When Miles Davis attended a White House dinner in 1987, he was asked what he had done to deserve to be there. No modest man, Davis, he responded “Well, I’ve changed music five or six times.”
Is it bragging when it’s absolutely true? In this recent Spotify playlist, Steve Henry takes on the Miles Davis discography in roughly a chronological order, a stunning 569 songs and 65 hours of music. That makes that, what, over 90 tracks per revolution in music?

Technically, Davis’ first recorded appearance was as a member of Charlie Parker’s quintet in 1944, and his first as a leader was a 1946 78rpm recording of “Milestones” on the Savoy label. But this playlist starts with the 1951 Prestige album The New Sounds (which later made up the first side of Conception). By this time, Davis had taken the jaunty bebop of mentor and idol Parker and helped create a more relaxed style, a “cool” jazz that would come to dominate the 1950s. Privately he swung between extremes: a health nut who got into boxing, or a heroin addict and hustler/pimp, and he would oscillate between health and illness for the rest of his life.

During the 1950s however, he also created some of his most stunning classics, first for Prestige and Blue Note, where he developed the style to be known as “hard bop; then for Columbia, a label relationship that would result in some of his most revolutionary music. (Note: to get out of his Prestige contract that wanted four more albums out of him, Davis and his Quintet booked two session dates and recorded four albums worth of material, the Cookin’ Relaxin’ Workin’ and Steamin’ albums that in no way sounds like an obligation.)

At Columbia, Davis made history with 1959’s Kind of Blue, considered by many as one of the greatest jazz albums of all time, along with his collaborations with arranger Gil Evans (Sketches of Spain, Porgy and Bess, Miles Ahead). After a lull in the mid-‘60s where the music press expected either a resurgence or a tragic end, Davis returned with second quintet (Wayne Shorter, Herbie Hancock, Ron Carter, Tony Williams) for another run of albums in his then “time, no changes” free jazz style, including Miles Smiles, Sorcerer, and Filles de Kilimanjaro.

But none of those prepared anybody for the giant leap beyond jazz itself into proto-ambient with In a Silent Way and the menacing misterioso-funk of Bitches Brew of 1970. Davis had watched rock and funk go from teenager pop music at the beginning of the decade to literally changing the world. He responded by creating one of the densest, weirdest albums which both owed some of its sound to rock and at the same time refuted almost everything about the genre (as well as the history of jazz). He was 44 years old.

His band members went on to shape jazz in the ‘70s: Wayne Shorter and Joe Zawinul formed Weather Report; John McLaughlin formed the Mahavishnu Orchestra; Herbie Hancock, although already established as a solo artist, brought forth the Headhunters album; Chick Corea helped form Return to Forever.

As for Davis, he delved deeper into funk and fusion with a series of albums, including On the Corner, that would go unappreciated at the time, but are now seen as influential in the world of hip hop and beyond. By the ‘80s, after a few years where he just disappeared into reclusion, he returned with some final albums that are all over the map: covering pop hits by Cyndi Lauper and Michael Jackson much in the same way that Coltrane covered The Sound of Music; experimental soundtracks; and experimenting with loops, sequencers, beats, and hip hop. Having struggled with illness and addiction all his life, he passed away at 65 years old in 1991, leaving behind this stunning discography, still offering up surprises to those looking to explore his legacy.

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Ted Mills is a freelance writer on the arts who currently hosts the artist interview-based FunkZone Podcast and is the producer of KCRW's Curious Coast. You can also follow him on Twitter at @tedmills, read his other arts writing at tedmills.com and/or watch his films here.

When Wendy Carlos released Switched-On Bach in 1968, her “greatest hits” compilation of the Baroque composer’s music, played entirely on the Moog analog synthesizer, the album became an immediate hit with both classical and pop audiences. Not only was it “acclaimed as real music by musicians and the listening public alike,” as Bob Moog himself has written, but “as a result, the Moog Synthesizer was suddenly accepted with open arms by the music business community.” There’s some exaggeration here. Stars like the Doors, the Monkees, and the Byrds had already recorded with Moogs the year before. And some classical purists (and classical Luddites) did not, in fact, hail Switched-On Bach as “real music.”

But on the whole, Carlos’s innovative demonstration of the electronic instrument’s capabilities (and her own) marks a milestone in music history as the first classical album to go Platinum, and as the first introduction of both Baroque music and the Moog synthesizer to millions of people unfamiliar with either.

Were it not for Carlos’s “use of the Moog’s oscillations, squeaks, drones, chirps, and other sounds,” as Bruce Eder writes at Allmusic, it’s unlikely we would have the video clip above, of Leonard Bernstein giving his own demonstration of the Moog (dig his hip "HAL" reference from the prior year’s 2001: A Space Odyssey), during one of his popular televised “Young People’s Concerts.”

Having just begun moving out of the studio, the Moog was still a collection of modular boxes and patch cables—an engineer’s instrument—and it takes four men to wheel it out on stage. (The easily portable, self-contained Minimoog wouldn’t appear until 1970.) Most people had no idea what a Moog actually looked like. But, its forbidding appearance aside, the sounds of the Moog were everywhere.

Bernstein mentions Carlos, and those stuffy purists, and makes a few more sci-fi jokes, then, instead of sitting at the keyboard, hits play on a reel-to-reel tape recorder. This pre-recorded version of Bach’s “Little Fugue in G” was actually arranged by Walter Sear (sample Carlos’s version here), and the recording lacks some of the panache of Carlos’s playing while the tinny playback system makes it sound like 8-bit video game music. But for this audience, the musical wizardly was still decidedly fresh.

The choice of Bach as Moog material was not just a matter of taste—his music was uniquely suited for Moog adaptation. As Carlos explains, “it was contrapuntal (not chords but musical lines, like the Moog produced), it used clean, Baroque lines, not demanding great ‘expressivo’ (a weakness in the Moog at the time), and it was neutral as to orchestration.” The Moog could also, it seems, make Bach’s fugues fly at almost superhuman speeds. Hear the “Little Fugue” played at a much more stately tempo, on a traditional pipe organ, further up, and hear it break into a run in the majestic performance just above.

Organs and harpsichords, strings and horns, these are still of course the instruments we think of when we think of Bach. Despite Carlos’s inventive foray—and its follow-up, The Well-Tempered Synthesizer—the synthesizer did not radicalize the classical music world, though its avant-garde offspring made much use of it. But it sure changed the sound of pop music, and wowed the kids who saw Bernstein’s program, some of whom may have gone on to popularize both electronic instruments and classical themes in prog-rock, disco, and yes, even video game music. See the Moog segment in the context of the full, one-hour “Young People’s Concert” here.

via Synthtopia

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

When punk rock began to wend its way out of the three-chord guitar attack and into a new generation of mannerisms, it tended to be bass players who led the way. Joy Division’s Peter Hook, Public Image Ltd's Jah Wobble, The Cure’s Simon Gallup, Bauhaus’s David J. With their moody takes on dub reggae, chord-driven melodicism, and lead lines on the upper frets, these were innovative players, but they still embraced the relative simplicity of punk at their core. Across the pond, then across the continent, however, in Southern California, punk bass took a much more animated, virtuosic character, thanks to jazz and funk-inspired legends like Minutemen’s Mike Watt and the Red Hot Chili Peppers' Flea, who has become, since his early 80s beginnings one of the most famous rock musicians in the world for his speed and unparalleled technique.

The shirtless wonder, who comes across both onstage and off as incredibly gregarious, yet humble, was once voted by Rolling Stone readers as the second best bassist of all time, and it’s not hard to see why, for example, in the mind-blowing video just above. But it is hard to see how. How does he do it? And what exactly is “it,” that incomparable Flea style? Where did it come from?

The Polyphonic video at the top breaks it down for us, the combination of funk slapping and popping and punk speed and aggression, combined with a melodicism Flea developed as a counterpoint to John Frusciante’s rhythmic guitar lines. Flea’s incredibly detailed attacks stand out for their novelty and precision, but it’s his ear for melody that makes his playing so distinctively musical, even when pared down and slowed down in RHCP’s ballads.

Some bassists weave lines around guitars and vocals, some mostly synchronize with the drummer’s kicks and hits—Flea does both, shifting from style to style within songs, and sometimes sounding like he’s playing two basses at once. His syncopated slap bass hits, courtesy of Sly Stone’s Larry Graham, create a secondary backbeat slightly ahead or behind Chad Smith’s drumming; his use of strummed chords, wild leaps around the neck, and beautifully melodic voicing make his bass playing an essential element of every song, rather than a just a low-end harmonic underpinning for more noticeable instrumentation. Funk music has always been bass-driven, and the Chili Peppers' funkiest tracks, and most excellent covers, follow the tradition. But in rock the bass can feel “like an afterthought.”

In Flea’s more than capable hands, a simple rock bass riff, as in “Snow,” just above, can suddenly become a thing of wonder (check it out at 1:51), even on its own and unaccompanied. Perhaps no bassist since Paul McCartney or John Paul Jones has done as much to turn rock bass into a lead instrument or has written as many memorable bass lines, only Flea can play them ten times faster while leaping several feet in the air. His “astounding instrumentalism” has always been amazing to behold, and not easy to imitate, to say the least. But why try? Bass players can learn a lot from watching Flea and incorporating his expressive techniques into their repertoire. But even Flea himself, perhaps the most recognizable bass player in rock, understands the instrument first and foremost as a supporting player. His best advice? Play in the “spirit of givingness,” as he says in his video lesson below, and listen to the subtleties of the other musicians’ playing. "You want to make everyone else sound good." Hey, if it's good enough for Flea....

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