Music Monday: More Miles and Some Donald Harrison
- Mar 30
- 2 min read
This weekend involved big blocks of reading and some grading in the run up to Easter break next weekend. This gave me a rare opportunity to listen to a couple albums three times completely through. While I wasn’t always able to give them my fullest attention, I did get to enjoy them in the way that I do.
I’ve never been a particularly deep listener. Instead, I’ve preferred iterative listening to immersive listening. This is the story of my life. I have always struggled to read a text deeply, but I can achieve a similar impact by reading it multiple times often over a number of months or years. The same goes for my walks. I tend to take the same walk over and over for years to dwell deeply in the landscape and to finally be able to notice things.
This weekend, I enjoyed Mile Davis’s two mid-1960s small ensemble recordings: E.S.P. (1965) and Miles Smiles (1967; recorded in 1966). Both feature Miles, with Wayne Shorter on sax, Herbie Hancock on keys, Ron Carter on bass, and Tony Williams on drums. The former feels more insistently hard bop (especially for its date) and even maybe a step back from Kind of Blue and Coltrane’s influence on Miles’s band in the early 60s. Miles Smiles, in contrast, feels more adventurous. The solos are freer and the album feels looser not like a blowing session but because the musicians know each other better. Miles Smiles is the classic and E.S.P. is seen as a lesser light. This is a bit of a bummer to me because E.S.P. is very good and very in the moment.
I also put on Donald Harrison Jr’s second live album at the Blue Note in New York: This Is Jazz (2011). Presumably, it was recorded earlier that year with Ron Carter on bass and Bill Cobham on drums. I mostly put it on because I had heard that Donald Harrison was having some health issues. It is my favorite Donald Harrison album. He plays alto and there’s plenty of room for each musician to do their thing. This trio had played enough together to sound like it too without giving up any of the looseness that marks a live recording. It doesn’t sound stale or overly comfortable (as some Harrison studio recordings do). They push each other — or so it sounds to me — especially Harrison.
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