Get Up With It!
About a week ago, I had an eight-hundred pound metal rack fall on me and while most of my bruises and sprains have been healing, my ribcage has only hurt more and more, which led me to go back to the doctor. Turns out I’ve most likely got some cracked ribs which there is unfortunately nothing that can be done about, except to take painkillers and suffer through the protracted healing process. As such, I’ve been prescribed T3s and told to rest.
So what better way to rest while zonked on pain medication than with Miles’ Get Up With It? This album is a lot of things. It was intended as a tribute to the recently deceased Duke Ellington, in particular the half-hour first song, “He Loved Him Madly” which slowly builds around Miles’ organ playing and three guitarists and climaxes with a great flute part by Dave Liebman. The album, while not sounding much like anything else Miles ever did, certainly pulls its influences from everything else he had done in the seventies. It puts a cap on his electric period, and culminates his own fascination with composing on the organ (in the liner notes, Liebman notes that Miles would often play it with his elbows during the sessions), with the funk and rock of Sly Stone and Jimi Hendrix, and an epitaph for the jazz greats who were passing on into history. After this, he went into retirement for a few years, and at the time, this was intended as a grand final statement on jazz.
The grooves of Get Up With It are slow and sensuous, and the all-star cast features almost everyone who had worked with him on his landmark electric releases over the past decade. “He Loved Him Madly” is a giant, spacey groove, wending its way over half an hour beginning with ambient organ and strange, moody percussion by Mtume and layering in guitars and flute, gaining a dark, percussive momentum by the end that prefigures post-rock. It’s a low, foreboding start, but “Maiysha” turns the tables quickly with a funky soul guitar at play with Miles on organ again and Sonny Fortune on flute, and at about ten minutes the drums kick into high gear and Pete Cosey starts some very weird, funky shit. This sets the stage for the awesome “Honky Tonk” with a Godlike lineup including John McLaughlin, Herbie Hancock, Keith Jarrett and Billy Cobham, making one of the funkiest, sharpest, most rhythmic pieces Miles ever did. It opens with a jumping, wicked duel between guitar and electric piano and works it hot and heavy as a backdrop for Miles to break out his trumpet and go wild. Then with “Rated X” things accelerate even more, into manic, shattering breakbeat territory.
The first disc starts with another half hour track, “Calypso Frelimo” but it carries the insane momentum that had built up over the rest of the first disc. The drums and percussion by Mtume and Al Foster are an all-out assault, and everything else follows suit, humming like a massive engine, then it all comes to a halt at the ten-minute mark for a low, deep groove with bass by Michael Henderson that sounds like the level 2 underground theme from Super Mario Bros while the other instruments explore the space above full of call and response melodies and heavy atmosphere, then at twenty-two minutes suddenly explodes back into full force. “Red China Blues” is a pretty standard electric blues workout, then “Mtume” is of course a pure rhythm exercise, and the final “Billy Preston” is a funky bass showcase. These last three are each a summation of a style in contrast to the other five songs which are a spacial exploration of sound.
This was intended at the time as Miles’ ultimate statement on jazz, and perhaps it is that, not to mention one hell of a ride. This is the playground of a master.
93% => ****1/2 —currently # 2 on my best of 1974 list—
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