“Get Up With It” by Miles Davis

This album may be the most influential music he's ever released. There. I said it.

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Welcome to a new edition of the Best Music of All Time newsletter!

Today’s music pick celebrates the 50th anniversary of a severely underrated Miles Davis late-career masterpiece.

Genre: Jazz Fusion, Psychedelic Soul, Experimental

Label: Columbia

Release Date: November 22, 1974

Vibe: 🌩️

The lazy way to start this post would be to talk about how great Miles Davis was. But doing so feels superfluous to the point of being embarrassingly trite. It’s Miles freaking Davis.

Instead of tossing out a term like “greatest of all time,” let’s ground that in some objective fact. His records have sold over 9 million copies worldwide. Kind of Blue, his classic 1959 LP and jazz music’s long-tail commercial equivalent to Abbey Road or Rumors, has sold north of 6.4 million. To put those figures into context, if you smush the sales generated from John Coltrane and Herbie Hancock’s entire discographies, you’d still be more than half a million shy of Kind of Blue. It should come as no surprise that jazz fans polled by BBC crowned him as their go-to jazz artist, partly because, as Jazz FM host Helen Mayhew put it, Davis was "the epitome of cool.”

I think it’s telling that, despite being more than half a century removed from their initial releases, many of his most famous works are his most avant-garde, at least as far as jazz history’s concerned. Birth of the Cool smoothed out bebop’s frenetic conventions, making good on its eponymous promise. Sketches of Spain added jazz flourishes to elements of traditional European classical styles for a truly captivating, frequently cinematic listening experience. In a Silent Way broke fusion barriers (and pissed off a lot of purists) by introducing electric instruments and rock elements into his process. On the Corner influenced everything from hip-hop and R&B to electronic and ambient music. And let’s not forget Bitches Brew, which proved that editors and producers could be the true stars of the show in jazz, not just the musicians participating in the recording sessions.

But, over and above those certified classics, you have Get Up With It, which looms like a coming storm over the rest of his discography. It also came at a fascinating inflection point in Davis’ career. He was coming off what he deemed a disappointment in On the Corner, a record he thought Columbia mishandled from a marketing perspective. “The music was meant to be heard by young black people, but they just treated it like any other jazz album and advertised it that way,” he wrote in his autobiography. “[They] pushed it on the jazz radio stations. Young black kids don't listen to those stations; they listen to R&B stations and some rock stations.” Then, in October 1972, Davis broke both his legs and sustained other injuries after crashing his cocaine-filled Lamborghini Miura on New York’s West Side Highway. That accident left him with chronic pain he’d contend with for the rest of his life, leading to a significant increase in drug and alcohol dependency. “Everything started to blur after that car accident,” he’d later admit.

Because it emerged from such dark, turbulent emotional times, Get Up With It is a mish-mash of Miles Davis eras and corresponding solo players. For example, “Honky Tonk,” the most overt funk track on the double album, was recorded four years before its release and features names from the Bitches Brew and A Silent Way sessions, including John McLaughlin laying down some mind-bending guitar and Herbie Hancock matching him on clavinet. “Red China Blues” and “Billy Preston” were recorded in 1972 and, among other changes, features Davis’ wah-wah pedal far more prominently. By the time the last of the recording sessions took place in New York in 1974, the raw material wasn’t tethered to any notions of what a Miles record—or, broadly speaking, a jazz-fusion record—should sound like.

A fascinating decision that helps subvert expectations is how much of an afterthought Miles Davis the trumpeter seems to be on his own record. His playing is almost unrecognizable at times, buried under layers of distortion and echo. As a musician, he’s rarely the center of attention on Get Up With It, content to slice through the soundstage like a brilliant flash of lightning ratchet up the tension or intensity. Consider “Mtume,” a driving piece of music that prizes rhythm above all else. Dipping and ducking under a beat that borrows as much from Afrobeat as from psychedelic rock, Davis’ trumpet eggs his guitarists on in an almost taunting fashion. Then, almost as quickly as it appears, he fades into the background again, ceding control of the track to Pete Cosey and Reggie Lucas on guitar, Al Foster on drums, and the eponymous James Mtume on percussion. But, with about three minutes left, Davis’ organ crashes into the mix, re-establishing his role as the omniscient orchestrator of the entire affair.

Across two hours of jaw-dropping material, the two most impressive achievements are all the most all-consuming, serving as the openers for each of the album’s two LPs. “He Loved Him Madly,” a musical eulogy to Davis’ mentor, Duke Ellington, envelopes you in a uniquely haunting atmosphere. From the short, rapid-fire snare drum stabs to the icily precise guitar licks, producer Teo Macero uses negative space so artfully throughout. Every textural element, including Davis’ despondent horn, is added and removed from the mix with purpose and care, evoking a mood closer to a Giallo film score than the jazz legend’s previous electric offerings. It’s clear he’s not just working through the grief of losing Ellington as a friend but also confronting his own mortality post-accident. The resulting emotional heft of this piece is truly astonishing.

The other behemoth from Get Up With It is “Calypso Frelimo,” which lets its freak fly in different but equally exciting ways. Named after the party who, at the time, wanted to free Mozambique from Portuguese rule, Michael Henderson’s bass playing anchors the polyrhythms in reggae, soul, and the earliest wisps of Afrofuturism. Before working with Davis, Henderson was a teenage member of Stevie Wonder’s band. You can hear him playing a similar role as a musical straight man on Live at the Talk of the Town, contributing some tasty, varied vamps to well-known Motown staples like “For Once in My Life.” On “Calypso Frelimo,” he opens up the space for the other musicians to transform melodies into components of a larger groove. As Greg Tate notes in his terrific essay, The Electric Miles, “Cosey's staccato guitar simultaneously functions like a second set of congas to Mtume's, a second rush of cymbals to Al Foster's, a second steel drum simulacrum to Miles's Gnostic organ, a second rhythm guitar to Lucas's, and as one of three solo voices.”

After Get Up With It, Miles Davis disappeared from show business. In his autobiography, he wrote of rampant substance abuse and promiscuity, habits that formed more as physical and emotional pain relief than anything else. “Sex and drugs took the place music had occupied in my life,” he observed frankly. Part of me wonders if this record took so much out of him that he needed years to recover and rekindle his love of the art form. By pushing the boundaries of what jazz, rock, funk, R&B, electronic, and various other genres could sound like, he’d also pushed himself far past the limits of what most musicians and composers would deem attainable. But that was Davis’ modus operandi until he passed away—to dig deeper. To look ahead to the future and what was possible instead of continuously dredging up the past and reheating well-worn trends or habits.

"When I hear jazz musicians today playing all those same licks we used to play so long ago, I feel sad for them," he once said. "I mean, it's like going to bed with a real old person who even smells real old.” By avoiding that tendency, he delivered a listening experience that, thousands of albums and artists into my growth as a music obsessive, is unlike anything I’ve heard before or since.

👉 Don’t forget to click the album image to stream the album on your favorite platform 👈