Miles in 1970: expanded, and expanding all the time... The summer of 1970 was enlivened by the strong rumour that promised to be the supergroup to end all supergroups was about to make its debut: Eric Clapton and John McLaughlin on guitars, Jack Bruce on bass, Larry Young on organ, Tony Williams on drums and Miles Davis on trumpet. The potential fusion of Cream’s blues-rock with the jazz-rock explored by Davis’s groups over the previous couple of years promised to realise an ambition, shared by many, of linking the raw energy and audience appeal of one idiom to the intellectual richness and sophistication of the other. According to stories in Rolling Stone and the Melody Maker, the unveiling was due to take place at the Randall’s Island Festival in New York. But, like Davis’s long-mooted collaboration with Jimi Hendrix, it was destined never to happen, aborted not so much by the musicians’ own desires as by the conflicting interests of those who took care of their business. Clapton carried on with Derek and the Dominoes, Bruce joined McLaughlin and Young in Lifetime, under Williams’s leadership, and Miles accepted an offer from Bill Graham to return to New York for four nights at the Fillmore East, supporting Steve Miller (“a sorry-ass cat”, in Davis’s later estimation). He had played there earlier in the year, opening for Laura Nyro. At that point Wayne Shorter, his saxophonist for six memorable years, had been on the brink of quitting, and the band – increasingly under the influence of the pianist Chick Corea, the bassist Dave Holland and the drummer Jack DeJohnette -- was edging closer and closer to free improvisation, making music that was magnificently risky but didn’t suit Miles’s intention to expand his audience rather than contract it. When they played original Fillmore in San Francisco a few weeks later, with the Brazilian percussionist Airto Moreira added to the group and the teenaged saxophonist Steve Grossman replacing Shorter, their leader was pleased to encounter a warm reception not from the usual set of jazz fans encountered in clubs or at festivals but from five thousand young white hippies who had turned up to hear the bill-topping Grateful Dead. Some of them would never have heard of him, but others had the newly released Bitches Brew at home, stacked next to Aoxomoxoa and Volunteers. At a time when he was desperate to cast off the old image of a man who played “My Funny Valentine” while wearing an Italian suit, a new audience beckoned, and a successful appearance at the Fillmore East would confirm his transformation. In the meantime Keith Jarrett – a former bandmate of DeJohnette in the Charles Lloyd Quartet, the first jazz combo to play at the original Fillmore three years earlier - had been added to the line-up. Jarrett would be playing organ while Corea concentrated on electric piano, both men utilising echo devices and ring modulators to distort the timbre of their instruments, creating textures might have been produced by an adventurous guitarist, which was perhaps what Miles – who loved Hendrix and had failed to persuade McLaughlin to join the band - was after. Teo Macero, Davis’s producer, recorded all four nights before boiling down the results for release later that year on a double-album called Miles Davis at Fillmore. Each of its four sides was devoted to a 25-minute precis of one night’s music, labelled “Wednesday”, “Thursday”, “Friday” and “Saturday”, with no identification of the individual tunes that Macero had cut and pasted together to create a false unity. Now the four performances can be heard in full, restored to their unedited state, allowing us to share the enjoyment of audiences who experienced the way the music evolved over the course of each evening’s hour-long set. This was a band that never felt the need to begin or end its performances with conventional gestures. Davis’s young sidemen might be wearing hippie headbands, but they had taken their leader’s habits of behaviour on stage – affecting detachment by never acknowledging the audience and disappearing into the wings while other musicians took their solos -- as a template for a new, beyond-cool mode of self-presentation. But their full engagement in the creative task was never in doubt, and more than 40 years later the result compels close listening. Although they hack a straighter path through the jungle of sound created for Bitches Brew, there is no shortage of variety, from an oozing swamp of exotic electronic and percussion effects to a driving 4/4 funk rhythm anchored by jolting bass-guitar riffs, foreshadowing the evolution that would occur when Michael Henderson, with his grounding in the music of James Brown and Stevie Wonder, took over from Holland. After leading a quintet that went unchanged from 1964 to 1969, now Davis was supervising a band seemingly in constant transition. Grossman, who had joined up just after his 19th birthday, would be gone by the time the band played to 600,000 young white hippies at the Isle of Wight in August, but his solos here show character and inventiveness as he drives the music into late-Coltrane territory. As an ensemble, the musicians could swerve and drift with a deceptively offhand fluency through their repertoire -- a nightly permutation from “Sanctuary”, “Directions”, “Miles Runs the Vooodoo Down”, “Bitches Brew”, “Spanish Key”, “It’s About That Time”, “Footprints”, and an unexpected nod to former glories in the ballad “I Fall in Love Too Easily” – in order to create a series of mood-platforms on which their employer could display every facet of his genius, from squally high-note explorations to pensive balladry. For whatever was going on around him, whatever costume he chose to wear in the search for a bigger audience, he was still and always Miles Davis. Richard Williams Photo credit: Amalie R. Rothschild

Psychedelic folk, eschatology, spirals and choirs: welcome back, Linda Perhacs... Of all the strange, unexpected records to slip through the cracks during the late 1960s, few have endured like Linda Perhacs’ 1970 album, Parallelograms. Quietly released by the Kapp label, and then lost to time, the album’s resurgence over the past decade has moved Perhacs out of the footnotes of psychedelic history and re-positioned her as one of the era’s more influential spirits. Daft Punk included “If You Were My Man” on the soundtrack of their 2006 film, Electroma; Julia Holter and Devendra Banhart adore her; the late Trish Keenan, of Broadcast, marvelled over Parallelograms’ titular epic, a dream-song split apart by electronics: “[the] simple idea of a list of shapes as a song… it’s really special.” Indeed it is. Perhacs’ own story is as unexpected and odd as the album itself. Working as a dental hygienist, she was quizzed by one of her patients, “I can’t believe this is all you do.” That patient happened to be film composer Leonard Rosenman, who, after hearing of Perhacs’ double-life as a Topanga Canyon songwriter, opened the doors for Perhacs to record Parallelograms. After the album’s disappearance, she returned to her dayjob, seemingly unfazed, though her slow-release discovery of her new millennial cult status has led her both back to the stage, performing with Holter and other collaborators in tow, and back into the studio. The Soul Of All Natural Things mostly captures the articulate mysticism of Parallelograms and beds it down with becalmed musicianship, and quietly gorgeous songs. These kinds of returns to visibility, the long-awaited follow-up, are fraught with risk. Lost in technology, and corralled by muso types, they often sell short the weirdness that built the myth, replacing it with ersatz easy listening. The Soul Of All Natural Things doesn’t entirely skirt this: there are a few moments where the performances are sickly-sweet, such as the astral muzak of “Intensity”, where the “living on the edge/Playing on the edge” sentiments of the lyrics are sold well short by glossy, smoothed-out production and ‘tasteful’ playing. But if The Soul Of All Natural Things, at times, courts lugubriousness, it’s just as often perfectly poised. The gentleness of the album’s acoustic ambiences suits Perhacs’ world-view (a kind of benign, elder-statesperson, post-hippy eco-politics), and on songs like the soft driftworks of “Freely”, or the stately, encircling guitar figures of “Children”, the combination of Perhacs’ simply stated songwriting and the chamber-music resonances of the arrangements sit together naturally. The voice is in fine fettle as well: Perhacs’ mature voice has a lighter cast, and what it lacks in stridency – the understated fierceness that made Parallelograms songs like “Paper Mountain Man” so starkly compelling – it gains in kindness. This tenderness plays to the Apollonian aspects of Perhacs’s music, and The Soul Of All Natural Things sometimes scans as deceptively gentle, feather-light, as though a few errant breaths would send it scuttling off its rails. But this reading of the album underestimates its powers, particularly the two songs that form the album’s core: “River Of God” and “Prisms Of Glass”. The latter, in particular, is a gem: reaching back to 1970’s “Parallelograms”, it very clearly echoes that song’s balance between acoustic filigree and electronic disturbance. On “Prisms Of Glass”, Perhacs spins out “spirals of windows and spirals of stairwells” in a surreal, eschatological vision. One of her guests, Holter herself, gives an equally bravura performance, her occasionally mannered voice disarmed and freed in such company, and even better for it. It’s no surprise that Holter informs the more widescreen visions of The Soul Of All Natural Things, given the ambitions of her own Loud City Song from last year, and the microscopically exploded pop songs of Michael Pisaro’s Tombstones, another album Holter was deeply involved with. Elsewhere in The Soul Of All Natural Things, there are a few moments of longueurs, where the songs come off a little too session muso. But this new, becalmed Perhacs reveals a clear eco-political message articulated with subtlety and nuance. For Linda Perhacs, the road back to the garden is gently lit. Jon Dale Q&A Linda Perhacs During the sessions for The Soul Of All Natural Things, you worked with other artists, such as Julia Holter. How do you feel these new presences changed the way you make and think about music? The recording sessions were pure magic. I loved how everyone brought their own thoughts and ideas to the table. The best answer I can give you is the same one I have seen in some of our performances and recordings. And that is, sometimes people are in your life and they make you feel clumsy, [and] then there are those rare moments when things are so harmonious and so good, the only thing you can do is say in amazement and gratitude that this has to be “sent and meant”… Much of the album suggests a ‘stepping out of the world’, not as retreat, but as a ‘step forward’. I feel the purpose of my music is to heal. Perhaps that is the forward step. My compositions come as an energy flow that starts above me and flows through me like a fast flow of rain. This only happens when I am grateful to the universe for all its beauty, when I am in a prayerful and thankful state of mind. Then it comes so quickly I can’t catch it fast enough to write it all down.

Joseph Mount and co head to Toe Rag for analogue experiment and mild anxiety... On their last album, The English Riviera, which sold quarter of a million copies and was nominated for the Mercury prize, Metronomy seemed to have finally tied down their eccentric English songwriting. Their first record fussed its way around scuzzy rock, videogame brightness and electroclash sleaze, while 2008’s Nights Out still had an air of mania even as the hooks got stronger. The English Riviera, and wonderful transitional single “Not Made For Love”, took a much-needed deep breath – their songs were still brittle and nervy, but often slower, and a little more at ease. That restless energy still hums away, however, only now they’re diverting it into a change of production rather than songwriting. Like The English Riviera, these are cool, sad lounge-pop songs that fret about love, but rather than being slick digital arrangements, they were recorded at Toe Rag Studios, the all-analogue base for The White Stripes, Tame Impala and others. Frontman Joseph Mount has been writing with a guitar, and has cited The Isley Brothers and The Zombies’ Odessey And Oracle as influences. If you were cynical you might see this as retrograde, but the fact is that Toe Rag fits Metronomy perfectly. You can hear the room echo in Mount’s vocals, a sound of immediate vulnerability, and the smudgy synths soften their tendency towards the inscrutable and wacky. The backbeats are the pre-808 drum machines that you might find perched atop a shopping mall church organ, so cute in their dogged bossa nova pulsing – “The Most Immaculate Haircut” doesn’t even chop off the sound of the machine warming up, slowly speeding up like a record with a needle left on it, while it stutters to a pathetic stop at the end of “The Upsetter”. It’s the beta-male version of the swaggering drumkit, but is humbly resilient, matching the protagonists of the songs who are easily hurt, flawed and yet not entirely spineless. “The Upsetter” opens the album, a lovely ballad where Mount wheedles “you’re really giving me a hard time tonight” over acoustic strumming and softly modulating seasick synths, that swell into an exceptional guitar solo reminiscent of Neil Young. The mood darkens on the next track “I’m Aquarius”, even the boom-tsk of the drum machine sounding more harried; the backing vocals are all sung rather than sequenced, and you can hear the singer grimly smiling after the nth shoop-doop-doop-ah. It’s perhaps their greatest song yet, a deftly told tale of the various poisons that seep into modern relationships: passive aggression, spite, narcissism and an emotional articulacy that paradoxically means a total lack of communication. “Never saw just how much you thought I meant to me,” Mount raps, taking the language of love song and twisting it into baffling anti-logic. He eventually lapses into a desperate repetition of the title, blaming the stars instead of himself. The rest can’t quite match this opening brace (indeed, Italo instrumental “Boy Racers” is plain annoying), but there are gems throughout. The title track is a big Roxy/Abba white disco number, while “Reservoir” uses a slightly silly backing – the kind of thing you might hear in a ’70s infomercial for carpet cleaner – on a Jarvis Cocker-style slice of freewheeling smalltown storytelling. There’s more wry emotional weakness on “Call Me”, as Mount promises “we can try anything” before immediately adding a caveat: “we can say we’ll try anything”. And throughout there’s a marked psych influence, half Byrds and half West Coast, and nowhere more than “Month Of Sundays” with its chorus line ringing with a Grace Slick hauteur. Mount has said that the Toe Rag trip was a one-off, so perhaps Metronomy will never cure their itchy feet. But they’re thriving in their constant meandering – be it around a mixing desk or affairs of the heart. Ben Beaumont-Thomas Q&A Joseph Mount Why did you head to Toe Rag? The last record was the first time I’d been in a proper recording studio, but in the end I was still quite heavily relying on a computer to edit and arrange. My only all-encompassing thought was to do a record that forced me to write songs in a more traditional way, and get a different sense of achievement. People of my age always feel like computers help you cheat a little bit in certain things you do; the feeling you get [at Toe Rag] is more that you’ve made something out of nothing. Making music in that environment is much more laborious, in a workmanlike way… It’s a different level of care: pre-production versus post-production, and it means that everything you’re doing with intent rather than as a reaction to something. The lyrics are quite frank… You’re laying yourself bare – I’ve always been quite aware of that and worried that people will take things the wrong way, or laugh. But I realised you can kind of say what you want and people will listen and not judge. I was travelling when I was writing, and the only stuff I felt I had the authority to write about was being away from people, mildly upsetting people by being unreliable. But there are other tracks where I took a little bit of inspiration from what I experienced and ran with it. So if maybe in some songs I sound like a flawed person, I can assure you I’m not, I’m just singing a little story [laughs]. INTERVIEW: BEN BEAUMONT-THOMAS Photo credit: Tim Eve