Agharta (album)

Agharta is a live double album by American jazz musician Miles Davis. It was recorded on the afternoon of February 1, 1975, at one of two concerts Davis performed at the Osaka Festival Hall in Japan; the evening show produced his 1976 live album Pangaea. He performed with his septet—flautist and saxophonist Sonny Fortune, bassist Michael Henderson, drummer Al Foster, percussionist James Mtume, guitarist Reggie Lucas, and Pete Cosey, who played guitar, synthesizer, and percussion.

Agharta was first released in Japan in August 1975 after Davis had retired. Its music eschews melody and harmony for a combination of riffs, crossing polyrhythms, and funk grooves for soloists to improvise throughout. Widely panned by contemporary music critics, the album has since received retrospective acclaim as an important and influential jazz-rock album. It was reissued by Columbia Records in January 1991. In 2009, Agharta was one of 52 albums by Davis that were remastered and released in mini-LP sleeves as a part of Sony Legacy's Miles Davis: The Complete Columbia Album Collection.

Background


Feeling that he was losing touch with audiences and listeners, Davis embarked on his first tour of Japan in 10 and a half years. Between January 22 and February 8, 1975, he played 14 concerts to capacity crowds in large-hall venues and earned enthusiastic reviews. Japanese critic Keizo Takada praised Davis' band as "magnificent and energetic", and said that he "must be the genius of managing men and bringing out their hidden talent. He played his music with his band just as Duke Ellington did with his orchestra." At the time of his February 1 concert at Osaka Festival Hall, Davis was experiencing severe pain from his left hip, which had been operated on almost 10 years earlier.

Davis performed two concerts at the hall on February 1, which were recorded and released as two double albums—Agharta was released in August 1975 in Japan and in 1976 in North America; Pangaea was released in Japan in 1976. The former was an afternoon show, and the latter was recorded in the evening.

Davis played both trumpet and organ, and led a septet that featured flautist and saxophonist Sonny Fortune, bassist Michael Henderson, drummer Al Foster, percussionist James Mtume, guitarist Reggie Lucas, and Pete Cosey, who played guitar, synthesizer, and percussion. Fortune played the samba theme on "Maiysha" with his flute and opened "Theme from Jack Johnson" on alto saxophone. The opening track "Prelude" was recorded over one and a half sides of the album. The titles "Interlude" and "Theme from Jack Johnson" are erroneously reversed on the disc label and liner notes of all editions of Agharta. The album's title is a reference to Agharta, a mythological subterranean utopia that acts as a spiritual source of power.

Composition
Agharta's music eschews melody and harmony, and is instead characterized by a combination of riffs, crossing polyrhythms, and funk grooves for soloists to improvise throughout. The album's four segments were unstructured and emphasized the playing of Davis' sidemen rather than his own trumpet. "Prelude" is based around a two-chord theme. "Theme from Jack Johnson" opens with Fortune's longest turn on alto saxophone. After Lucas' guitar part, Fortune played a shuffle beat based on Henderson's walking bass line and Cosey's rhythm guitar. Henderson ended its long sequence by playing the ostinato from Davis' 1959 composition "So What", while Davis played an extended part on open trumpet.

The album has been categorized as jazz-rock by music journalists Jim DeRogatis, and Simon Reynolds. According to The Wire magazine, the album's music "offers a drastic intensification of rock's three most radical aspects: space, timbre, and groove". By contrast, Martha Bayles of The New York Times felt that Davis' fusion albums, including Agharta, "take little from jazz, apart from free improvisation (which Davis had spurned a decade earlier), and little from rock, apart from ear-bleeding volume and electronic instruments." She added that the music instead revealed "what Amiri Baraka calls Davis's 'penchant for minimalism'" and understated composition. With respect to categorizations of the music as jazz or rock, Davis insisted that he was simply exploring different directions in music.

Critical reception
Agharta was the most widely panned of Davis' albums during the 1970s. In a contemporary review for The New York Times, critic Robert Palmer said that the album is marred by long stretches of "sloppy, one-chord jams" and disjointed sounds. He that felt Davis' wah-wah pedal "robs" him of his phrasing and criticized the band as poor "by rock standards", particularly Pete Cosey, whose overamplified lead guitar "whines and rumbles like a noisy machine shop" and relegates Reggie Lucas to background riffs. In a positive review, Nathan Cobb of The Boston Globe said that its music is "a kind of firestorm for the '70s" with a "positively cosmic" rhythmic foundation and that Davis "remains the one who leads the others through the unknown waters of electronic jazz rock."

In his 1981 review of the album, Robert Christgau called Agharta "angry, dissociated, funky, and the best Davis music since Jack Johnson." He commended drummer Al Foster for "moving from body to spirit rhythms in an effortless, guileless show of chops", Sonny Fortune for "the best reed playing on a Davis record in this decade", and praised guitarist Pete Cosey as "simply astonishing—the noises he produces for the second half of side one comprise some of the greatest free improvisations ever heard in a 'jazz'-'rock' context."

Legacy and influence
Agharta was released after Davis had retired in 1975. Despite being one of his lesser-known albums, it belonged to a musical period in Davis' career that influenced subsequent groups in the British jazz scene and Norwegian musicians such as Bugge Wesseltoft. The album was reissued in the United States by Columbia Records in January 1991. Both Agharta and Davis' 1972 album On the Corner were major influences on the Beastie Boys' 1994 album Ill Communication. Jazz guitarist Henry Kaiser said that the best band performance of jazz's electric era was on Agharta.

In a review upon its reissue, Bill Milkowski of Down Beat magazine called Agharta a "landmark electric album" that inspired "a whole generation of musicians who became intrigued by the possibilities of getting past the notes and dealing more in catharsis than precision on their instruments." Milkowski credited Cosey's excursive style for "spawning an entire school of 'sick' guitar playing" and asserted that Fortune's "urgent, angular sax lines on top of" Foster, Henderson, and Lucas' syncopated grooves predated Steve Coleman and Greg Osby's M-Base experiements by a decade. Sputnikmusic's Hernan M. Campbell felt that it "displays some incredibly dextrous musicianship all throughout, especially from Pete Cosey who practically steals the show with his deploys of Hendrix-inspired electrical distorting devices."

In The Rolling Stone Album Guide (2004), J. D. Considine wrote that Agharta's "alternately audacious, poetic, hypnotic, and abrasive" music has "held up better than much of [Davis'] '70s concert recordings." Davis biographer Jack Chambers said that the album is superior to most of Davis' other music from his electric period, and that its "Maiysha" and "Jack Johnson" segments "magically bring into focus the musical forces over which many thought Davis had lost control." Allmusic's Thom Jurek asserted that "there is simply nothing like Agharta in the canon of recorded music. This is the greatest electric funk-rock jazz record ever made – period." In a 2007 review, Phil Alexander of Mojo magazine likened its electronic aesthetic to that of Stockhausen: "Agharta is both ambient yet thrashing, melodic yet coruscating." In 2009, Agharta was one of 52 albums by Davis that were remastered and released in mini-LP sleeves as a part of Sony Legacy's Miles Davis: The Complete Columbia Album Collection. Music journalist Richard Cook cited the album as "among the highest points of Davis's career".

Track listing
All compositions by Miles Davis.

Original LP

 * Side one
 * 1) "Prelude (Part 1)" – 22:34

"Prelude (Part 2)" / 3. "Maiysha" – 23:01
 * Side two

"Theme from Jack Johnson" – 26:17
 * Side three

"Interlude" – 25:59
 * Side four

1991 CD reissue
"Prelude (Part One)" – 26:01 "Prelude (Part Two)" – 6:33 "Maiysha" – 12:20
 * Disc one

"Theme from Jack Johnson" – 26:50 "Interlude" – 25:16
 * Disc two

2006 mini-LP edition
"Prelude" – 32:31 "Maiysha" – 13:10
 * Disc one

<li>"Interlude/Theme from Jack Johnson" – 60:55</ol>
 * Disc two

Musicians

 * Pete Cosey – electric guitar, EMS Synthi A, percussion
 * Miles Davis – electric trumpet with wah-wah, organ
 * Sonny Fortune – soprano saxophone, alto saxophone, flute
 * Al Foster – drums
 * Reggie Lucas – electric guitar
 * Michael Henderson – electric bass
 * James Mtume – conga, percussion, water drum, rhythm box

Production

 * Takaaki Amano – assistant engineer
 * Mitsuru Kasai – assistant engineer
 * Teo Macero – producer
 * Keiichi Nakamura – director
 * Tamoo Suzuki – engineer