50 years later, On the Corner is still the future
The time-altering power of Miles Davis' vision of the future
Miles Davis’s album On the Corner celebrated its 50th anniversary earlier this week, and it still could have been released 50 years from today. Easily the most critically reviled album Miles had released at that point, and maybe the most critically reviled jazz album made by anyone in the pre-smooth jazz era, its now firmly secured legacy as yet another high water mark in a discography bursting with them reflects a greater shift in the jazz ecosystem. More and more, listeners are gravitating towards freakier, funkier, and/or more spiritual sounds in jazz. This is made clear by the resurgence of interest in Miles’ electric period as a whole - as well as fusion luminary Herbie Hancock’s Mwandishi trilogy, maybe the only records that can match those electric Miles albums in terms of far-outitude - and by which records are getting reissued, which ones are going for small fortunes on Discogs, which elderly statesman are still releasing music to a substantial audience today, and so on and so forth.
But On the Corner speaks to something much deeper than reissue labels and discogs discourse. On the Corner represents a master synthesis of sounds, some ancient, some new, many nonexistent until Miles and his band put them on tape, all handled with the compositional depth of a master musician. Miles’ band jams like Jimi Hendrix and Funkadelic, and grooves like James Brown and Sly & the Family Stone - if all four of them had been sucked into a black hole together. But the supersonic mass of this funk supernova Miles conjures up is composed with the virtuosity and attention to detail of Ellington or Stravinsky. Miles is the black hole at the center of this music. No matter how disparate the sound strata is - and CERTAINLY no matter how “not jazz” the end result is - no sounds escape Miles’ reach on this record, and none are immune to his craft. He could make it into whatever the fuck he wanted, and that’s what he did.
Much of the criticism surrounding On the Corner is the same that followed Miles everywhere in his electric period - specifically, that he was selling out to rock audiences. The criticism may have stuck to On the Corner particularly for a number of reasons. On the Corner wasn’t a rock album in the same sense that A Tribute to Jack Jonson and Bitches Brew were - if anything, it was a funk album (though, as I’ll get into later, Miles would disagree with that assessment), and to this day funk still doesn’t get the respect it deserves. Whereas rock had more than its share of savants by 72’ (not that it mattered to the jazz police), funk’s allegiance to the groove has always been mistaken by some for a lack of depth or meaning, or whatever. Another likely reason On the Corner built such an infamous reputation was that it didn’t sell shit. Two years earlier, Miles made the biggest album of his lifetime with Bitches Brew (Kind of Blue has since well exceeded it in sales, but Bitches Brew was his first gold record) - but whatever rock audience he gained with that album wasn’t there to help On the Corner cross over. Thus, the album became defined by the shellacking it took from jazz critics.
Proponents of the sell-out narrative can point to a number of quotes from Miles himself about his commercial aspirations. “It was with On the Corner and Big Fun that I really made an effort to get my music over to young Black people,” he said in his Autobiography. “They are the ones who buy records and come to concerts, and I had started thinking about building a new audience for the future.” Furthermore, in the liner notes for the box set of the complete sessions of the album, producer Bob Belden stated that “the original album was an effect. In essence, it’s compression in a narrow stereo field to make the music work on AM radio.” Miles, in retrospect, blamed the album’s commercial failure on Columbia not marketing the album to the young Black audience he was looking for, and instead marketing it to the traditional jazz snobs whose opinions Miles couldn’t have given less of a shit about.
But listening to On the Corner raises the question: how the fuck was this ever going to get played on the radio? The album certainly has the same sense of immediacy that all great funk has, but the music is as much of a disorienting flurry of sound as anything with its level of groove could be. The opening suite running from the title track through “Vote for Miles” absolutely pummels its blurting “ACK ACK-ACK-ACK ACK” wah-wah riff and simmering, snapping drum pattern into your skull. “Black Satin” is the track that probably works the best as a standalone song apart from the album, and it’s a boiling stew of loopy time signatures, slightly off percussion rhythms, and electro shock pedal bursts.
Miles’s effort to reach a young Black audience was also his most avant-garde album to date, and it’s obvious from listening to the album that he was taking in much more than just Hendrix, Sly and James Brown. Paul Buckmaster, who did the arrangements for Elton John’s “Tiny Dancer,” Harry Nilsson’s “Without You” and the Rolling Stones’ “Moonlight Mile” amongst others, played cello on the album (I’ve listened to this album more times than most and I cannot make out any cello for the life of me, but the credits say so), and he also introduced Miles to the work of Karlheinz Stockhausen. Miles stated in his Autobiography
What I was playing on On the Corner has no label, although people thought it was funk because they didn’t know what else to call it. It was actually a combination of some of the concepts of Paul Buckmaster, Sly Stone, James Brown, and Stockhausen, some of the concepts I had absorbed from Ornette’s music, as well as my own.
The influence of Stockhausen and Ornette doesn’t sound like any kind of ingredient for a ticket to the hit parade. But On the Corner’s hypothetical crossover appeal can’t be understood through metrics such as commercial sales or radio play. It’s possible that Miles was a big enough weirdo that he could have made On the Corner with cynically commercial intentions, or thought this warped vision of avant-garde freak funk would be the best way to fatten his pockets. But more likely is that he saw something unitarian in this music, a groove that could break through the class divides and genre purism that all too often govern the presentation of Black music.
As the “sellout” narrative fades, another familiar narrative emerged: that of the album that was too ahead of its time, something that people needed a few decades to understand. This is a friendlier narrative, but still insufficient in fully understanding On the Corner’s legacy. There’s some truth to it - obviously, it was hated at the time and has since proven to be influential. The roots of Black electronica can be heard everywhere on the album, which the late, great Greg Tate summed up by calling it “the first hip-hop/house/drum'n'bass/breakbeat album I'd ever heard.” The album’s always kind of sounded like slowed down drum ‘n’ bass to me, and when Timbaland put that literal idea into practice decades, he helped prove that utterly bugshit music made by Black artists could get played on the radio.
But On the Corner isn’t a record that was too ahead of its time that people subsequently caught up with, because it’s ahead of all time, the present included. It isn’t future music in the sense that it predicted the future, but more in the sense of what Sun Ra referred to as the “Alter Destiny.” In an interview with Thomas Bushmeat Stanley, Sun Ra said:
You have to use an equation and use the vice future, the alter future. You know, in the church they use the altar, a-l-t-a-r. You got to use a-l-t-e-r, alter; that means change. In other words, you substitute a future for the one you got. The one you’ve got ain’t no good. Pull it out. You put the vice future in there, like you put the vice president in there if the president fails. Well, you’ve got a vice future. The vice future is pure—you ain’t did nothing with it. But the future is based on the past. The vice future stands by itself; it has no past. It’s never been used.
Looking at the historical context surrounding On the Corner - Nixon’s election, the white backlash to the civil rights movement,COINTELPRO, the flow of drugs from the government into Black communities and the subsequent racist drug war it initiated - it’s safe to say that in ‘72, the future was in need of a substitute. In hindsight, 50 years later, this has been proven. Thomas Bushmeat Stanley described the Alter Destiny as, amongst other things, “a when that creates a where,” a future “antithetical to Manifest Destiny and American Exceptionalism,” and as “new human consciousness—a profoundly adaptive ecology of awareness that actualizes Justice and obviates Rape, War, Money, the Nation-State, and a host of other outdated and maladaptive practices.” In this sense, On the Corner renders the respectability politics used to police Black music - jazz in particular - and Blackness as a whole illegitimate. Though On the Corner is, in the most literal sense, part of the past, it still can be seen as part of the Alter Destiny because it’s never been used. Just as Sun Ra visited this planet, gave us his music and his philosophy and left, the music of On the Corner came to us once and remains truly singular.
One of Funkadelic’s best songs put the questions “who says a jazz band can’t play dance music, who says a rock band can’t play funk, who says a funk band can’t play rock?” over music that should make anyone who even considers those questions feel like a moron. Relatedly, On the Corner represents a shift in the reality of jazz, funk, and music as a whole, presenting a future free from notions of “accessible” or “inaccessible music,” “jazz” or “selling out,” “straight ahead” or “avant garde.” The future it presents is separate from our reality, but it’s still here, and it’s all happening on the corner.