Denying The Existence Of "Now"

Since the late 1950s, pop and rock producers have embraced technological advances virtually the minute they were available—indeed, some of them invented new recording methods along their way to the ideal sound. Overdubbing and editing became routine tools of the trade early on, and have never been abandoned. During the subsequent decades, though, the increased profile of rock criticism fueled a new self-consciousness among rock bands, which in turn spawned an ever-increasing dependence on technology—for awhile.

The pop music industry was unused to being the subject of serious pseudo-academic scrutiny as occurred in the pages of Rolling Stone, Creem, Crawdaddy and other journals. Flattered, many of the artists began to take themselves as seriously as the critics took them. This isn’t to suggest that bands in the late 1960s and early 1970s were in thrall to rock critics, or took their career guidance from them. (That wouldn’t happen until a few years later, when Jon Landau and Dave Marsh began the process of constructing Bruce Springsteen.) But as rock music expanded its sonic palette, critics embraced their efforts, placing albums like Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band and Pet Sounds into the pantheon they were assembling.

The honeymoon didn’t last long. In the 1970s, with the rise of the progressive rock movement and wildly popular arena-rock acts like Led Zeppelin and Black Sabbath, not to mention chart-topping bands like Fleetwood Mac and the Eagles, many critics began to turn against the very aesthetic concepts they’d espoused only a few years earlier. The prevailing line became that rock had grown soulless and bloated, that the music had lost touch with its populist roots. This conclusion was based more in critical solipsism than in accurate observation of the rock scene, since the very bands decried as elitist were the most popular. Still, it dovetailed with the rise of a small but highly publicized technological backlash, in the form of punk rock.

Punk bands took pride in sonic, lyrical and sartorial rawness, and began traveling backward, abandoning gadgetry as they went, in search of some romanticized, mythical “realness” supposedly missing from the more polished records being made by bigger acts. Most punk records were still made using overdubs and editing, of course (the guitars on Never Mind The Bollocks are practically Spectorian), but they didn’t use them as much as, say, the Eagles or Electric Light Orchestra.

The idea that a record should accurately document a musical performance seems rooted in a psychological need for honesty, and a corresponding suspicion of trickery on the part of pop performers. Of course, there was the common belief among jazz musicians that pop was a lesser form, something beneath them, but that was combined with a disdain for the “impure” method of recording with overdubs.

The jazz attitude is that performances laid live to tape are evidence that the musicians in question can play a song beautifully every time, and make it new and interesting every time, too. This is, of course, a myth; many jazz boxed sets are littered with flubbed takes and false starts. (Charlie Parker has an entire mini-discography of nothing but this sort of stuff.)

The flip side of this belief is the idea that jazz musicians who assemble their tracks from the best fragments after multiple incomplete takes, or—worse yet—the recording of individual instruments separately of one another, are somehow cheating. As if the process of making albums has an ethical dimension.

This idea holds no real sway in pop. Pop music is about the eternal Now. A record is not perceived as having any existence outside of itself. There is no larger context, only the gleaming moment. This is why pop’s ideal medium of transmission is the single. Even with singles making up a smaller and smaller chunk of overall record sales, they are, because of radio and MTV, still the way people hear pop music. Albums by pop artists are rarely, if ever, solid, coherent efforts from beginning to end. In the majority of cases, they feature three or four singles (or single-quality tracks), and six or eight clearly substandard, place holder songs padding out the CD to a releasable length.

Compilations are a far safer bet. The K-Tel company famously realized this in the 1970s, and the British have seemingly always known it. A series of pop compilations called Now That’s What I Call Music has, within the last few years, made a sizable impression on the US pop charts. Each volume collates the biggest pop singles of the months leading up to its release. To date, less than 20 American volumes have been released. In the UK, by contrast, the series is near 60 volumes deep.

In both US and UK, the series’ cover art reflects the pop worldview described above. The word “Now” is printed four or five times larger than the rest of the title put together, equaled in size only by the volume number. Thus the series asserts itself as a sequence of moments, a parade of nows: Now 1, Now 2, Now 50, etc. But even as it’s superceded by the next volume, each Now lingers, preserved in digital amber, an “eternal Now.” And if one had the whole series, and an MP3 player, simply pressing “shuffle” would amount to the creation of a time machine, rocketing the listener back and forth from the “now” that was five, or ten, years ago forward to the “now” of now, the compilation perhaps purchased that very week.

(Of course, the singles compiled on the Now discs are several months old by the time the CD hits stores—so even when the cover explicitly states it’s the sound of “now,” the listener is still playing catch-up. Or archiving. In pop, we are all librarians, whether we’re preserving yesterday or 1965.)

For even as pop is apparently about moments, each replacing the one before into the vastness of time, the pop audience reacts in a seemingly oppositional way. People buy singles and, years after their initial release, haul them out and play them, in fits of nostalgia for the time in their life when that song was new. Sometimes the point isn’t to conjure up a particular memory (a first kiss, a wedding, senior year of college), but to attempt the reclamation of the mindset—usually an imagined innocence—of a younger self.

Jazz does not hold the same sway over our memories. Something in it distances itself from the emotional territory pop stakes out in the mind. This is partly because of the relationship jazz has built up with its audience over the decades, in the post-rock ‘n’ roll era. With the rise of rock ‘n’ roll as the most popular music in America, jazz’s audience diminished. At the same time, jazz changed; it became less danceable, less a physical pleasure than an intellectual one. In this way, jazz separated itself from the pressures of existing in the Now. And yet, the tradition of one-take, real-time recording lingers.

Miles Davis’s albums from the late 1960s through the mid-1970s seemed to explicitly deny the existence of any “now,” at least as far as the recording process was concerned. He argued, through his work, that studio albums had no obligation to replicate real events—that they could be elaborate constructs, faithful only to their own internal logic. It was like the difference between landscape painting, or portraiture, and Abstract Expressionism. Miles felt no need to offer raw, or even slightly polished, reality. Why, when better, more vivid options were available?

This makes some of Miles’s reissue box sets, The Complete In A Silent Way Sessions and The Complete Bitches Brew Sessions in particular, problematic. Jazz boxes are traditionally organized in chronological fashion, with takes of a tune following one another—the master take usually comes first, followed by various alternate versions and, in some cases, fragments and false starts. Thus, it’s possible to assemble slightly different versions of albums, if the listener prefers, say, Take 11 of a piece to the Take 10 that might have been initially released.

Because of Miles and Teo’s working methods, though, this is impossible. There are no complete takes of “Pharaoh’s Dance” or “Bitches Brew.” Instead, there are tapes containing hours of loose, unstructured jams. From these, Macero culled illuminating fragments and spliced them together into suites of sound. Thus, the released version of Bitches Brew is simultaneously the only version and a false one. Davis and Macero have created a fictional Now, and declared it to be the only one.

Miles and Teo utterly abandoned the idea of “honesty” in recorded music. They chose to assert that the record was the record, a work unto itself, and if a listener felt like hearing interactive performances by a group of musicians, well, that’s what concerts were for.

It seems obvious that Miles’s studio albums between 1969 and 1972 were experiments. Some tracks were much more heavily edited than others, as the assembled musicians found their way into this new soundworld. The studio recordings on Live-Evil, for example, were released virtually without post-production fiddling. On the other hand, A Tribute To Jack Johnson was almost as heavily edited as the first disc of Bitches Brew.

At the same time, Miles was recording live albums, some of which were nearly as chopped-up as the studio records. Miles Davis At Fillmore was recorded over the course of four days in June 1970. Davis and Macero decided to devote one side of the double album to each of the four nights. In so doing, the producer made the choice to take highlights from the night’s sets, rather than whole tunes. So while some pieces were allowed to run nearly their full course, and one or two came close to the 10-minute mark, others were reduced to 90 second introductory phrases or vamps. And no effort was made to make the transitions smooth, subtle, or even particularly pleasing to the ear. Some seem to switch with simple tape-slice.

The live tracks on Live-Evil were also manipulated after the fact. A melodic fragment from the studio recording “Honky Tonk” is incorporated into the album’s opening medley, “Sivad,” and the double disc’s final track, “Inamorata,” is drowned out at the end by a wash of strings from some long-lost soundtrack album Teo pulled from the Columbia vaults, and a poem by Conrad Roberts. Neither added element has much of a place in the piece—the effect is much more disorienting than it is evocative.

But again, the aim seems to have been the subversion of reality. Macero’s goal was to disturb the listener. “Inamorata” is nearly 30 minutes long. By the time the strings and poetry come in, the music has grown quite involving. Thus, when the piece is rudely disrupted, the effect is rendered much more jarring because of the time-investment the listener has already put into the piece. It’s like having someone shake you awake in the middle of a particularly seductive and fascinating dream.

The same is true, on a smaller scale, of the tracks on At Fillmore. Just as you’re settling into the flow of the performance, it’s disrupted, quite suddenly. Even if each piece were brilliant and enjoyable on its own merits (and not all of them are), the transitions still come as a series of shocks. Listening to the record is like walking down a hallway and having unseen hands yank the carpet from beneath your feet at random intervals. It doesn’t even seem like enjoyment was the point—the disruption of that enjoyment was the point. At Fillmore was one of the trumpeter’s openly hostile albums, part of a set that included Black Beauty, Live-Evil and On The Corner, and to a substantially lesser degree In Concert: Live At Philharmonic Hall.

It’s worth noting that the work Teo Macero did in the studio with Miles Davis was not mirrored in his work with other Columbia artists. He was a house producer for the label, working with artists from Dave Brubeck and Thelonious Monk to Tony Bennett. But none of those artists’ albums sound like Bitches Brew or On The Corner. They’re straightforward jazz (or jazz-pop) records.

This indicates that, while Miles granted Teo a shocking degree of autonomy in the editing room (Macero claims that the In A Silent Way session was one of the only times Davis worked alongside him on the post production), the artistic impulses were decidedly the trumpeter’s own. Davis gave the raw material to Macero, and approved the final edits. But it was the creation of that raw material that was crucial.

To Davis, the electric sessions were an extension of the improvisatory process that created Kind Of Blue. On that record, though, he’d still been pursuing complete takes, in traditional jazz fashion. In the late 1960s, there was no attempt made to play a piece all the way through, for the simple reason that there was no piece until its components were assembled, after the fact, in the editing room.

Over time, the creative process, into which Miles and Teo had wandered more or less blind, evolved. They grew to understand the capabilities of technology (Macero, in fact, ordered machines custom-built to create effects he heard in his head and wanted to apply to the music), and the abilities of the assembled musicians, and the way those two factors could work together. They also felt their feet more and more as the years progressed. The 1969 sessions are raw, and more tentative than recordings from only a few months later, and music produced during Miles’s last studio dates before vanishing, are even more complex, but also more subtle and refined. By the time of “He Loved Him Madly,” in 1974, the illusions had become nearly seamless.