The Complete on the Corner Sessions

At some point when making your way through the six discs of The Complete On The Corner Sessions, maybe even as early as during the languid funk of disc two’s 17-minute long “Turnaround,” even the most die-hard electric Miles fan might find himself asking “Isn’t this all a little much?”

The ostensible answer is “Well, yeah,” but take a step back, consider the time-span this set covers, and a more level head will prevail.

This set is the culmination of Columbia’s “Miles’ metal-box” releases, the final entry in an impressive and exhausting body of work from one of the greatest American musicians of the 20th century. It also functions as a close to Miles’ studio-recording career before he went into retirement for six years, mainly due to illness and rumored addictions but also presumably in part because he had taken this whacked-out electro funk-rock just about as far as he could.

The title of the set is misleading, as everything that appeared on the original On The Corner album was recorded in just two sessions in early June of 1972, and only disc one contains outtakes from those sessions. Disc six is basically a re-mastered version of OTC, which leaves four discs worth of material representing 12 recording sessions stretching between August 1972 and May 1975, much of it previously released on the albums Big Fun and Get Up With It. That’s a lot of time and sessions to cover, especially considering the previous electric Miles box sets each contain less than a year’s worth of music, and the six CDs that make up the Cellar Door box set covers a mere four nights in 1970. What’s linking all of the material here, and why it actually is appropriate that it is lumped together in one set, is a consistency in the fierceness and boldness with which Miles and his rotating group of musicians attacked these improvisatory rock/funk jam sessions.

Miles got a lot of flack from jazz-heads at the time OTC came out, what with its sitars and wah-wah pedals and congas. And though decades later, people huff and puff about how square those critics were, the criticism was understandable: This really isn’t jazz. It’s not exactly rock either. I wouldn’t even call it fusion. It is its own thing, and 35 years later, this music remains scorching. Rarely has a group of musicians with this level of musicianship  — Chic Corea, John McLaughlin, Herbie Hancock and Jack DeJohnette are just a few of the two dozen players here — performed with such abandon and freedom as on the two sessions that make up the original OTC.

Things loosen up even more when the big names mentioned above split to make room for guys even further out on the fringes of jazz, and by the time we get to the end of the set, three years later, only bassist Michael Henderson (without whom this music would have been entirely different and entirely less funky) and Miles remain from the original sessions.

There is a huge audible change in the music when Chicago guitarist Pete Cosey shows up midway through disc three, in July of 1973, doubling up the perfectly fine guitar Reggie Lewis had been playing for the past year. Cosey, a veteran of numerous Chess recordings and an untold number of raucous club dates, brought an even greater intensity to the proceedings, moving the band in a more rock direction with his rapid-fire Hendrix-esque squalling. By the summer of ’74, a third guitarist, Dominique Gaumont, had been added, resulting in tracks such as “What They Do,” perhaps the craziest, most psychedelic piece of music Miles ever recorded in a studio. And check out the Stockhausen cum Can, pure noise organ blurts Miles himself emits on that track.

These box sets are geared toward the completist (and some would say elitist — TCOTCS retails for $140!), and to be honest, as great as the bulk of this music is, the sets fairly reek of an obsessive/nerdy scholarship that takes a little bit of fun out of the whole thing. It might be cool, if one has the resources, to score the OTC box for under a hundred dollars on ebay and spend a solid weekend pouring over the accompanying 120-page book, checking personnel and studio dates as the tracks play, but it’s not the same as randomly coming across an obscure, weird looking record like Get Up With It (Miles looks awfully sketchy on the cover with those big-ass glasses) in a record or thrift store, dropping a few bucks on it, putting it on the turntable at home and hearing music that makes you think, “What the fuck is this?” Take a track like “He Loved Him Madly,” Miles’ tribute to Duke Ellington and the first song on Get Up With It (It takes up half of the fourth disc here). You have to strain to hear any Ellington in it, but what you will hear is one of the most maddeningly slow, creepy dirges you’re likely to ever encounter. This is also the track where Teo Macero’s brilliant edits are the most obvious, even audible, as the music crawls along at a glacial pace. It’s more than 30 minutes long, and the first time I listened to it, I turned it off because it wigged me out so bad. Nothing on Bitches’ Brew or On The Corner had prepared me for that music. You can’t really experience a song in that way when it’s contextualized and explained to death.

Few people are buying these boxes out of curiosity, the way they would a record, and back when much of Miles’ electric catalogue was only issued in Japan and hard to come by, there was a real sense of discovery and mystery in hearing those records without knowing exactly who was playing what and when each track was recorded. The original OTC didn’t even have personnel listed. Now this stuff’s been micromanaged and archived in museum-quality boxes. Perhaps all of this is a minor qualm, ultimately. Times change, as do tastes and formats.  What matters most is the music, and all the music here is good, if at times, repetitive. It’s well worth your money, or the risk you incur stealing it off the Internet (though OiNK just got shut down, so look out). It will last you a lifetime. If you get tired of listening to multiple takes of “On The Corner” or “Big Fun,” you can lay off for a few weeks or months and come back later to have your mind blown all over again. There really isn’t any other music out there quite like this. It’s a shame where it would go from here.