An Appreciation of “Live-Evil” by Miles Davis
Like other musical genres in 1971, jazz was going through changes. The stakes were unusually high. Many jazz lovers, the people who adored Miles Davis’s Kind of Blue (1959), listened with disappointment or even horror as jazz deconstructed itself throughout the ’60s into freer forms, or no forms at all. Melody collapsed into uncontrolled screeching. In the late ’60s, rock seemed to be consuming everything in its path and, while jazz was winning a new generation of young listeners, it was also merging with all the things that many jazz fans tried specifically to avoid. Free jazz seemed to have said all it could say in the late works of John Coltrane, and his death in 1967 left the avant-garde without a clear direction forward (insofar as direction was even relevant).
Of course, it is illusory to speak of jazz as a monolithic genre that moves in only one direction at a time (Paul Winter’s Icarus and Carla Bley’s Escalator Over the Hill also date from 1971). Still, in times of transition, jazz listeners instinctively looked to Miles Davis. In 1971, he definitively answered the question of whether the challenging jazz-rock gumbo Bitches Brew (1969), the biggest selling jazz album in history up to then, was a fluke or a harbinger of things to come. Davis saw his own bet, and he raised it by adding Sly Stone and Jimi Hendrix to the pot. If jazz-rock fusion was baptized in 1969, it was confirmed in 1971, when its mission began in earnest. On “Gemini/Double Image,” guitarist John McLaughlin starts so strong it’s as if he is throwing down a gauntlet to jazz fans. This is flat-out rock. In addition, Billy Cobham and bassist Dave Holland lay down a strange, off-kilter rhythm behind McLaughlin — it sounds like drunk Monk and it’s in no particular hurry to get anywhere. The track is a little disturbing, even now. In 1971, it was the sound of the floor falling down and the ceiling rising up.
Words are treated as mirror images: the title is Live-Evil, and some tracks are named “Selim” (Miles) and “Sivad” (Davis). “That reversal was the concept of the album: good and bad, light and dark, funky and abstract, birth and death,” Davis writes in his autobiography. The front album cover (by Mati Klarwein, who also did Bitches Brew) is Life with a fertile Mother Africa: powerful, serene, and endlessly mysterious. The back cover is an equally fertile Evil with an unforgettable nightmarish white monstrosity, a repulsive and unnatural reptilian fusion of Marie Antoinette and J. Edgar Hoover. The music delivers on the concept of fused contrasts, and it frustrates generalizations. It’s at turns aggressive and meditative, funky and delicate, linear and broadly atmospheric, embedded in the ghetto streets and floating over a scorched post-apocalyptic desert.
The music was recorded live in December 1970 over four nights at the Washington, DC, club Cellar Door, and producer Teo Macero mixed in studio material recorded in February and June 1971. Live albums hold a special place in jazz, but Macero’s heavy editing replaced the convention of the live album as a historical document with the vision of the live album as a kind of hallucinatory dreamscape blurring distinctions between time and place. Even if you were there, you aren’t there now; and even if you’re listening to it now, it takes you somewhere far away.
