The new Miles Davis box set, The Cellar Door Sessions 1970, is very good. It’s a six-CD set of the live sessions from which were drawn Live/Evil, in my mind easily the best electric Miles album.

As the Amazon review (written by Dallas’ own Robert Wilonsky) puts it: “This is where Miles Davis turned funk into jazz, rock into soul, and chaos into Beauty…He rocked harder than Sly, got funkier than J.B., and turned jazz inside out, slicing the music open till blood spilled on to the floor.”

I got turned onto that album around 1994, when I was roommates with L. — probably the smartest guy I’ve ever met, despite his copious appetite for illegal substances. He’s now a big-time physicist who studies things like “injection and transport of interstellar pickup ions in the solar wind” and “space plasma particle instrumentation including time-of-flight spectrometers and ion optics.” He’s the mac-daddy.

20 January 2006

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