Consumer Guide Album

Miles Davis: Panthalassa: The Music of Miles Davis 1969-1974 [Columbia, 1998]
Tapes of these Bill Laswell remixes have been around almost a year, and for the longest time I didn't get the point. When the original albums were edited down for release by Teo Macero, that was Davis's choice; alive, he was free to object should Macero's forays into formlessness strike him as too discursive, or too commercial. Anyway, learning to distinguish among the author-authorized variants was tricky enough. Hand them over to the ambient-techno brigade and the tide would never stop rising. But one night I listened with a first timer and got the message. Metastructures condensed, themes highlighted, beats punched up by a master tinkerer who's loved them forever, the transcendent buzz of electric Miles nevertheless remains undulant, unpredictable, perverse--and so relaxed about getting where it's not actually going that newcomers will find it hard to imagine how much more unhurriedly it might arrive. For me this will get played like In a Silent Way and Jack Johnson before it. It's a passport to provisional utopia. A