Miles Davis - Get Up With It

Duke Ellington died in May 1974. Miles Davis answered with just over thirty minutes of organ drone, Pete Cosey's guitar smeared across the top, and almost nothing you could call a melody. He named it "He Loved Him Madly," after the line Ellington used to give audiences from the stage, and it takes up the entirety of side one.

Get Up With It is the double album Columbia assembled at the end of 1974 out of four years of sessions, 1970 through 1974, and it plays less like a record than a survey of everything Miles had been doing while nobody at the label could work out what to call it. "Maiysha" is almost gentle. "Rated X" is a wall of jammed organ clusters. "Calypso Frelimo" runs thirty-two minutes and fills side three. "Red China Blues" is the closest thing here to a straight blues, and "Mtume" and "Billy Preston" are named after the men playing on them. The personnel shifts from session to session and takes in John McLaughlin, Herbie Hancock and Pete Cosey along the way.

It landed to mixed reviews and then quietly turned into one of the most influential things he ever released. Brian Eno singled out "He Loved Him Madly" in the liner notes to Ambient 4: On Land as a direct influence on his own ambient work, and the murk and repetition stretched across these four sides kept surfacing in other people's records for decades afterward. It was also the last studio album Miles put out before he stopped playing in public for the rest of the seventies.

Original 1974 US Columbia pressing, catalog KG 33236, in the gatefold sleeve.

Used copy: VG+ vinyl / VG+ sleeve