feroc­i­ty, lung­ing like a rabid dog and cir­cling like a dervish – com­plete with what sounds for all the world like a pick-glis­san­do – is com­ing out of Davis’ horn, not McLaughlin’s gui­tar. 

Hendrix’s death upset Miles deeply. “He was so young and had so much ahead of him,” he wrote. It’s hard even to imag­ine what might have lay ahead for both of them in the stu­dio, but Davis’ take on Jim­i’s musi­cal per­son­al­i­ty might give us a good idea of where they were headed—into ter­ri­to­ry far beyond the blues, jazz, rock, world-funk, and any oth­er genre label you might care to name.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

In 1969 Telegram, Jimi Hen­drix Invites Paul McCart­ney to Join a Super Group with Miles Davis

Lis­ten to The Night When Miles Davis Opened for the Grate­ful Dead in 1970

When Jazz Leg­end Ornette Cole­man Joined the Grate­ful Dead Onstage for Some Epic Impro­vi­sa­tion­al Jams: Hear a 1993 Record­ing

Jimi Hen­drix Arrives in Lon­don in 1966, Asks to Get Onstage with Cream, and Blows Eric Clap­ton Away: “You Nev­er Told Me He Was That F‑ing Good”

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

Jazz instru­men­tal­ists who “play the changes” have learned to make impro­vi­sa­tion look easy. In live per­for­mance, the audi­ence shouldn’t see the years of study and prac­tice behind what Willie Thomas calls at Jazz Every­one, “a sys­tem that com­bines the basic jazz lan­guage with the impor­tant music the­o­ry con­cepts” and at the same time “allows a play­er to focus on how the music fits the tune and not the chord sym­bols and scales that often incum­ber per­for­mance.”

That may seem like a wordy expla­na­tion, but Thomas is care­ful to expli­cate the cliché “play the changes” for max­i­mum mean­ing, draw­ing on over forty years of expe­ri­ence him­self learn­ing the prin­ci­ple as a “use­ful tool for self expres­sion through jazz music.” The idea of play­ing to the tune may seem fun­da­men­tal­ly obvi­ous, but the more one devel­ops as a stu­dent, the far­ther away one can get from lived expe­ri­ence.

How might musi­cians apply ideals about ensem­ble play­ing to actu­al ensem­ble play­ing? For answers to this ques­tion, we might turn to jazz leg­end Chick Corea, mem­ber of Miles Davis’s band dur­ing the path­break­ing In a Silent Way and Bitch­es Brew ses­sions; play­er in and leader of more Gram­my-win­ning ensem­bles than per­haps any­one else (he’s col­lect­ed 23 awards so far); and “one of the jazz world’s most thought­ful and lucid cham­pi­ons.”

This descrip­tion comes from a Chris­t­ian Sci­ence Mon­i­tor write-up of Corea’s appear­ance in a two-hour Q&A ses­sion at Berklee Col­lege of Music in 1985, where the pianist and jazz fusion key­board mas­ter had stu­dents pick up the typed hand­out above at the door. He begins with the sim­plest, but most impor­tant advice, “Play only what you hear,” then elab­o­rates in 16 rules which you can read in full below.

Corea’s pri­ma­ry metaphor is architectural—performance, he says, is about cre­at­ing spaces and taste­ful­ly fill­ing them. Doing this well requires seri­ous study and prac­tice. Then it requires remem­ber­ing some basic rules, or Chick Corea’s “Cheap But Good Advice for Play­ing Music in a Group.” My favorite: “always release what­ev­er ten­sion you cre­ate.” Like much of you we find here, it’s good all-around advice for every endeav­or.

1. Play only what you hear.
2. If you don’t hear any­thing, don’t play any­thing.
3. Don’t let your fin­gers and limbs just wander—place these inten­tion­al­ly.
4. Don’t impro­vise on endlessly—play some­thing with inten­tion, devel­op it or not, but then end off, take a break.
5. Leave space—create space—intentionally cre­ate places where you don’t play.
6. Make your sound blend. Lis­ten to your sound and adjust it to the rest of the band and the room.
7. If you play more than one instru­ment at a time—like a drum kit or mul­ti­ple keyboards—make sure that they are bal­anced with one anoth­er.
8. Don’t make any of your music mechan­i­cal­ly or just through pat­terns of habit. Cre­ate each sound, phrase, and piece with choice—deliberately.
9. Guide your choice of what to play by what you like—not by what some­one else will think.
10. Use con­trast and bal­ance the ele­ments: high/low, fast/slow, loud/soft, tense/relaxed, dense/sparse.
11. Play to make the oth­er musi­cians sound good. Play things that will make the over­all music sound good.
12. Play with a relaxed body. Always release what­ev­er ten­sion you cre­ate.
13. Cre­ate space—begin, devel­op, and end phras­es with inten­tion.
14. Nev­er beat or pound your instrument—play it eas­i­ly and grace­ful­ly.
15. Cre­ate space—then place some­thing in it.
16. Use mim­ic­ry sparsely—mostly cre­ate phras­es that con­trast with and devel­op the phras­es of the oth­er play­ers.

via Nate Chi­nen

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Thelo­nious Monk’s 25 Tips for Musi­cians (1960)

Wyn­ton Marsalis Gives 12 Tips on How to Prac­tice: For Musi­cians, Ath­letes, or Any­one Who Wants to Learn Some­thing New

John Coltrane Draws a Pic­ture Illus­trat­ing the Math­e­mat­ics of Music

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness