Listen to
A Tribute to Jack Johnson and hear, like, six people tear s
hit up, sometimes at the same time. “Right Off” was supposedly an accident (a jam started by guitarist John McLaughlin, bassist Michael Henderson, and drummer Billy Cobham that Miles Davis suddenly rushed in the studio to play on), but what a gorgeous accident; Herbie f
ucking Hancock was just “in the building” and sort of walked in and sat down and just
destroyed it with the nastiest organ sound known to man.
Oops.
Okay, so yeah, this review--after only two sentences--has surely been the most hyperbolic and informal I’ve yet committed to paper (or computer, or whatever), but isn’t “Right Off” the most hyperbolic and informal music can get? For twenty-six minutes, Miles and co. run through the most complex, rugged solos of their career, all while creating a musical background that presents itself as both entrancing and surprisingly raucous.
“Yesternow,” for the most part, is considerably quieter and more interested in the spaces between notes (as much of
Kind of Blue was)--especially evident not only in its spare beginning section but also in its sample of 1969’s
In a Silent Way, an album that could be considered “ambient jazz,” a little more than halfway through. In its own way, though, “Yesternow” is just as blissfully ridiculous as the preceding track, with the band doing as much as it can with, say, a James Brown bassline, or a funk guitar riff. On
A Tribute to Jack Johnson, we see this happen over and over again: the band takes small amounts of something, and turns them into overwhelmingly large amounts of
everything. And, of course, when the band wreck it like they do here, this vast “everything” sounds pretty f
ucking awesome.
