Agharta is a 1975 live double album by American jazz trumpeter, composer, and bandleader Miles Davis. By the time he recorded the album, Davis was 48 years old and had alienated many in the jazz community while attracting younger rock audiences with his radical electric fusion music. After experimenting with different line-ups, he established a stable live band in 1973 and toured constantly for the next two years, despite physical pain from worsening health and emotional instability brought on by substance abuse. During a three-week tour of Japan in 1975, the trumpeter performed two concerts at the Festival Hall in Osaka on February 1; the afternoon show produced Agharta, and the evening show was released as Pangaea the following year.
Davis led a septet at the concert; he, saxophonist Sonny Fortune, and guitarist Pete Cosey were given space to improvise against a dense backdrop of riffs, electronic effects, cross-beats, and funk grooves from the rhythm section – drummer Al Foster, bassist Michael Henderson, guitarist Reggie Lucas, and percussionist James Mtume. Davis controlled their rhythmic and musical direction with hand and head gestures, phrases played on his wah-wah processed trumpet, and drones from an accompanying electronic organ. The evolving nature of the performance led to the widespread misunderstanding that it had no compositional basis, while its dark, angry, and somber musical qualities were seen as a reflection of the bandleader's emotional and spiritual state at the time.
Agharta was first released in Japan by CBS/Sony in August 1975 just before Davis temporarily retired due to increasingly poor health and exhaustion. At the record label's suggestion, it was titled after the legendary subterranean city. Davis enlisted Japanese artist Tadanori Yokoo to design its artwork, which depicted the cityscape of an advanced civilization with elements inspired by Eastern subterranean myths, Afrofuturism, and ufology. An alternate cover was produced for its 1976 release in North America by Columbia Records.
A highly divisive record, Agharta further challenged Davis' jazz audience and was widely panned by contemporary critics; reviewers found the music discordant and complained of Cosey's loud guitar sounds and Davis' sparse trumpet playing. It was reevaluated positively in subsequent years, however, as a generation of younger musicians was influenced by the band's abrasive music and cathartic playing, particularly Cosey's effects-laden free improvisations. Agharta has since been viewed as an important jazz-rock record, a dramatically dynamic group performance, and the culmination of Davis' electric period spanning the late 1960s and mid-1970s.
Background
In the early 1970s, Miles Davis continued exploring directions radically different from the jazz music that made him renowned in the 1950s and 1960s. The music from this electric period in his career found him experimenting with rock, funk, African rhythms, emerging electronic music technology, and an ever-changing lineup of musicians who played electric instruments. The trumpeter attracted younger audiences as his fusion music became more radical and abstract while alienating older listeners, musicians, and critics in the jazz scene who accused him of selling out.; . After recording his 1972 On the Corner album, Davis began to focus more on performing live, working in the studio only sporadically and haphazardly; the 1974 releases Big Fun and Get Up with It compiled recordings he made between 1969 and 1974.
By 1973, Davis had established most of his band's line-up, a septet featuring bassist Michael Henderson, guitarists Pete Cosey and Reggie Lucas, drummer Al Foster, percussionist James Mtume, and saxophonist Dave Liebman; Liebman left the group the following year and was replaced by Sonny Fortune.; . Lucas, Henderson, Foster, and Mtume functioned as the band's rhythm section, while Cosey, and Fortune were given space to improvise as soloists. Their concerts – played frequently at rock venues and festivals – became opportunities for Davis and his sidemen to test new musical ideas and ways to exploit electronic equipment.
Davis toured relentlessly for two years while tolerating intense physical pain and difficulty walking, caused by joint pain from sickle-cell anaemia, badly damaged ankles after a 1972 car wreck, and osteoporosis in his left hip, which had been operated on a decade earlier.; ; . He had also developed nodules on his larynx that often left him short of breath, especially when playing the trumpet. To numb the pain, he became increasingly dependent on self-medicating with painkillers, cocaine, and morphine, which combined with his alcohol and recreational drug use led to mood swings; he would by turns feel vulnerable and hostile.; . By the end of 1974, a disappointing showing in DownBeat magazine's readers poll reinforced to Davis that his reputation had diminished. Unfazed by detractors and personal troubles, he kept his touring schedule intense. As Henderson recounted:
Tour of Japan In 1975, the 48-year old Davis embarked on a three-week tour of Japan. Between January 22 and February 8, he played 14 concerts in large-hall venues to capacity crowds and enthusiastic reviews.; . Japanese critic Keizo Takada said at the time that Davis is leading his "magnificent and energetic" band just as Duke Ellington had his orchestra: "Miles must be the genius of managing men and bringing out their hidden talent."
Throughout the tour, Davis was sick with pneumonia and a bleeding ulcer that grew worse, while his hip occasionally and unpredictably slipped out of its socket. Unable to work his trumpet's volume and effects pedals because of the pain in his legs, he would go down on his knees to press them with his hand during performances. To relieve his pain and perform, he used codeine and morphine, smoked, and drank large quantities of Heineken beer. On several occasions, Davis was able to play two concerts in one day, as he did on February 1 at the Festival Hall in Osaka.
The Festival Hall performances were recorded by Japan's CBS/Sony record label under the supervision of Teo Macero, Davis' producer of 15 years. "The Japanese people were very beautiful", Henderson recalled from the concerts. "They came in with their suit and ties on and we proceeded to blow the roof off the suckers with a million amplifiers."
Composition and performance
For the first of the afternoon concert's two sets, the band performed the compositions "Tatu", "Agharta Prelude", and "Maiysha" (from Get Up with It), making up Aghartas first disc of music. The second-set performances of "Right Off" (from Davis' 1971 Jack Johnson album), "Ife" (from Big Fun), and "Wili (= For Dave)" spanned the second disc; between the "Right Off" and "Ife" segments, the band improvised a passage based on "So What" (from the 1959 album Kind of Blue) for 41 seconds after Henderson started to play its ostinato.; ; . The pieces were performed in medleys, which were given generic track titles on Agharta, such as "Prelude" and "Interlude". As with his other live releases in the 1970s, Davis refused to have individual compositions specified in the track listing because he felt critics and other listeners often overlooked the music's intrinsic meaning by indulging in abstract musical analysis. "I'm not doing anything, it doesn't need an explanation", he later told Leonard Feather. Music scholars were able to identify the pieces through an examination of what Davis researcher Enrico Merlin called "coded phrases", which Davis played on trumpet or organ to signify the end of one segment and direct the band toward the next section. He first used such cues and modulations when recording "Flamenco Sketches" in 1959, Merlin said.
The pieces featured on Agharta were part of a typical set list for the group, but their performances of each sometimes changed almost beyond recognition from concert to concert. This, along with the track names, led to the widespread misunderstanding that the music was mostly or entirely improvised and unstructured. Lucas explained that the band started each performance with a "very defined compositional basis" before developing it further in a highly structured yet "very free way"; the "Right Off" segment, for instance, was improvised from the original recording's E-flat riff. Davis had the band play around a single chord in a piece for several minutes with variations as each member performed in a different time signature; Foster might have been playing in common time and Mtume in compound duple metre or septuple time, while the guitarists would comp in another tempo altogether. "That's a lot of intricate shit we were working off this one chord", Davis remarked. From Lucas' perspective, this kind of "structured improvisation" resulted in significant interplay between the rhythm section and allowed the band to improvise "a lot more than just the notes that were being played in the solos; we were improvising the entire song as we went along."
Like Pangaea and Dark Magus – the two other live albums showcasing the septet – Agharta revealed what Amiri Baraka described as Davis' affinity for minimalism.; . He abandoned melodic and harmonic conventions in favor of riffs, cross-rhythms, and funk grooves as a backdrop for soloists to improvise throughout. Davis had preferred understated compositions throughout his career but by the mid 1970s he showed a deeper embrace of rhythm, inspired by Afrocentric politics. When Mtume and Cosey joined the band, his live music lost most of its "European sensibilities" and "settled down into a deep African thing, a deep African-American groove" emphasizing rhythm and drums rather than individual solos, Davis said, although he did not completely reject melody. "We ain't in Africa, and we don't play just chants. There's some theory under what we do."; .
Categorizing Agharta as a jazz-rock record, Simon Reynolds wrote in The Wire that the music "offered a drastic intensification of rock's three most radical aspects: space, timbre, and groove". In Martha Bayles' opinion, it drew from jazz only in its element of free improvisation and from rock only in its use of electronics and "ear-bleeding volume". The album also showcased Davis' avant-garde impulses and exploration of ambient sounds. According to Greg Tate, the septet created "a pan-ethnic web of avant-garde music", while Sputnikmusic's Hernan M. Campbell said they explored "progressive ambiences" particularly within the record's second half; Phil Alexander from Mojo characterized Agharta as "both ambient yet thrashing, melodic yet coruscating", and suggestive of Karlheinz Stockhausen's electronic experiments.; ; .
Dynamics and effects During the concert, Davis directed approximately 50 stops or breaks to the band, particularly the rhythm section, by gesturing with his head or hand.; These stops served as dramatic turning points in the tension-release structure of the performances, changing their tempo and allowing the band to alternate between quiet passages and intense climaxes. He also interjected the performances with drone washes from his Yamaha organ, achieving a "strange, nearly perverse presence" that Mikal Gilmore believed "defined the temper" of the music. Lucas said Davis applied a feel for dynamics he had developed earlier in his career playing jazz, but with a greater array of contrasts, including atonal, dissonant chords, and his own bebop trumpet playing set against the group's funk rhythms. "Extreme textures and extreme volume", Lucas explained, "were as much part of the palette as the contrasting chord and rhythmic structures. Being equipped like a full rock band, we sometimes literally blew the walls out."