Here, today, we return to the book of fusion. We return to Miles Davis and the words that he wrote on the mountainside—how they told of a world without skin, a world sun-bruised, its bedrock rippling in rhythmic, red beats. A world whose dirt is made from the juiced human collective!
We return not to reiterate these inborn certainties, but to examine how they distort with changing time and context. Perhaps they dilate beneath the microscope. Perhaps they wriggle. Perhaps they assume our future forms. This is the drama of analysis.
Big Fun is a record from 1974 collecting side-long tributes to the Sun God that didn’t fit among Bitches Brew‘s howling sacrifices. They gave in too easily. Stole the fun and meaning from our dark ritual because they too closely resembled our own devotion to the hungry sky.
So we held them in, like air, or a knife. We handed them to Teo Macero so he could maybe alter them back into candidates for sacrifice. But to no avail. They grew more devoted than us, and we are fucking devoted. Our love is an awesome love. But to hear these cast-offs was to look into a mirror full of light.
Finally, we released them. We released them not realizing that, prior to release, they stole our bitching sitar.
We redden when it carves its humming path through these tracks.
Now, our justification! Examples of why this music had to be set free to scratch out a wild space of its own!: Side three, “Go Ahead John,” features the glitched drumming of Jack DeJohnette, who never feels obligated to either side of the stereo spectrum. His movements are free, sudden, awkward, disorienting—what happens when stereo-panning is left to the discretion of cymbals. Then guitarist John McLaughlin comes in as he will, like a locust on fire come to plague our oppressors, but filtered through the same effects as DeJohnette’s drumming, an interrupted object of fury at the whim of windfall.
You see why we had to do what we had to do.
MILES DAVIS: “LONELY FIRE”
But let us, for the moment, quit our narrative—from-here-on-out it is diversionary and induces boredom even among the converted—to focus in on “Lonely Fire.” Though bearing similar length to its brothers, it is more meditative, perhaps in reaction to “Go Ahead John” and its eyes that dart with a methamphetamine pulse. Though languid, it is still the funk—that is what Miles is all about in these days of fused glory, how much the soul can distort if it rides on an endless backbeat into the heart of the sun. But it’s the funk stretched and reclined on a plane. (“Lie” is the word. The funk lies. “Lay” is not the word, unless the funk “lays” you down with its attack. We are open to this possibility.) It is a very patient funk; it is a funk maybe waiting for the next calculated star move. The groove it gains in the last ten minutes is slight, but subsequent listens reveal it to have been there the whole time, pulsing beneath the skin. “Lonely Fire” knew all along, but it kept this knowledge from us. Were we immediately cognizant of its intent, we would drink its particular light with big and knowing gulps instead of being suddenly stuffed full with divine grace.
So it unfolds, and unfolds. It unfolds on its big hurting legs that throb like light through passing trees. It tears at its pained body in large ambient strips, built from Joe Zawinul’s and Chick Corea’s keyboards that are transparent and horrifying, like ghosts, Davis’ and Wayne Shoter’s slow sawing in, plus the good work of Khalil Balakrishna and Airto Moreira who have taken our sitar and tambura but have made trembling clouds with them. Finally, at the eleven minute mark, “Lonely Fire” has dug through enough muscle and bone to reach its heart. Which, somehow, still thumps with delight.
Often fusion is discussed in direct relation to the critical barbs it endured, mostly high whines over its diversions from traditional jazz. We here at (desperation + noise) value your time. We know their are other adjective-stuffed blogs you could choose, and we appreciate that you have chosen to occupy our underground bunker for the time being, at least until the bombs stop dropping. We are, regardless, going to waste your time now with a paragraph about the perceived intentions of jazz fusion and how this song is an embodiment of the wild hope inherent.
Fusion is a simultaneous rejection and acceptance. It rejects jazz’s classically defined lines (though it never had any; this is what happens when you let historians fuck up music) and accepts rock’s pretty-goddamn-apparent alignment with jazz (they both embrace improvisation, rock is just more private about it; as they evolved, the both of them decided they wanted to kill you, the listener). Fusion says, “Fuck history,” all the while acknowledging that we are in its thrall. In this way it is totally punk fucking rock. (We at (desperation + noise) say this about everything we love. And we believe it. We are fools.)
So too with “Lonely Fire” and this belabored body metaphor which maybe does not merit a few more sentences, but you know how we do. The long jam acknowledges the inevitable pain of living in bodies with nerves and senses and desires for oblivion, but does so knowing of the incredible bright thing at our centers. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
THE NOTORIOUS B.I.G.: “SUICIDAL THOUGHTS”
Three seconds of “Lonely Fire”‘s original 1,280 serve as the backing for the two minutes of The Notorious B.I.G.’s “Suicidal Thoughts.” No. Wait. Stop that train. I want to get off.
There’s, like, only a few icicles of keyboard and a sitar strum intact. There is none of the fire or hope that inform the original. Alien drums come in through a thick haze, courtesy of producer Lord Finesse. Over this, Biggie confirms his intent to quit even the heart’s incessant movement forward, completely rejecting what we have established as promising on a basic level. And then there’s Sean “Puffy” Combs, at the other end of Biggie’s proposed phone call, whose protests grow new awful limbs in light of how he has since made Biggie’s corpse dance for money; Sean “Puffy” Combs, who fails to stop Biggie (probably because he, Puffy, is a failure), whose presence injects the proceedings with some pretty inane and obstructive melodrama, but it’s comforting that someone besides us is aware of Biggie’s state, even though that someone is a complete dick.
(We have now gone out of our way to insult Puffy. Sorry, Puffy. You produced some pretty good tracks in the early-to-mid-’90s.)
The reasons to kill yourself, according to The Notorious B.I.G.: Loving your transgressions, though they have destroyed everything else you love; “All my life I been considered as the worst / Lyin’ to my mother, even stealin’ out her purse / Crime after crime, from drugs to extortion / I know my mother wished she got a fuckin’ abortion.” There is no light here. Biggie has so driven himself toward oblivion that his light inherent has winked forever into the black. These are deteriorated and desperate conditions in which to experience “Lonely Fire.”
What I fear is that they might bear more truth.
Tags: Big Fun, fusion, Jazz, jazz fusion, Lonely Fire, Miles Davis, Ready to Die, Sean "Puffy" Combs, Suicidal Thoughts, The Notorious B.I.G.
